When corporations engage in misconduct, we rely on two types of sanctions to discipline them: legal and reputational. For various reasons, both types of sanctions have limitations. This chapter argues that a combination of legal and reputational sanctions for corporate misconduct can help to improve the effectiveness of blame attribution, deliver meaningful punishment for misconduct, and foster organizational change. For example, legal sanctions through lawsuits and government fines can trigger reputational sanctions that can unleash a subsequent wave of monetary costs because the publicity associated with the lawsuit or government fine can lead a corporation’s stakeholders to re-evaluate their relationship with it. Alternatively, legal rules can facilitate the operation of reputational markets by increasing information flows and thereby improving attribution of conduct to particular companies.

The plaintiff, John Walkovsky, was struck by a taxi owned by Seon Cab Corporation while walking in New York City. Seon Cab Corp. was one of the ten cab companies owned by a group of shareholders, including William Carlton. The case highlights the harms visited on innocent parties by limited liability and shareholders’ focus on profit. A feminist rewrite would examine the costs visited upon vulnerable groups such as tort victims with limited access to the legal system, children who are likely to be more severely injured if harmed by corporate activity or by the loss of a parent so injured, and immigrants and lower-income Americans who may not have health insurance to cover the physical harms caused by corporate business. Intentional undercapitalization of corporations and an adherence to minimum insurance requirements externalizes the costs of doing business onto the rest of society. This externalization of costs is particularly harmful when it causes physical injury or death to portions of the population who cannot absorb the costs ducked by the corporation. A feminist perspective could consider the interests of these vulnerable populations in designing a limited liability doctrine that encourages entrepreneurial risk-taking while balancing it against the cost of significant corporate externalities.

Chapter four has a dual purpose: it firstly demonstrates how the increased participation of States in economic activities through their SOEs, has fundamentally changed international law; and secondly, it analyses some of the unique challenges posed by the doctrine of sovereign immunity to the regulation of SOEs. In this context, sovereign immunity is viewed as a unique challenge because if a SOE pleads immunity, a domestic court could be barred from either adjudicating the dispute in question, or from enforcing a judgment that has been obtained against a SOE. A plea of immunity could thus leave victims without a method to access justice, or without an effective remedy if the judgment that has been obtained cannot be enforced. With a focus on immunity from adjudication, the chapter looks into key issues such as the difference between acts jure imperii and acts jure gestionis, the process of assimilating SOEs into the State and some of the key exceptions to State immunity applicable to SOE such as the commercial transaction exception; the non-commercial tort exception and asks next whether there is a human rights exception to State immunity.