Eduardo Gill-Pedro
Associate senior lecturer
Decoding the Rights of Companies in the Technocene
Editor
- Jaakko Salminen
Other contributions
- Eduardo Gill-Pedro
Summary, in English
Companies — for profit commercial corporations — shape our world, and our world is shaped to the service of companies. The superhuman capabilities of companies and the enormous resources at their disposal has allowed them to massively transform our natural and social environment. Some argue that we are not living in the Anthropocene, but rather in the Technocene—a geological era brought about not by the psycho-physiological make up of human beings, but by technological agency. The central element of this technological agency is the modern company, a form of legal technology that has shaped not only our legal orders and our political and economic institutions, but the geology of the world itself.
And yet, in legal theory and practice, the company has kept a remarkably low profile. Companies are either subsumed under the broader category of ‘personhood’ and treated as indistinguishable from other kinds of legal persons, or they are regarded as mere fictions, labels that facilitate interactions between human persons. The ascription of rights to companies has been an essential element in the construction of the modern company as a legal, political and economic entity. It is an essential ‘cog’ in the legal technology of the modern commercial corporation. In claiming rights, companies demand not only legal standing, but also political and moral standing. Furthermore, it is in its capacity as a bearer of rights that the company most closely mirrors the human being as a legal subject, deserving of equal treatment.
However, this aspect of corporate personality has been mostly underexplored in scholarship. While a search on Google Scholar for human rights and companies reveals hundreds of articles about corporate social responsibility and the human rights obligations of companies, entries on the rights of companies are few and far between. The rise of the company as a subject of rights has gone largely unnoticed and remains undertheorized. Towards this, the workshop brought together a diverse, multijurisdictional crowd of leading scholars from private law, constitutional law, public international law, human rights law as well as legal and political theorists to explore and seek to understand the implications of granting rights to companies. The Special Issue is the first systematic transdisciplinary exploration of this topic and provides a unique contribution to the debate on the role of corporate legal persons in shaping the global legal order.
And yet, in legal theory and practice, the company has kept a remarkably low profile. Companies are either subsumed under the broader category of ‘personhood’ and treated as indistinguishable from other kinds of legal persons, or they are regarded as mere fictions, labels that facilitate interactions between human persons. The ascription of rights to companies has been an essential element in the construction of the modern company as a legal, political and economic entity. It is an essential ‘cog’ in the legal technology of the modern commercial corporation. In claiming rights, companies demand not only legal standing, but also political and moral standing. Furthermore, it is in its capacity as a bearer of rights that the company most closely mirrors the human being as a legal subject, deserving of equal treatment.
However, this aspect of corporate personality has been mostly underexplored in scholarship. While a search on Google Scholar for human rights and companies reveals hundreds of articles about corporate social responsibility and the human rights obligations of companies, entries on the rights of companies are few and far between. The rise of the company as a subject of rights has gone largely unnoticed and remains undertheorized. Towards this, the workshop brought together a diverse, multijurisdictional crowd of leading scholars from private law, constitutional law, public international law, human rights law as well as legal and political theorists to explore and seek to understand the implications of granting rights to companies. The Special Issue is the first systematic transdisciplinary exploration of this topic and provides a unique contribution to the debate on the role of corporate legal persons in shaping the global legal order.
Department/s
- Department of Law
Publishing year
2025-02-21
Language
English
Publication/Series
Transnational Legal Theory
Document type
Editor for a journal
Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Topic
- Law
Keywords
- Law
- Corporate persons
- transnational law
- technocene
Status
Inpress
Project
- The Company as a European Supercitizen? The protection of the human rights of corporate persons in European law.
ISBN/ISSN/Other
- ISSN: 2041-4005