The debate over whether corporate social responsibility should comprise soft law responsibility or legally binding obligations is inadequate to address the legal relationship between corporations and society. The corporate social responsibility movement addresses only an economic agency problem and overlooks a fundamental gap between economic agency and legal agency, or attribution. The former is the problem of potential divergence of interests between a principal and an agent, and the latter concerns the laws regulating the relationship between a person and his or her representative. Corporate social responsibility is meant to respond to the first of these— – the economic agency problem – —as scholars have analyzed at length. However, the legal structures needed to address attribution and legal accountability are still far from established. The chapter proposes an attribution framework that can appropriately address the legal agency problem, in other words, to address corporate social accountability. It suggests that creating a new form of fictitious legal entity could help address this problem by resolving collective action issues.

Chapter 7 proposes how the liability framework should be implemented. Harm liability can flow from a statutory standard or local tort law. This focus allows liability to complement, rather than replicate, public enforcement. The quantum of liability should depend on the harm incurred by the victim, rather than on the wrongfulness of the perpetrator’s conduct or the consequences that the perpetrator foresaw. Privacy liability is most effective as part of a mechanism of collective redress, such as class actions. A robust notion of loss and harm can address problems of insufficient compensation and uncertainties in class certification. Considering privacy problems at scale, we need a framework recognizing mass privacy effects for regulators and courts.

Tech companies bypass privacy laws daily, creating harm for profit. The information economy is plagued with hidden harms to people’s privacy, equality, finances, reputation, mental wellbeing, and even to democracy, produced by data breaches and data-fed business models. This book explores why this happens and proposes what to do about it. Legislators, policymakers, and judges are trapped into ineffective approaches to tackle digital harms because they work with tools unfit to deal with the unique challenges of data ecosystems that leverage AI. People are powerless towards inferences about them that they can’t anticipate, interfaces that manipulate them, and digital harms they can’t escape. Adopting a cross-jurisdictional scope, this book describes how laws and regulators can and should respond to these pervasive and expanding harms. In a world where data is everywhere, one of society’s most pressing challenges is addressing power discrepancies between the companies that profit from personal data and the people whose data produces profit. Doing so requires creating accountability for the consequences of corporate data practices—not the practices themselves. Laws can achieve this by creating a new type of liability that recognizes the social value of privacy, uncovering dynamics between individual and collective digital harms.

Tech companies bypass privacy laws daily, creating harm for profit. The information economy is plagued with hidden harms to people’s privacy, equality, finances, reputation, mental wellbeing, and even to democracy, produced by data breaches and data-fed business models. This book explores why this happens and proposes what to do about it. Legislators, policymakers, and judges are trapped into ineffective approaches to tackle digital harms because they work with tools unfit to deal with the unique challenges of data ecosystems that leverage AI. People are powerless towards inferences about them that they can’t anticipate, interfaces that manipulate them, and digital harms they can’t escape. Adopting a cross-jurisdictional scope, this book describes how laws and regulators can and should respond to these pervasive and expanding harms. In a world where data is everywhere, one of society’s most pressing challenges is addressing power discrepancies between the companies that profit from personal data and the people whose data produces profit. Doing so requires creating accountability for the consequences of corporate data practices—not the practices themselves. Laws can achieve this by creating a new type of liability that recognizes the social value of privacy, uncovering dynamics between individual and collective digital harms.

Colombia has faced over fifty years of internal armed conflict, resulting in more than 9 million victims and dozens of peace negotiations with different illegal armed groups. With the demobilization of the largest paramilitary group in 2003 (Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia), the country saw renewed accountability efforts that highlighted the role of businesspeople in the violence. A norm of business accountability for past atrocities started to emerge with a number of convictions in the courts. When the government launched negotiations with the FARC guerrilla group in 2012, many observers expected continuity in this path of increased accountability of economic actors. But the path was severed. This chapter describes the ebbs and flows of business accountability in Colombia, looking at the role of the human rights movement in securing higher levels of accountability, and the emergence of an organized opposition from the business community to stop the process. The chapter argues that this business countermovement is a result of the success of the human rights movement in the courts, which led to convictions and brought the matter to the public eye. All of this created a more tangible threat to the interests of economic actors, leading to the subsequent backlash.

BHR is a fast-evolving interdisciplinary field and naturally its focus expands over time and new subdiscussions start to emerge. Such new discussions often appear at the intersection between BHR and other fields. This chapter briefly outlines four selected emerging discussions within the BHR field, namely: the intersection between BHR and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the relevance of climate change for BHR, gender perspectives on BHR, and BHR in post-conflict and transitional justice contexts.

Used wisely, inside and outside the courtroom, strategic litigation may be an important vehicle for achieving accountability. To show how communities and advocates sparked the life of a movement seeking accountability of corporate actors under international law, this chapter will provide a chronological account of developments and setbacks that the movement has faced. Using Chiquita as a case study, the chapter distils the recent history of corporate accountability under international law. It follows a linear approach, explaining the developments and set-backs in corporate criminal responsibility under international law. It starts with Nuremberg as a milestone, and goes on to analyze subsequent approaches supporting or rejecting the accountability of corporate officers and corporations. Passing through domestic litigation that emanated from Nuremberg precedents, as well as the subsequent developments, the chapter tells the recent history of corporate accountability under international criminal law.

This chapter shows that the UK relies on information disclosure and market forces to steer companies towards greater sustainability, leaving company law and corporate governance largely free to focus on shareholder value. It traces the twentieth century regulatory and policy changes which reoriented the UK’s system from managerialist to shareholder-centric, before analysing the 2006 reforms, which are supposed to promote ‘enlightened shareholder value’ through directors’ duties and disclosure. Finally, the chapter considers recent developments that attempt to use information disclosure to promote a long-term approach, including giving shareholders stewardship responsibilities and a ‘say on pay’, making changes to takeover regulation, and requiring companies to make disclosures in relation to modern slavery. None of these recent measures have been successful, and the chapter concludes that far-reaching reforms to corporate governance are urgently needed.