Lustig: The Enduring Charter: Corporations, States, and International Law

Doreen Lustig (Tel Aviv Univ. - Law) has posted The Enduring Charter: Corporations, States, and International Law (in The Law and Logics of Attribution: Constructing the Identity and Responsibility of States and Firms, Melissa J. Durkee ed., forthcoming). Here's the abstract:

This chapter chronicles the lingering presence and influence of international law on the regulatory options available for corporations operating both within and outside state borders and offers an alternative to the conventional history positing the irrelevance of international law to the question of business corporations. During the nineteenth century, a corporation came to be considered a private entity formed for the purpose of pursuing commercial ends. Prior to that time, the identity of corporations was less clearly defined, and they owed their existence to the governments that chartered them. In the context of international law, this transition would gain prominence in the latter part of nineteenth century in debates among scholars in the field about the involvement of chartered companies in the scramble for Africa. As the nineteenth century drew to an end, most chartered companies were dissolved. Consequently, the international legal debate over the legitimacy of using companies as governing authorities in Africa was put to rest. In the following decades, international legal scholars rarely considered the private business corporation an issue of concern or subject for examination in key treatises or other works. Yet, reading the commentaries of these international lawyers along with the experience of the post-charter legal order exposes how the presumption of separate spheres between the public (authority of governments) and the private (authority of firms) did not necessarily result in the resumption of responsible governance on the part of the imperial state. Nor did business enterprises make a radical shift away from the practices associated with the charter era. Rather, the international legal doctrines of state responsibility, diplomatic protection, human rights, and investment law weaved a veil that concealed much of the activities of corporations from legal scrutiny and nurtured the alliance between powerful governments and commercial corporations.