The Moral Economy of Corporate Justice

Multinational companies are increasingly being held liable for corporate misconduct in global markets. This development is driven by US prosecutors seizing their effective jurisdiction over a variety of economic transactions in ways that have triggered a discussion about the extraterritoriality of American law. Critics are warning about the strategic use of litigation tactics in order to attain economic or security objectives. Cornelia Woll argues that we need to go beyond the geopolitics and study the long-term effects of these legal strategies and the institutional change they trigger. In particular, we see the rise of a regime of negotiated justice to discipline and sanction corporate actors in global markets, which is rather distinct from prior assumptions about corporate liability in many countries.
Cornelia Woll is Professor of Political Science at Sciences Po and Co-Director of the Max Planck Sciences Po Center on Coping with Instability in Market Societies (MaxPo) in Paris. Her research focuses on international political economy and economic sociology, in particular regulatory issues in the European Union and the United States. A specialist on business–government relations, she is the author of The Power of Inaction: Bank Bailouts in Comparative Perspective (Cornell 2014) and Firm Interest: How Governments Shape Business Lobbying on Global Trade (Cornell 2008). She continues to investigate the politics of the recent financial crisis.