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Between Self-Regulation and the Alien Tort Claims Act: On the Contested Concept of Corporate Social Responsibility

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Ronen Shamir
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Abstract

Using Alien Tort Claims Act suits against multinational corporations as an immediate context for discussion, this article explores the emerging field of corporate social responsibility. The article argues for an understanding of concrete legal struggles as part of broader competing strategies for regulating corporate obligations to a multitude of stakeholders. By identifying and analyzing the positions of concrete actors who operate in the field, the main thesis of this article is that the field strongly tilts in the direction of voluntary and self-reliant models of corporate responsibility. The article identifies this process as consistent with the privatization of regulative structures in general and with extant modeling of corporate governance in particular, and points at the correlation between these trends and the interests of multinational corporations.

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Type
Articles of General Interest
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 38 , Issue 4 , December 2004 , pp. 635 - 664
Copyright
© 2004 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

I wish to thank the anonymous reviewers of LSR for their insightful and helpful comments. This research was supported by the Israeli Science Foundation (Grant No. 943/0233.0).

References

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