Hersch Lauterpacht Memorial Lecture 2018: The Changing Place of the Corporation in International Law by Professor Sundhya Pahuja

Part 1: From Colonial Companies to Global Corporations In this lecture, I will introduce the problematic of the corporation in international law. The modern corporation is often understood to be a child of the state, a child which has grown too powerful to control. However, we need to go back further than the advent of the modern corporation in order to see that the Company emerged in the early modern period not as a child of the state but rather as a form of associational life which exercised public authority and which rivalled other such forms, including the state. In this lecture, I will suggest ways in which a richer understanding of the history of the corporation and its jurisprudential form can illuminate contemporary patterns of global ordering. Part 2: Decolonisation and Battles over Global Corporations and International Law This lecture will trace the struggles over the question of the corporation, how it should be conceptualized, and its proper relation to international law during the period bookended by the end of the Second World War, and the end of the Cold War. It will focus in particular on the attempt in 1974, by the ‘Group of 77’ developing states, to assert international legal control over trans or multi-national corporations through the establishment of the Commission on Transnational Corporations, as well as consider the rivalrous jurisprudence and institutional initiatives emerging at the same time. Part 3: Contemporary Patterns of Ordering: Business and Human Rights and International Investment Law This lecture will consider what happened to the earlier struggles over the global corporation, once history ‘ended’, and three worlds putatively became one. It will trace the twin emergence of International Investment Law, and Business and Human Rights, in order to ask what account of the international - and what kind of world - is authored and authorised by those ‘regimes’.