Corporate Harms

This book argues that corporate harms can and should be conceptualised as horrific because they are novel forms of damage on an unprecedented scale. There is long-term recognition of widespread, systemic harms caused by corporations and the relative dearth of response by the criminal legal system. This book argues that the harms caused by corporations generate a category crisis for criminal law. Leaving aside the difficulties that criminal law has in conceptualising the corporation as a criminal legal subject, corporate harms in and of themselves raise categorical challenges because they are beyond the imagination of the criminal law in terms of magnitude, size, type, and quality. Corporate harms tend not to be the subject of criminal law because they are too vast, too diffuse, and too disturbing for existing legal categories. Drawing on criminal law, criminology, cultural legal studies, and horror as both genre and affect, this book reconceptualises corporate harm through the lens of horror. It argues that corporate violence is structurally horrific in its scale, temporality, spatial reach, ordinariness, and institutional betrayal. This book will appeal to scholars and students with relevant interests in legal theory, law and literature, criminal law, criminology, and cultural studies.