The Great Reversal: Corporate Property and Corporate Conduct in International Law

The Judge Jon Newmann Lecture at Yale, 2019

It is commonly held that ‘International Investment Law’, and the ‘UN Framework on Business and Human Rights’ are new and emerging fields of international legal activity.  Both engage directly with the place of the multinational corporation, the first in terms of the protection of property and the adjudication of disputes, the second in terms of the conduct of corporations. But these engagements are not as new as they may appear. In this talk, I enrich our understandings of the emergence of these fields by offering an account of an earlier attempt to deal with both the property and conduct of multinational corporations.  That was the attempt in the 1970s led by the Global South to establish the UN Commission on Transnational Corporations.  That initiative sought to internationalise legal control over the conduct of multi-national corporations, whilst at the same time, to assert national authority over the ownership of property.  But what eventuated was the reverse: internationalized protection for foreign property, and national responsibility for corporate conduct.  Understanding the story of these ‘new’ regimes in this way - and as intimately connected to each other - sheds light on the dark side of their combined operations today.