The co-op bookstore for avid readers
Book Cover for: States, Firms, and Their Legal Fictions, Melissa J. Durkee

States, Firms, and Their Legal Fictions

Melissa J. Durkee

This volume offers a new point of entry into questions about how the law conceives of states and firms. Because states and firms are fictitious constructs rather than products of evolutionary biology, the law dictates which acts should be attributed to each entity, and by which actors. Those legal decisions construct firms and states by attributing identity and consequences to them. As the volume shows, these legal decisions are often products of path dependence or conceptual metaphors like "personhood" that have expanded beyond their original uses. Focusing on attribution, the volume considers an array of questions about artificial entities that are usually divided into doctrinal siloes. These include questions about attribution of international legal responsibility to states and state-owned entities, transnational attribution of liabilities to firms, and attribution of identity rights to corporations. Durkee highlights the artificiality of doctrines that construct firms and states, and therefore their susceptibility to change.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Cambridge University Press
  • Publish Date: Mar 7th, 2024
  • Pages: 302
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 9.00in - 6.00in - 0.69in - 1.26lb
  • EAN: 9781009334679
  • Categories: JurisprudenceMilitary

About the Author

Durkee, Melissa J.: - Melissa J. Durkee is Professor at Washington University School of Law. She is an expert in international and business law and her research focuses on the public-private interactions that produce and interpret legal norms. She is an elected member of the American Journal of International Law and chairs the International Legal Theory interest group of the American Society of International Law. Her work appears in leading journals including the Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, Virginia Law Review, and others.