Law as capitalist technique

Hudson, Alastair (2018) Law as capitalist technique. King's Law Journal, 29 (1). pp. 58-87. ISSN 1757-8442 (https://doi.org/10.1080/09615768.2018.1475845)

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Abstract

This article analyses how one of the aspects of law (little discussed in the literature) is as a series of techniques in practice which facilitate the activities of the current model of capitalism. Commonalities are drawn between traditional trusts law and offshore trusts law enabling tax avoidance; company law and the extraction of value from businesses (as with BHS); how corporate governance failures in UK company law enable the avoidance of personal liability (as with Carillion and Enron), and their comparison with the regulation of banks; and how the concept of ‘industrial democracy’ set out in the 1970s enables a different way of modelling these legal techniques. This article prefaces in a little more detail the work of the Corporate Governance Policy Review which I am leading for the British Labour Party in 2018.

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