It is an unresolved but important issue whether one legal entity can be vicariously liable for another legal entity’s tort in a corporate group. The debate over a parent company’s liability for its subsidiary’s torts has emerged, particularly in the context of environmental harms or mass torts resulting in personal injuries. Often, liability claims surpass the subsidiary’s value, leading to its insolvency, and tort creditors attempt to claim against alternative defendants, especially the parent company. 

I have been writing a series of papers that examines what systems theory is and whether it can be used to think through problems of corporate liability. This blog post provides an overview of two of the three published papers (both published in the second half of 2023).

Private law is often said to be distinctive in a certain sense: it is about ‘interpersonal justice’. But consider the following: Antony Duff says criminal law is to be understood in a certain relational way. Kristen Rundle says that the Fullerian ideal of the internal morality of law concerns certain relations between the lawgiver and law subject. Avihay Dorfman argues that there are relational aspects of many public law duties. If there is any meaningful use of the relational architecture in these domains, it must extend beyond the vision offered by what is traditionally known as the ‘bipolarity’ thesis in private law.