States, Firms, and Their Legal Fictions : Attributing Identity and Responsibility to Artificial Entities

Corporations and states are creatures of law that claim rights, trade roles, and avoid responsibility based on legal concepts in international and domestic law. Using the concept of “attribution” as a touchstone, this cross-disciplinary book explores the law's diverse ways of constructing the identities and responsibilities of firms and states.

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.