Risky Business: Enterprise Liability, Corporate Groups and Torts
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Glen Wright
Abstract
Corporate personality and limited liability have been the foundations of corporate law for most of its modern history. While these concepts greatly contributed to the early development of corporations, their application in the modern era is outmoded. Nowhere is this clearer than in ‘risky business’ scenarios, where a subsidiary is constituted for the purpose of shielding the corporate group as a whole from tortious liability arising from risky or dangerous activities. Tort victims generally must rely on ineffective and inconsistent common law and tort law doctrines in order to seek redress for torts committed against them, and a number of high profile cases have highlighted the flaws in such approaches. Many corporate law and tort scholars have commented on these flaws and a literature has developed proposing rational alternatives. This paper presents the case for adopting ‘enterprise liability’ in risky business situations, that is, treating the companies within a corporate group as one unified enterprise for the purposes of compensating tort victims.
Acknowledgment
I wish to thank Sandra Frisby at the University of Nottingham for her excellent corporate law course that inspired this paper, and Michelle Worthington at the Australian National University, whose interesting work on corporate governance caused me to revisit this subject.
© 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- Models of Negligence – The Debate in Israel’s Supreme Court
- Compensation for Personal Injury: Comparative Incentives for the Interplay of Tort Law and Insurance Law
- Risky Business: Enterprise Liability, Corporate Groups and Torts
- Contracting Out of the Provision of Welfare Services to Private Actors and Liability Issues
- Are We Really Helping Them? – The Needs of Tort Victims in Mass Litigation Environments
- Book Reviews
- Miquel Martín-Casals/Diego M Papayannis (eds), Uncertain Causation in Tort Law (Cambridge University Press 2015). 344 pp. ISBN 978-1-107-12836–1. £ 79.99 (hardback).
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- Models of Negligence – The Debate in Israel’s Supreme Court
- Compensation for Personal Injury: Comparative Incentives for the Interplay of Tort Law and Insurance Law
- Risky Business: Enterprise Liability, Corporate Groups and Torts
- Contracting Out of the Provision of Welfare Services to Private Actors and Liability Issues
- Are We Really Helping Them? – The Needs of Tort Victims in Mass Litigation Environments
- Book Reviews
- Miquel Martín-Casals/Diego M Papayannis (eds), Uncertain Causation in Tort Law (Cambridge University Press 2015). 344 pp. ISBN 978-1-107-12836–1. £ 79.99 (hardback).
