The Jurisdictional Vacuum: Transnational Corporate Human Rights Claims in Common Law Home States
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Private MNCs that operate in developing host states through overseas subsidiaries are regularly accused of human rights and environmental violations. Host state plaintiffs who then seek redress in home states where a corporate parent is domiciled face a number of doctrinal limitations. Focusing on the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada, this Article outlines the current state of common law doctrines that consistently inhibit host state plaintiffs from advancing transnational home state claims. Cumulatively, the doctrines create a ‘jurisdictional vacuum,’ illustrating that domestic legal principles have not kept pace with commerce that spans across state borders. As international business has been able to structure itself to avoid the adjudicative reach of home state courts, harmed host state plaintiffs are unable to utilize domestic common laws to exact civil liability and obtain compensation. Comprised mainly of transnational claims that originate in commercial activities in the extractive and manufacturing industries, the vacuum’s doctrinal limitations fall within two broad categories. In the first category, home state courts have parochially interpreted corporate legal personality. Adhering to the corporate veil, they have disaggregated otherwise integrated transnational business operations in accordance with the entity theory of liability. They have also disaggregated MNC liability from government and individual liability by, respectively, holding onto ‘statist’ notions of international law and restrictively construing corporate personhood. In the second category, home state courts have taken restrained approaches to transnational corporate claims that implicate foreign relations or trade and investment or, otherwise, impinge on a host state’s judicial system. They have routinely invoked deferential and prudential doctrines, namely forum non conveniens and act of state, and restrictively interpreted the presumption against extraterritoriality. And when they have eschewed restraint in boomerang litigation, the end result has equally thwarted the ability of host state plaintiffs to procure compensatory remedies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Direct model labels (unvalidated)
Per-model category and study-design labels from the labeling rounds. They are machine output, unvalidated, and the disagreement between models ships as data. No study design here is MEDLINE-validated yet.
| Model arm | Categories | Study design | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| gemma | no category Domain: not available · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Theoretical or conceptual | low |
| gpt | no category Domain: not available · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Theoretical or conceptual | low |
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedLabeled directly by 2 models reading the full record.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".