.

Are Corporations Subjects of International Law?

Are Corporations Subjects

of International Law?
Jos E. Alvarez*

* Herbert and Rose Rubin Professor of International Law, New York University School of Law. This es-
say is based on a keynote address delivered at a conference on Corporations and International Law
on March 12, 2010 at Santa Clara University School of Law. The author is grateful for comments re-
ceived during that conference, the research assistance of Eran N. Sthoeger, as well as the Fiomen
DAgostino and Max E. Greenberg Research Fund.

1
.

9 SANTA CLARA JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL LAW 1 (2011)

TABLE OF CONTENTS
I. Introduction

II. Personhood and its Discontents: Citizens United

A. United in Support of the International Regime

1. The National Rule of Law

2. Fair Process

3. The Virtuous Cycle

B. Dissenting from Citizens United and the Investment Regime

1. Lack of Equal Access to the International Rule of Law

2. Lack of Equal Remedies

3. Threats to Human Rights Remedies

4. Alleged Conflicts with Other Fundamental Rights

5. Alleged Conflicts with the Residual Sovereign Right to Regulate

III. The Risks of Corporate Personhood

A. Espousal of the New Dispute Settlement Mechanisms?

B. Personhood and the Residual Rules of International Law

C. Personhood and the Rights at Stake: What Does Personhood Mean for Investor
and Human Rights?

IV. Conclusion

2
.

Are Corporations Subjects of International Law?

I. Introduction
In todays United States, and especially among U.S. human rights advocates, the answer
to my titular question is a resounding yes. If a subject is, as the International Court of
Justice (ICJ) indicated back in 1949, an entity that international law treats as a person
that is, something that can affect and be affected by international law and can enforce in-
ternational law by bringing at least some international claims,1 a corporation seems as
much a subject of international law as an individual or an international organization. This
is certainly the answer suggested by Second Circuit judicial decisions under the Alien Tort
Claims Act (ATCA), which have shown no patience with expert opinions to the contrary by
old-fashioned positivists based in Europe such as James Crawford and Christopher Green-
wood.2 Additionally, District Judge Schwartz in Presbyterian Church of Sudan v. Talisman
Energy Inc. had no problem dismissing Crawfords and Greenwoods respective conten-
tions that, outside of ATCA decisions by U.S. courts, corporations have generally not been
found liable under international law and are therefore not subjects of international law.3
I contend that focusing on whether or not a corporation is a subject under international
law or an international legal person is at best a distraction and that affirmative decisions
to this effect may be a very bad idea. Contrary to what many human rights advocates ap-
parently believe, those who want to hold corporations accountable for international law
violations should not be so quick to assume that they want corporations to be subjects of
international law.
Judge Schwartzs 2003 opinion, part of lengthy saga that ultimately ended in dismissal
of plaintiffs claims for failure to prove their allegations,4 affirmed in no uncertain terms
that corporations, like any other private actor, are subject to jus cogens for acts such as
genocide, rape, torture, summary execution, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Fur-
thermore, corporations could be found liable, no less than individuals, at least in some cas-
es as aiders and abettors, co-conspirators, or entities otherwise complicit in such acts or
other human rights violations normally requiring state action.5 Judge Schwartz, along with
many other U.S. judges, has had no trouble drawing these conclusions even though nearly
all the relevant precedents cited in U.S. courts either impose human rights obligations di-

1. Reparation for Injuries Suffered in the Service of the United Nations, Advisory Opinion, 1949 I.C.J.
174, 179 (Apr. 11) [hereinafter Reparation Case].
2. See Decl. of James Crawford S.C., Presbyterian Church of Sudan v. Talisman Energy Inc., Republic of
Sudan, 453 F. Supp. 2d 633 (S.D.N.Y. 2006) [hereinafter First Declaration]; Second Decl. of Christo-
pher Greenwood, id. [hereinafter Second Declaration].
3. See First Declaration, supra note 2; Second Declaration, supra note 2.
4. Presbyterian Church of Sudan v. Talisman Energy, Inc., 582 F. 3d 244 (2d Cir. 2009).
5. Presbyterian Church of Sudan v. Talisman Energy, Inc., 244 F. Supp. 2d 289 (S.D.N.Y. 2003). For a dis-
cussion of this case, see Douglas M. Branson, Holding Multinational Corporations Accountable? An
Achilles Heel in Alien Torts Claims Act Litigation, 9 SANTA CLARA J. INTL L. 227 (2011). Although the Se-
cond Circuit, in affirming the dismissal of this claim, narrowed the scope of conspiracy liability and
required fulfillment of a high burden of purpose with respect to aiding and abetting, the essence of
Judge Schwartzs ruling was left intact. Id. Contemporary ATCA debates among U.S. courts now ap-
pear to be focused on second generation questions that presume that corporate liability might indeed
be shown as a matter of international law but dispute the requisites needed to prove aiding and abet-
ting, conspiracy, vicarious liability and other alleged connections between a corporation and a state
when the underlying customary norm requires state action. See, e.g., In re South African Apartheid Lit-
igation, 617 F. Supp. 2d 228 (S.D.N.Y. 2009).

3
.

9 SANTA CLARA JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL LAW 1 (2011)

rectly only on states or impose criminal liability only on individuals or corporate officials
but not on the corporation itself.6 Nevertheless, the district court in Talisman saw itself as
having no real choice on these matters since, as it pointed out, there was clear and con-
sistent Second Circuit authority supporting its conclusions.7
That court, as have most under the ATCA, drew from international laws silencethe
fact that it did not specifically distinguish between natural and juridical individualsthe
logical conclusion that what is prohibited to other persons is presumptively also prohibit-
ed to corporate associations.8 The premise is that international law, including international
criminal law, does not distinguish between natural and juridical purposes and that it is, as
expert witness Prof. Ralph Steinhardt suggested to the Talisman court, implausible to
protect a corporation that engages in slave trade or supplies Zyklon B to kill Jews.9 The
idea that has persuaded our courts to date is that corporations are merely groups of per-
sons and that what is illegal for one individual to do should be equally illegal for a group of
them, even when this group is formed to make a profit. Of course, no one involved in these
cases, including the judges, actually believes that corporations are the functional equiva-
lent of persons; they just find that international law makes this leap. In doing so, these
courts may be consciously or unconsciously influenced by the fact that under U.S. law, cor-
porations can do nearly everything that natural persons can do: that is, they can sue and be
sued, be taxed, own property, enjoy constitutional protections, contract, and be criminally
prosecuted.10 The fact that suing a corporate entity under the ATCA and not just a corpo-
rate official facilitates a finding of jurisdiction as well as a reach into a far deeper pocket for
purposes of damages is hardly mentioned but is, of course, very much on the mind of ATCA
litigants. Everyone involvedfrom the plaintiffs to the judges to the U.S. and other gov-
ernments concerned with such casesis only too aware of the differences between suing
an individual corporate official and suing powerful multinational corporations. Even if cor-
porations manage to escape a monetary penalty commensurate with the harm they have
allegedly caused, the prospect of years of ATCA litigation might inspire them to put politi-
cal pressure on the rogue governments in which they operate. Corporate ATCA litigation is
the human rights advocates answer to sovereign immunity: If you cant sue the govern-

6. See First Declaration, supra note 2; Second Declaration, supra note 2.

7. Church of Sudan, 244 F. Supp. 2d at 309.
8. In this respect, these U.S. court decisions are not unlike those in European human rights bodies which
have suggested, at least in dicta, that what states are individually barred from doing they are equally
barred from accomplishing when they associate with one another, as when they use international or-
ganizations (IOs) to accomplish what none of them can do alone. Interestingly, in those cases, the Eu-
ropean institutions appeared to be suggesting that it might be possible to pierce the IO veil in order to
make the IOs members liable. These adjudicators did not suggest that the organization itself might be
liable. See, e.g., Melchner v. Germany, App. No. 13258/87, 64 Eur. Commn H.R. Dec. & Rep. 138
(1990); Waite and Kennedy v. Germany, 1999-I Eur. Ct. H.R. 393; Beer v. Germany, App. No.
26083/94, 30 Eur. H.R. Rep. 261 (1999); Matthews v. United Kingdom, App. No. 24833/94, 28 Eur.
H.R. Rep. 361 (1999). That latter step is taken, however, by the International Law Commission (ILC)'s
draft rules on IO responsibility. See discussion infra at 3638.
9. Church of Sudan, 244 F. Supp. 2d at 316 (quoting the Decl. of Ralph G. Steinhardt).
10. For a historical survey of how U.S. national law came to such conclusions, see David Millon, The Am-
biguous Significance of Corporate Personhood, STANFORD AGORA (2001), available at
http://papers.ssrn.com/paper.taf?abstract_id=264141.

4
.

Are Corporations Subjects of International Law?

ment, go for the businesses that prop it up.11 Small wonder then that for U.S. human rights
advocates corporate subject/personhood is an idea whose time has come.
Awareness of the colossal harms that may result when corporate greed becomes aligned
with government power helps to explain nearly all that is said on the subject of corporate
subjects under international law on this side of the Atlantic. It certainly helps to explain
the Talisman courts approval and reliance on Louis Henkins famous invocation of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, stating that [e]very individual and every organ of
society includes juridical persons. Every individual and every organ of society excludes no
one, no company, no market, no cyberspace. The Universal Declaration applies to them
all.12 The understandable desire to find someone accountable for atrocities beyond com-
prehensionin the Talisman case the horrors in Sudan over the last decadehelps to ex-
plain why that court did examine closely the context of Henkin's contention. That court did
not consider that Henkin was addressing merely the preamble of an instrument originally
intended to be non-binding or that the Universal Declaration includes a number of rights
that even the court in Talisman affirms are not recognized by customary law.13
The desire to provide some modicum of justice for human rights victims may also ex-
plain the powerful slant in favor of a yes answer to my titles question in the most widely
used international law casebook in the United States. That casebook, by Dunoff, Ratner and
Wippman, is not your grandmothers international law text focused only on states as ac-
tors.14 While the casebook devotes only a few pages to the status of corporations under in-
ternational law, what it tells its readers is choice, namely that: corporations, at least since
the Dutch East India Company, have long been major international law actors and have ex-
erted considerable influence in the making of rules governing trade, investment, antitrust,
intellectual property, and telecommunications; are indirect claimants in the World Trade
Organization (WTO) dispute settlement system and direct claimants in investor-state arbi-
tration; have long participated in governmental teams before international organizations
forums; have had direct voting rights in the International Labor Organization; have played
standard-setting roles in other organizations like the International Telecommunications
Union; have been the de facto subjects of a large number of treaties dealing with every-
thing from labor law to environmental protection;15 have been the direct subject of Securi-

11. See, e.g., Branson, supra note 5, at 228.

12. Church of Sudan, 244 F. Supp. 2d 289 at 318 (citing Louis Henkin, The Universal Declaration at 50 and
the Challenge of Global Markets, 25 BROOK. J. INTL L. 17, 25 (1999)).
13. Compare Universal Declaration of Human Rights, G.A. Res. 217A, art. 17, U.N. GAOR, 3d Sess., 1st plen.
mtg., U.N. Doc. A/810 (Dec. 10, 1948), available at
http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/index.shtml ((1) Everyone has the right to own property
alone as well as in association with others. (2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.),
with Church of Sudan, 244 F. Supp. 2d at 324 ([C]onfiscation of property without just compensation
does not violate the law of nations), and id. at 325 (While expropriation or property destruction
alone may not violate the law of nations, the Court finds that expropriation or property destruction,
committed as part of a genocide or war crimes, may violate the law of nations[.]).
14. JEFFREY L. DUNOFF, STEVEN R. RATNER & DAVID WIPPMAN, INTERNATIONAL LAW NORMS, ACTORS, PROCESS: A
PROBLEM ORIENTED APPROACH (2d ed. 2006).
15. The teachers manual on this point is quite revealing: its suggested response to a question concerning
the target of ILO conventions is to point out that while traditional scholars would say that such trea-
ties create obligations only for states, a more contemporary view is that the ILO was and is trying to
regulate the companies and placed obligations on them, though the states are given the primary re-

5
.

9 SANTA CLARA JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL LAW 1 (2011)

ty Council decisions, including its sanctions regimes; and, of course, have been the subject
of or participated in fashioning substantial soft law regulatory efforts, such as codes of
conduct.16 The intended message is clear: Since corporations make and enforce law, only a
formalist blind to reality would deny that they are persons or subjects of international
law.17 That casebook includes, for good measure, a lengthy excerpt from the 2003 work
product of the UN Commission on Human Rights, its Norms on the Responsibility of Trans-
national Corporations and Other Business Enterprises with Respect to Human Rights.18 As
is well known, this wish fulfillment fantasy of human rights advocates everywhere goes far
beyond relatively restrained decisions like Talisman. Human rights advocates proclaim
that corporations are directly liable under international law (albeit within their respective
spheres of activity and influence) for an extensive array of human rights obligations af-
firmed by a number of treaties and soft-law instruments, irrespective of whether the
sources cited impose their obligations solely on states or are legally binding. These ill-
considered Norms, widely derided by the United States and a number of other govern-
ments, were, of course, the first victim of John Ruggie, who as U.N. Special Rapporteur on
corporate responsibility and accountability, pronounced them a non-starter at the begin-
ning of his tenure.19
The laudatory zeal of human rights advocates also helps to explain the most thorough-
going attempt to advance, by way of prescription, a theory of legal responsibility for corpo-
rations by one of the co-authors of that casebook, Steven Ratner.20 While, as will be ad-
dressed below, Ratners approach does not rely on corporate subject-hood, it has been
widely interpreted as implying that conclusion. Indeed, this conclusion is suggested by
even the relatively cautious (and now dated) U.S. Restatement of Foreign Relations, which,
even back in 1986, put the notion that corporations were not subjects of international law
in the past tense, indicating that [i]n the past it was sometimes assumed that individuals
and corporations, companies or other juridical persons created by the laws of state, were
not persons under (or subjects of) international law.21 In this fashion, Louis Henkin, as

sponsibility for ensuring compliance. JEFFREY L. DUNOFF, STEVEN R. RATNER & DAVID WIPPMAN,
TEACHERS MANUAL FOR INTERNATIONAL LAW NORMS, ACTORS, PROCESS: A PROBLEM ORIENTED APPROACH 40
(2d ed. 2006).
16. DUNOFF ET AL., supra note 14, at 21634.
17. See also Emeka Duruigbo, Corporate Accountability and Liability for International Human Rights Abus-
es: Recent Changes and Recurring Challenges, 6 NW. U. J. INTL HUM. RTS. 222 (2008) (describing the
challenges to the orthodox view that corporations are not subjects of international law); Jonathan I.
Charney, Transnational Corporations and Developing Public International Law, 1983 DUKE L.J. 748
(1983) (summarizing literature on point and concluding that corporations ought to be permitted to
participate in the making of international law but that it would be unwise to accord them complete
international legal personality).
18. DUNOFF ET AL., supra note 14, at 224; Econ. & Soc. Council [ECOSOC], Subcommn on Promotion & Prot.
of Human Rights, Norms on the Responsibilities of Transnational Corporations and Other Business En-
terprises with Regard to Human Rights, U.N. Doc. E/CN.4/Sub.2/2003/12/Rev.2 (Aug. 26, 2003).
19. See Adefolake Adeyeye, The Role of Global Governance in CSR, 9 SANTA CLARA J. INTL L. 147 (2011);
Larry Cat Backer, The United Nations Protect-Respect-Remedy Project: Operationalizing a Global
Human Rights Based Framework for the Regulation of Transnational Corporations, 9 SANTA CLARA J.
INTL LAW 37 (2011).
20. Steven R. Ratner, Corporations and Human Rights: A Theory of Legal Responsibility, 111 YALE L.J. 443
(2001).
21. RESTATEMENT (THIRD) OF FOREIGN RELATIONS LAW OF THE UNITED STATES [hereinafter Restatement], Part

6
.

Are Corporations Subjects of International Law?

chief rapporteur of that Restatement, softly denigrated the old-fashioned positivist concep-
tion of subjects of international law in favor of an accordion-like, flexible notion of inter-
national legal personality.
Andrew Clapham, writing in 2006, appeared to do the same but more boldly. Clapham
wrote about limited international legal personality rather than subjects, but otherwise
proudly embraced the circular reasoning of the ICJs Advisory Opinion regarding repara-
tion.22 Like the ICJ, which determined that the U.N. was an international legal person be-
cause it acted like a legal person, Clapham argued that the fact that corporations (like indi-
viduals) enjoy certain international legal rights and privileges leads to the inescapable
conclusion that they are international legal persons. We need to admit, he wrote, that
international rights and duties depend on the capacity to enjoy those rights and bear those
obligations; such rights and obligations do not depend on the mysteries of subjectivity.23
In other words, we can draw international personhood from the fact that corporations are
already treated as persons; we can imply additional rights and obligations because they al-
ready have some. Clapham wrote that:
The burden would now seem to be on those who claim that states are the sole bearers of human
rights obligations under international law to explain away the obvious emergence onto the interna-
tional scene of a variety of actors with sufficient international personality to be the bearers of rights
and duties under international law. If The Sunday Times has sufficient personality and the capacity
to enjoy rights under the European Convention on Human Rights, it might surely have enough per-
sonality and capacity to be subject to duties under international human rights law.24

Clapham is correct that traditional international lawyers have not been very good at ex-
plaining what a subject of international law is, even though all seem to agree that what-
ever it is, the concept is as fundamental as is the doctrine of sources of international law.25

II, introductory cmt. (1987).

22. ANDREW CLAPHAM, HUMAN RIGHTS OBLIGATIONS OF NON-STATE ACTORS 79 (2006). In the Reparation Case,
supra note 1, the ICJ was asked by the General Assembly to give an advisory opinion on whether the
U.N. could make a claim vis--vis a state for its own damages as well as damages suffered by relatives
of one of the organizations agents (the Secretary-Generals mediator, who had been killed by a car
bomb in Jerusalem). Before answering the questions posed to it, the ICJ drew from the U.N.s enumer-
ated powers to conclude some treaties, its capacity to enjoy privileges and immunities, its separate
existence vis--vis states, and its ability to take certain actions, the inference that the UN was an in-
ternational legal person. Id. at 179. The ICJ was careful to note
[t]hat was not the same thing as saying that it is a State, which it certainly is not, or that its legal
personality and rights and duties are the same as those of State . . . . What it does mean is that it is a
subject of international law and capable of possessing international rights and duties, and that it
has capacity to maintain its rights by bringing international claims.
Id. The ICJ decided in effect that the U.N. could take actions that were functionally necessary to ful-
fill its Charter purposes. Id. at 183. The finding of personhood led the Court to conclude that the U.N.
could present a claim for its own damages as well as that incurred by its agents family. Id. at 184.
Moreover, the Court found that the U.N. could assert these claims even with respect to a non-member
of the U.N., thereby suggesting that the U.N.s personhood and its capacity to engage in the functional-
ly equivalent of diplomatic espousal was good against the world merely because fifty states had cre-
ated the organizations. Id. at 185.
23. Id. at 6869.
24. Id. at 82.
25. Indeed, the significance of international legal subject/personhood seems apparent from the fact that
virtually every international legal treatise over the past century accords the concept pride of place,
alongside the sources identified in article 38 of the Statute of the ICJ.

7
.

9 SANTA CLARA JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL LAW 1 (2011)

He is not the only one to see the incoherency of Ian Brownlies affirmation that while states
are the only true subjects of international law and we can expand that category to em-
brace international organizations because states have given international organizations
certain capacities, no other entity can enjoy that exalted status even when these also have
been given the capacity to bring international claims in certain international regimesas
have corporations and individuals.26 Small wonder then that well before Clapham, Dame
Rosalyn Higgins, one of Brownlies contemporaries, noted that international lawyers con-
ception of subjects and objects erected an intellectual prison of our own choosing and
then declared it to be an unalterable constraint.27 Higgins, a faithful student of the Yale
School of International Law, argued that we replace those categories and talk only of par-
ticipants in the international legal process.28
However, at least among European scholars, Higgins remains an outlier. Most of these
continue to affirm, along with Crawford and Greenwood, that the only real subjects or per-
sons in international law are states and their creations, namely organizations consisting of
states as members such as those of the U.N. system.29 On this side of the Atlantic, we most
often hear the reverse. For those to whom positivism has lost some of its allure, interna-
tional personhood tends to be a functional conception that can readily accommodate cor-
porations.30
Given this range of choices, Higgins and others who resist the subject/object dichot-
omy appear to be more sensitive to real world practice. Calling corporations, non-
governmental organizations (NGOs), and individuals all participants seems strikingly
sensible and accurate. A mere participant in the international legal process is less likely
to carry the intellectual baggage that a subject of international law or certainly a person
has. Seeing corporate (and other non-state) actors as participants is less likely to elicit
misleading analogies between corporate persons, established under national law for dis-
tinct purposes, and natural persons, who, at least under international law, do not require
national law recognition to be accorded at least some rights (even as stateless persons).31
Calling a corporate entity a subject or object of international law confuses more than
enlightens. As Clapham argues, [t]rying to squeeze international actors into the state-like

26. See, e.g., IAN BROWNLIE, PRINCIPLES OF PUBLIC INTERNATIONAL LAW 5870 (4th ed. 1995). But see NICOLA
JGERS, CORPORATE HUMAN RIGHTS OBLIGATIONS: IN SEARCH OF ACCOUNTABILITY 1935 (2002) (rejecting
subject/object dichotomy).
27. ROSALYN HIGGINS, PROBLEMS AND PROCESS: INTERNATIONAL LAW AND HOW WE USE IT 49 (1994).
28. Id. at 4950 (noting that the whole notion of subjects and objects has no credible reality, and, in
my view, no functional purpose). For Higgins, there are no subjects and objects, but only partici-
pants. Individuals are participants, along with states, international organizations . . . , multinational
corporations, and indeed private and non-governmental groups. Id. at 50. For a comparable view, see
Robert McCorquodale, The Individual and the International Legal System, in INTERNATIONAL LAW at
30732 (Malcolm Evans ed., 2d ed. 2006).
29. See, e.g., Second Declaration, supra note 2, at 1012 (citing LASSA OPPENHEIM, INTERNATIONAL LAW: A
TREATISE (R. Y. Jennings & Arthur Watts eds., 9th ed. 1992)) (1905). Greenwood asserts in no uncer-
tain terms that while the law of human rights is regarded as conferring rights upon individuals, it
still imposes obligations only upon States. Id. 14.
30. See, e.g., JGERS, supra note 26; McCorquodale, supra note 28; JENNIFER A. ZERK, MULTINATIONALS AND
CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY: LIMITATIONS AND OPPORTUNITIES IN INTERNATIONAL LAW 72103
(2006).
31. For a forceful defense of the natural rights of human persons as distinct from rights derived from the
proposition that humans are legal persons, see RAFAEL DOMINGO, THE NEW GLOBAL LAW 12631 (2010).

8
.

Are Corporations Subjects of International Law?

entities box is, at best, trying to force a round peg into a square hole.32 Moreover, the sub-
ject-object dichotomy implies that these are hermetically sealed categories such that mere
objects are passive recipients of international rights and duties that are created by inter-
national laws subjects. The realities of contemporary international law-making process-
es are a great deal more complex. The designation of participant recognizes that today,
thanks to increasing participation rights in a number of international fora for many non-
state actors, corporations (alongside a number of non-state actors) are now involved in the
making of international law, including, as is addressed below, the making of international
investment law through investor-state adjudication.
This essay addresses only a limited range of issues with respect to international sub-
jects. It does not tackle the issue of subjects head-on but gives it only a glancing blow. This
essay warns human rights advocates, who are, in the United States and especially through
ATCA litigation, driving this sea change in fundamental doctrine, of the need to think care-
fully about how much they want to rely on the attractive trope that corporations are inter-
national persons or subjects. It suggests the risks of deducing, from the fact of personhood
or subject-hood, that corporations have certain rights and obligations in international law.
It identifies some of the unintended consequences that may emerge when international
lawyers argue in hierarchical fashion, top down, that corporations are international legal
persons and are to be treated legally as the functional equivalent of either states or natural
persons. My point is strikingly simple, even banal. It is that even in our progressive era,
when scholars acknowledge that all legal concepts are constructed and can be decon-
structed to suit distinct normative agendas, when corporations are designated as per-
sons, many, including judges and arbitrators, may treat this literally.33 This essay argues
that not all of the results will be progressive.

II. Personhood and its Discontents: Citizens United

My starting point, not surprisingly, is that masterstroke in finding that corporations are
people too: the U.S. Supreme Courts recent decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election
Commission.34 On January 21, 2010, a 5-4 majority of the Court found unconstitutional a
federal law that prohibited corporations and unions from using their general treasury
funds to make independent expenditures for speech within thirty days of a primary elec-
tion or that expressly advocate the election or defeat of a candidate.35 The majority opin-
ion, by Justice Kennedy, explicitly put corporations and individuals on the same plane. Like
the Talisman court did in applying the ATCA, Justice Kennedy described corporations as
merely associations of persons that, like other groups, are entitled to the free exercise of
political speech. Justice Kennedy stressed that political speech does not lose First Amend-

32. CLAPHAM, supra note 22, at 80.

33. For an interesting introduction to linguistic studies concerning the mental states commonly attribut-
ed to group agents such as corporations, see Joshua Knobe & Jesse Prinz, Intuitions about Conscious-
ness: Experimental Studies (forthcoming), available at
http://www.unc.edu/~knobe/consciousness.pdf.
34. Citizens United v. FEC, --- U.S. ---, 130 S.Ct. 876 (2010).
35. Id.

9
.

9 SANTA CLARA JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL LAW 1 (2011)

ment protection simply because its source is a corporation.36 His opinion repeatedly em-
phasized that corporations, as associations of persons like many others that U.S. law re-
veres, contribute to the discussion, debate, and dissemination of information and ideas that
the First Amendment protects;37 that the U.S. government has the power to ban corpora-
tions from speaking no more than it does with respect to individuals;38 that corporate
speech is no less indispensable to decision-making in a democracy than is any other form
of speech;39 that the contention that corporate speech can be limited because of the rela-
tive wealth of corporations is as illegitimate as any other argument based on the speakers
identity;40 and that since the state cannot ban speech from wealthy individuals, it can no
more disfavor the corporate form of wealthy speech; and that businesses, large and
small, bring valuable expertise to bear on robust democratic debates.41 Further, since me-
dia corporations accumulate wealth, a contention that corporate wealth is a reason to re-
strict speech rights is tantamount, argued Kennedy, to contending that media outlets or
wealthy individuals may also have their rights restricted.42 In any case, Justice Kennedy ar-
gued that targeting corporations on the basis of wealth is overbroad given the millions of
small businesses that exist with less than $1 million in receipts per year.43 For these rea-
sons, Justice Kennedy concluded that Congress had in reality arbitrarily disfavored one
particular type of association of persons.44
Citizens United never said one word about international law or international person-
hood or subjects of international law. Justice Kennedys sole reference to anything remote-
ly foreign consisted of two sentences noting that the federal act that the court was ruling
unconstitutional applied equally to U.S. and foreign corporations and was overbroad, even
if we assume arguendo, that the Government has a compelling interest in limiting foreign
influence over our political process.45 Of course, the fact that the Court struck down legis-
lation that affected foreign corporations as well as domestic ones led to the memorable ex-
change between President Obama and Justice Alito at the State of the Union, where the
President asserted, to Alitos apparent disagreement, that the decision in Citizens United
precluded speech limitations on foreign corporations.46 Justice Stevens in dissent also criti-
cized the majoritys reasoning on this basis.47 It would appear that even in our partisan
times, everyone agrees that foreigners, including their corporations, are not persons, at
least constitutionally speaking.

36. Id. at 900.

37. Id.
38. Id.
39. Id. at 904.
40. Citizens United v. FEC, --- U.S. ---, 130 S.Ct. 876, 884 (2010).
41. Id. at 882.
42. Id. at 905.
43. Id. at 907.
44. Id. at 908.
45. Id. at 911.
46. For reports (including video) of Justice Alitos silent dissent during the State of the Union address, see
Posting of Martin Kady II to Politico,
http://www.politico.com/blogs/politicolive/0110/Justice_Alitos_You_lie_moment.html (Jan. 27,
2010, 22:05 EST).
47. Citizens United, 130 S.Ct. at 948 (Stevens, J., dissenting).

10
.

Are Corporations Subjects of International Law?

Despite the parochial nature of Citizens United, both the majority and dissenting opin-
ions in that case offer insights to international lawyers. The parallels between the reason-
ing adopted by the majority in Citizens United and international lawyers who would accord
international personhood on corporations are striking. Justice Kennedy drew connections
between media companies and other corporationsjust as Clapham does in his reference
to The Sunday Times case.48 Moreover, many of the arguments raised by both the majority
and the dissent in Citizens United are reminiscent of those made for and against the inter-
national legal regime that treats corporate interests most like real subjects of international
law, namely the international investment regime.

A. United in Support of the International Investment Regime

The international investment regime consists of nearly 3000 bilateral investment trea-
ties (BITs) and regional free trade agreements with investment chapters (FTAs, such as the
North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)) around the world.49 This treaty network
provides foreign investors of the respective treaty parties fair and equitable treatment, full
protection and security, and other protections under customary international law such as
the guarantees of the international minimum standard. Most of these investment treaties
also include protections from violations of investors investment contracts with host states,
national and most favored nation treatment, prompt, adequate and effective compensation
upon expropriation, and other rights. Under most contemporary investment treaties, for-
eign investors have the right to bring direct claims for violations of their treaty rights in
various arbitral forums, including the World Banks International Centre for the Settlement
of Investment Disputes (ICSID). Respondent states in investor-state disputes are under a
treaty obligation to pay out any resulting arbitral awards against them and investors can
seek direct enforcement of such arbitral awards in local courts.50 The presumptive remedy
in investor-state arbitration is full compensation in accordance with the Chorzou Factory
standard51 and not merely an award that encourages a state to remove an illegal national
law, as is the case in the WTO (which relies on authorized interstate trade retaliation).
Moreover, unlike the interstate dispute settlement scheme of the WTO, governments can-
not prevent private investors from bringing claims under such investment treaties and
they cannot prevent investors from making particular arguments that might establish ex-
pansive arbitral precedents.
Under investor-state arbitration, therefore, states are mostly passive participants in a
game controlled by corporate plaintiffs in which the latter play the jurisgenerative role that
in the WTO and throughout much of international law is formally reserved to states. As
students of the burgeoning investor-state arbitral case law attest, states have in effect del-

48. See CLAPHAM, supra note 22, at 82.

49. For an overview of international investment treaties, see U.N. Conference on Trade and Dev.
[UNCTAD], Recent Developments in International Investment Agreements (2008June 2009), IIA
Monitor No. 3 (2009), available at http://www.unctad.org/en/docs/webdiaeia20098_en.pdf.
50. For an overview of how investor-state arbitral awards are enforced, see Alan S. Alexandroff & Ian A.
Laird, Compliance and Enforcement, in THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF INTERNATIONAL INVESTMENT LAW 1171
(Peter Muchlinski, Federico Ortino & Christopher Schreuer eds., 2008).
51. Chorzw Factory (Ger. v. Pol.), 1928 P.C.I.J. (ser. A) No. 17 (July 26).

11
.

9 SANTA CLARA JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL LAW 1 (2011)

egated the making of international investment law to third party private attorneys general,
namely the wealthy multinationals that can afford to bring the cases and generate the case
law.52
If one applies the ICJs (circular) reasoning from the Reparation Case, it is easy to con-
clude, based on the international investment regime, that corporations and other investors
under BITs and FTAs are international legal persons or subjects of international law to no
less an extent than the Court found was true of the U.N.53 In the same way that the U.N.
Charter implicitly recognizes that the United Nations has a distinct personhood apart from
its member states, investment treaties appear to recognize the distinct personhood of
their third party beneficiaries, whose rights appear to be delineated in these treaties as dis-
tinct from those of the state parties to such treaties. As does the U.N. Charter, which recog-
nizes that the U.N. can conclude certain agreements under international law,54 many BITs
and FTAs umbrella clauses explicitly internationalize investor-state contracts, thereby
elevating such contractual assurances to the level of interstate pacts.55 In addition, most
BITs and FTAs, unlike the U.N. Charter (which does not confer on the organization the ca-
pacity to sue), explicitly provide investors with the ability to pursue their claims vis--vis
states at the international level. To the extent the ICJ concluded in the Reparation Case that
the ability to act as a person is the principal determinant of personhood status, the same
conclusion can even more readily be drawn with respect to corporations and other inves-
tors under the international investment regime.
Whether or not investors are seen as international legal persons, there is little doubt
that, as Tillmann Braun has argued, the change from diplomatic espousal of aliens claims
to todays investor-state dispute settlement is a significant paradigm shift.56 In the days of
espousal, harms to the rights of aliens, including alien investors, were treated as harms to
their nation states. Consistent with the idea that such harms constituted an injury to the
dignity of the state, the home state of the alien, not the alien itself, was given the right to
make a claim against the host state. Whether to bring such a claim was totally at the discre-
tion of the host state; the alien was not entitled to protection. Such claims were nonethe-
less conditioned on exhaustion of local remedies. In addition, the home state was entitled
to reject, modify or settle its nationals claim, including by entering into lump sum inter-
state agreements whereby the injured nationals claim could be reduced to a pittance. In

52. For a critical view of the resulting global administrative law that is produced in the course of inves-
tor-state arbitrations, see Gus Van Harten & Martin Loughlin, Investment Treaty Arbitration as a Spe-
cies of Global Administrative Law, 17 EUR. J. INTL L. 121 (2006); see also Benedict Kingsbury & Stephan
Schill, Investor-State Arbitration as Governance: Fair and Equitable Treatment, Proportionality, and the
Emerging Global Administrative Law, in EL NUEVO DERECHO ADMINISTRATIVO GLOBAL EN AMRICA LATINA
(2009), available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1466980.
53. Reparation Case, supra note 1.
54. See, e.g., U.N. Charter art. 43, 3; U.N. Charter art. 63; U.N. Charter art. 75.
55. For an introduction to umbrella clauses, see, e.g., RUDOLF DOLZER & CHRISTOPH SCHREUER, PRINCIPLES
OF INTERNATIONAL INVESTMENT LAW 15362 (2008). Even with respect to BITs and FTAs that lack um-
brella clauses, comparable elevations of investor-state contracts might be achieved through other in-
vestor guarantees, such as their typical provision assuring fair and equitable treatment. See id. at
14042.
56. Tillmann Rudolf Braun, Globalization-Fueled Innovation: The Investor as Subject of International Law
(forthcoming) (draft paper on file with author).

12
.

Are Corporations Subjects of International Law?

any case, even if the espousing state received compensation, it was under no duty to reim-
burse its injured national; it was, after all, the states claim, not the investors claim.57 An-
other obvious consequence was that the prospects for an injured corporations claim to be
pursued internationally turned on the willingness of its state of incorporation to do so; nei-
ther that companys shareholders nor those who had invested in a company registered in
the host state enjoyed any distinct protection.58
BITs and FTAs conferring of rights to investors to bring their own claims against host
states overturned every one of these aspects of espousal. Commentators have described
the significance of the change in different ways: as privatization, individualization, or
humanization.59 For some the change from espousal to investor-state arbitration has
meant that the underlying disputes have been depoliticized or juridified; others consid-
er the change to be so fundamental as to imply the constitutionalization of this area of the
law.60 Most commonly, commentators have suggested that BITs and FTAs have trans-
formed investors into empowered third party beneficiaries of treaties who are free to ig-
nore the domestic jurisdiction of the courts in which they operate and are no longer de-
pendent on their home states to assert their rights.61 Some scholars and judicial or arbitral
decisions have suggested that BIT and FTA claims vindicate the investors own rights ra-
ther than those of its nation state.62 This is one possible implication of the fact that under
the ICSID Convention states are barred from extending diplomatic protection once their

57. Id.
58. See, e.g., Barcelona Traction, Light and Power Co. Ltd. (Belg. v. Spain), 1970 I.C.J. 3, No. 47, at 37 (Feb.
5) [hereinafter Barcelona Traction Case].
59. See generally Zachary Douglas, The Hybrid Foundations of Investment Treaty Arbitration, 74 Y.B. INTL
L. 151 (2003).
60. On the constitutionalization of international investment law, see DAVID SCHNEIDERMAN,
CONSTITUTIONALIZING ECONOMIC GLOBALIZATION: INVESTMENT RULES AND DEMOCRACYS PROMISE (2008).
61. See, e.g., Douglas, supra note 59. BITs, like post-WWII FCNs, also overcome the hurdle imposed by the
rule in Barcelona Traction, Light and Power Co. Ltd., 1970 I.C.J. 3, which severely restricted the states
that could present international claims on behalf of those corporations that were controlled by their
own nationals.
62. Thus, Braun writes,
insofar as modern bilateral investment treaties assure investors substantive rights along with asso-
ciated formal enforcement procedures, they contribute to a fundamental change in international
lawthe individual or legal person in private law is assigned individual rights through a treaty in
international law and this is upgraded to the status of a partial subject of international law.
Tillman Rudolf Braun, Globalization: The Driving Force in International Investment Law, in THE
BACKLASH AGAINST INVESTMENT ARBITRATION 491506 (Michael Waibel et al. eds. 2010). See also Jan
Paulsson, Arbitration without Privity, 10 ICSID REV. FOREIGN INV. L.J. 232, 256 (1995); Thomas Walde,
Investment Arbitration under the Energy Charter Treaty: An Overview of Key Issues, 1 TRANSNATL
DISPUTE MGMT. (2004), http://www.transnational-dispute-
management.com/samples/freearticles/tv1-2-article224b.htm; Occidental Exploration and Produc-
tion Co. v. Republic of Ecuador, [2005] EWCA (Civ) 1116, [20] (Eng.); Societe Genereale de Surveil-
lance S.A. v. Republic of the Phil., ICSID Case No. ARB/02/6, Separate Decl. of Arbitrator Crivellaro of
Jan. 29, 2004, available at
http://icsid.worldbank.org/ICSID/FrontServlet?requestType=CasesRH&actionVal=showDoc&docId=
DC658_En&caseId=C6. But see The Loewen Group Inc. (Can.) v. U.S., ICSID Case No. ARB(AF)/98/3
(NAFTA Chap. 11 Arb. Trib/U.N. Commn on Internatl Trade Law [UNCITRAL]), Award on Merits of
June 26, 2003, 233 [hereinafter Loewen] (suggesting the NAFTA replaced states traditional power
to take international measures for wrongs done to their nationals by an ad hoc definition of certain
kinds of wrong, coupled with specialist means of compensation having nothing in common with pri-
vate arbitral remedies for commercial wrongs).

13
.

9 SANTA CLARA JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL LAW 1 (2011)

nationals have exercised their right to submit a dispute to ICSID and that an investor and
the respondent state are accorded equal status in that forum.63 As Braun points out, under
investor-state dispute settlement, states are no longer the only guarantors responsible for
law and order or, in other words, an international rule of law. 64
One of the general rationales offered for establishing this innovative international re-
gime is precisely that suggested by the majority in Citizens United: Corporations have a le-
gitimate role to play in constructing the rule of law and democratic society and their rights
as persons should be respected no less than others. The investment regime just takes this
rationale one step further to argue that foreign businesses should be able to bring interna-
tional claims against the home states in which they operate. Although the creators of the
investment regime extend their view of the polity to foreign corporationsunlike the ma-
jority in Citizens Unitedtheir logic for doing so adheres closely to the Courts reasoning.
The Citizens United majority draws connections among all groupings of persons and corpo-
rations. Similarly, defenders of the investment regime point out that to the extent BITs and
FTAs apply to individual investors and shareholders, the holder of these treaty rights may
be as much a human being as anyone who files a complaint before a U.N. human rights
treaty body or a regional human rights court. The principal difference between the majori-
ty in Citizens United and defenders of the investment regime, in short, is that the latter see
foreign and not just domestic corporations as people too.
In addition, some of the more specific rationales for establishing the investment regime
echo those of the majority in Citizens United. Sensitive to the fact that governments have
restricted the political participation rights of foreign corporations in their midst and can-
not be trusted to provide fair, impartial justice to foreign companies in their local court,
those who built the modern investment regime argue that foreign investors need to have
direct access to effective international dispute settlement to compensate for their political
disempowerment in the host states in which they operate. BITs and FTAs were established
on the premise that foreign corporations, which are disabled from participating equally in
the political process of the host states in which they operate, need more credible assuranc-
es of their rights than the potential intervention of their home states (through diplomatic
espousal).65 To those who negotiate BITs, diplomatic espousal and gunboat diplomacy are
simply not sufficient guaranteesnot in the age of globalization when neither is palatable
to governments. Since foreign companies cannot vote or, in most places, exercise their po-
litical speech rights and cannot always count on their own politically motivated govern-
ments to espouse their claims, they need to be able to bring direct claims against host
states that fail to treat them or their property fairly and equitablyno less than the U.N.

63. See Convention on the Settlement of Investment Disputes between States and Nationals of Other
States (ICSID Convention), Mar. 18, 1965, 575 U.N.T.S. 159, reprinted in 4 I.L.M. 524.
64. Braun, supra note 56, at 44. Indeed, investor-state arbitrators appear to enjoy greater power than do
most national courts. This is true to the extent that, for example, such arbitrators need not fear any
plenary review authority, are not limited by national laws or even a national constitution, can opine
on even national security issues subject to none of the usual abstention doctrines that may restrict a
national court (such as the political question doctrine), and are not formally bound by prior rulings of
any court or arbitral body.
65. See, e.g., Douglas, supra note 59, at 182 (stating that the raison dtre of the investment regime is to
respond to the inadequacies of diplomatic protection).

14
.

Are Corporations Subjects of International Law?

did in the Reparation Case that discovered the U.N.s personhood.66 The fact that most
states have not affirmed the political rights (whether in terms of corporate speech or oth-
erwise) of foreign corporations is, ironically enough, one of the justifications for the emer-
gence of BITs and FTAs.
Like the majority in Citizens United, advocates of the investment regime have argued
that advancing corporate rights is fully consistent with, and indeed essential to, advancing
democratic governance.67 Defenders of the investment regime appeal, in short, to the same
rule of law/human rights values that inspire ATCA plaintiffs. Thus, abundant literature
contends that the investment regime promotes: the national rule of law, human rights-
friendly views of fair process, and a virtuous circle in defense of both free markets and
human rights.

1. The National Rule of Law

According to its defenders, the international investment regime is built upon and pro-
motes common values of good governance increasingly expected of all rights-regarding
states.68 Some have put a more jurisprudential gloss on this contention. They have suggest-
ed that the investment regime, along with other contemporary human rights regimes,
elaborate a cluster of common normative principles inspired by Lou Fullers inner morali-
ty of law.69 It is pointed out that, like human rights regimes, BITs and FTAs require states
to (1) respect the legal values of stability, predictability and consistency, (2) protect legiti-
mate expectations, (3) grant procedural and administrative due process and avoid denials
of justice, (4) achieve transparency and (5) take only reasonable and proportionate ac-
tions.70
Like the majority in Citizens United, defenders of BITs and FTAs contend that when in-
vestors rights are protected, others rights tend to be as well. Versions of this argument
range from the contention that free markets and respect for human rights usually go in

66. Indeed, one of the rationales offered by the ICJ in the Reparation Case for why the U.N. could be as-
sumed to have the capacity to bring an international claim on behalf of agents of the U.N. (and not
merely claims for damages to the organization itself) was the courts expressed dissatisfaction with
diplomatic espousal as a vehicle to vindicate the U.N.s rights to have an independent civil service.
Reparation Case, supra note 1. Of course, as noted, comparable dissatisfaction with espousal was the
basis for the establishment of investor-state dispute settlement.
67. For criticism of this view, see Tom Ginsburg, International Substitutes for Domestic Institutions: Bilat-
eral Investment Treaties and Governance, 25 INTL REV. L. & ECON. 107 (2005). For some scholars, the
investment regime is also the harbinger of the democratization of international law. See, e.g., Braun,
supra note 62, at 13 (arguing that the investment regime signals the end of the monopolization of
law by the state and the dawning of a much more inclusive and broader notion of public interna-
tional law in which a reasonable balance exists between the rights of states and respect for the indi-
vidual).
68. See, e.g., Charles H. Brower, II, Corporations as Plaintiffs Under International Law: The Quest for Narra-
tives about Investment Treaties, 9 SANTA CLARA J. INTL L 179 (2011).
69. See Kingsbury & Schill, supra note 52.
70. Id. Given the fact that investor-state arbitrators have sometimes rejected investor claims where there
is a serious allegation of corruption, finding that such acts violate international public policy or are
not protectable investment made in accordance with national law, the investment regime, along
with sanctions imposed by entities such as the World Bank, might be seen as part of a interlocking set
of global norms to sanction corporate corruption. For an example, see PAGBAM, Siemens Withdraws
ICSID Claim Against Argentina, ARB. NEWS, Oct. 6, 2009, at 12, available at
http://www.um.edu.uy/_upload/_pdf_titular/web_titular_66_ArbitrationNewsletterPAGBAM.pdf.

15
.

9 SANTA CLARA JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL LAW 1 (2011)

tandem to more specific (if controverted) contentions about the rule of law effects of in-
vestment treaties. Some argue that, for example, the implementation of investment treaty
protections into local law leads to improvements in the functioning and independence of
local courts, to the benefit of domestic investors as well as all citizens. It is postulated that
investment treaties provide incentives for governments to improve the national rule of law
generally, if nothing else to avoid instances where foreign investors have cause to file in-
ternational complaints. Defenders of the investment regime also contend that a govern-
ment that is capable of violating its word to foreign investorsand breach its solemn
promises to themis capable of doing the same to its own citizens.71

2. Fair process
It is argued that to the extent investor-state arbitrators elaborate concepts such as fair
and equitable treatment (FET), they are engaging in the same enterprise as regional hu-
man rights courts that formulate ever more detailed conceptions of what international
due process requires, including clarification of what the right to be heard means. Con-
sider an investor-state tribunals now oft-cited standard for what FET requires of states.
According to TECMED v. Mexico, FET requires a state
to provide to international investments treatment that does not affect the basic expectations that
were taken into account by the foreign investor to make the investment. The foreign investor ex-
pects the host State to act in a consistent manner, free from ambiguity and totally transparently in
its relations with the foreign investor, so that it may know beforehand any and all rules and regula-
tions that will govern its investments, as well as the goals of the relevant policies and administrative
practices or directives, to be able to plan its investment and comply with such regulations. . . . The
foreign investor also expects the host State to act consistently, i.e. without arbitrarily revoking any
pre-existing decisions or permits issued by the state that were relied upon by the investor to assume
its commitments as well as to plan and launch its commercial and business activities.72

TECMIDs expectations for government action could easily be applied by human rights
advocates in non-investor settings.

3. The Virtuous Circle

Like the majority in Citizens United (which puts the free expression rights of corpora-
tions and real persons on the same plane and suggests that free speech rights of all are en-
hanced through corporate speech), comparable positive synergies between corporate
rights and human rights are asserted on behalf of the investment regime.73 Proponents of

71. This contention is all the more plausible to the extent investor-state contracts are internationalized
(as they arguably are under the umbrella clauses of BITs) such that pacta sunt servanda is seen as ap-
plicable to them as well as to interstate pacts. For a survey of arbitral decisions enforcing investor
contracts with host states even before the age of BITs, see Jason Webb Yackee, Pacta Sunt Servanda
and State Promises to Foreign Investors Before Bilateral Investment Treaties: Myth and Reality, 32
FORDHAM INTL L.J. 1550 (2009).
72. Tecnicas Medioambientales TECMED S.A. v. Estados Unidos Mexicanos, ICSID Case No. ARB(AF)/00/2
(NAFTA Chap. 11 Arb. Trib.), Award of Mar. 29, 2003, reprinted in 43 I.L.M. 133, 173 (interpreting the
FET standard from a BIT between Mexico and Spain).
73. See, e.g., Brower, supra note 68, at 198 (noting the discernible shared emphasis in both the human
rights and investment regimes on the creation of zones of autonomy or freedom from governmental
intervention).

16
.

Are Corporations Subjects of International Law?

the investment regime note the potential for overlap between the substantive rights given
investors under investment agreements and those accorded to individuals under human
rights law. Like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the European Convention
on Human Rights, BITs and FTAs protect property rights no less than rights to due process.
The investment regime is similarly grounded in hoary doctrines of state responsibility to
aliens, including the international minimum standard and the principles of denial of justice
and full protection and security. It too seeks non-discriminatory and non-arbitrary treat-
ment by government, equal access to national courts, and the vindication of settled expec-
tations for its persons.
For supporters of the investment regime all of this demonstrates that free markets and
human rights historically go together and are part of a virtuous circle. Like Justice Kennedy
in defense of the rights of Citizens United, defenders of BITs and FTAs point out that in-
vestment treaty guarantees accrue not only to the wealthy or the powerful but extend to
small businesses as well and, depending on the text of a particular BIT, may include non-
profits. They point out that investment treaties may benefit Amnesty International, for ex-
ample, when it is threatened by the trend in some authoritarian regimes to regulate it (or
other troublesome NGOs) out of existence. It is suggested that progressive environmental,
labor rights, and human rights NGOs all may find investor-state remedies of use.
Also like the majority in Citizens United (who invoke the right of listeners to be enlight-
ened by corporate speech), defenders of the investment regime remind their critics that
investor protections may encompass traditional human rights. They point out that some
investor-state claims, such as those involving allegations of government harassment of
employees or the kidnapping of family members of the owner of a foreign business, could
easily have been recast as human rights claims if they had been asserted elsewhere.74 As
Lee Bollingers recent book touting the benefits of global free speech notes, this may also
be the case when the foreign investor is a publisher or broadcaster attempting to remain in
business despite government efforts to silence its views.75 In cases involving media inves-
tors, investor rights are free speech rights. And like the majority in Citizens United who in-
voke the plight of owners of small business, BIT defenders invoke the rights of majority or
minority shareholders who may be injured in their personal capacity and who now may be
entitled to bring claims (as under the NAFTA), such as Canadian claimant Raymond Loe-
wen who faced an allegedly discriminatory jury in Mississippi.76 In such ways the rights to
corporate speech and the rights of foreign investors are assimilated and humanized.

B. Dissenting from Citizens United and the Investment Regime

As might be expected, the dissenters arguments in Citizens United are reminiscent of
those made by the critics of the international investment regime. The essence of the dis-

74. See, e.g., id. at 199201 (discussing Desert Line Projects v. Yemen).
75. LEE C. BOLLINGER, UNINHIBITED, ROBUST, AND WIDE-OPEN: A FREE PRESS FOR A NEW CENTURY 15051
(2010).
76. See Loewen, supra note 62. Of course, this highlights the contrast with the limits imposed under Bar-
celona Traction, Barcelona Traction Case, supra note 58, where the underlying rights were seen only
in terms of the rights of states and not those of natural persons (or shareholders).

17
.

9 SANTA CLARA JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL LAW 1 (2011)

senters views was precisely that corporations were not like persons. According to Justice
Stevens,
[i]n the context of election to public office, the distinction between corporate and human speakers is
significant. Although they make enormous contributions to our society, our corporations are not ac-
tually members of it. They cannot vote or run for office. Because they may be managed and con-
trolled by nonresidents, their interests may conflict in fundamental respects with the interests of el-
igible voters. The financial resources, legal structure, and instrumental orientation of corporations
raise legitimate concerns about their role in the electoral process. Our lawmakers have a compelling
constitutional basis, if not also a democratic duty, to take measures designed to guard against the
potentially deleterious effects of corporate spending in local and national races.77

To the same end, Justice Stevens pointed out that U.S. laws, including free speech laws,
draw many distinctions based on the type of person, from those of students to members
of the Armed Forces to a companys own employees.78 Stevens argued that limits on corpo-
rate speech are less worrisome because the speaker is not a natural person or a member of
a political community;79 that the absence of such limits accord undue influence to corpo-
rate views;80 that corporate speech is readily distinguishable from individual speech as
persons generally do not form corporations to facilitate expressive or associational ends;81
and that those who drafted the Bill of Rights conceptualized speech in individualist
terms.82 Stevens also turned the majoritys attempt to distinguish foreign corporations
against it. The Court all but confesses that a categorical approach to speaker identity is un-
tenable, he writes,
when it acknowledges that Congress might be allowed to take measures aimed at preventing for-
eign individuals or associations from influencing our Nations political process. [Quoting the maj.
opn. at 4647.] . . . The notion that Congress might lack the authority to distinguish foreigners from
citizens in the regulation of electioneering would certainly have surprised the Framers, whose ob-
session with foreign influence derived from a fear that foreign powers and individuals had no basic
investment in the well-being of the country.83

Critics of the investment regime, particularly human rights advocates, would find Justice
Stevens arguments congenial. They also find the suggested analogy between investment
and human rights treaties offensive precisely because they do not see how corporate inter-
ests are, in any way, equivalent or comparable to the rights of natural persons.84 Like the
dissenters in Citizens United, they also find the comparisons between corporations and real
human beings absurd. Like the dissenters, the advocates are not convinced that either
good governance or democracy is enhanced when we privilege corporate interests or
equate them with human interests. Like the dissenters, the advocates find it hard to under-
stand the argument that corporate interests are now so disempowered that they need

77. Citizens United v. FEC, --- U.S. ---, 130 S.Ct. 876, 930 (2010) (Stevens, J., dissenting).
78. Id. at 945.
79. Id. at 930.
80. Id. at 963 & n.64.
81. Id. at 950.
82. Id. at 948.
83. Citizens United v. FEC, --- U.S. ---, 130 S.Ct. 876, 948 n.51 (2010) (Stevens, J., dissenting). Justice Ste-
vens also quotes Professor Teachouts observations that a corporation might be analogized to a for-
eign power inasmuch as its legal loyalties necessarily exclude patriotism. Id.
84. See, e.g., Brower, supra note 68, at 20204 (noting the differences between most human rights claim-
ants and investor-state claimants).

18
.

Are Corporations Subjects of International Law?

greater rights or that everyone is better off when such greater rights are accorded.85
Justice Stevens ends his dissent in Citizens United with the following memorable line:
While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would
have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.86 Human rights
critics of the investment regime would find his suggestion of misplaced priorities quite apt.
The Canadian based International Institute for Sustainable Development, for example, ad-
vocates strongly that the investment regime needs to be recalibrated to strike a better bal-
ance between corporate power and the power of the state to regulate in the wider public
interest.87 The contention that the investment regime privileges one over-privileged set of
juridical entities to the detriment of the rights owed by all states to natural persons within
their jurisdictions underlies all the other criticisms of the regime. Five of these criticisms
can be briefly summarized.

1. Lack of Equal Access to the International Rule of Law

For countries such as the United States that have not adhered to any human rights trea-
ty that entails a binding pre-commitment to binding dispute settlement (such as the juris-
diction of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights), investment treaties, which permit
foreign investors direct access to international arbitration, present an embarrassing lack of
parity. At the same time, investor-state arbitrations, as under the NAFTA, are limited to ex-
amining foreign investors rights and are not forums to adjudicate all the harms that a for-
eign investor might inflict on local populations, local consumers, or locally hired employ-
ees. A nation that permits itself and its laws to be subject to supranational adjudicative
review when it comes to how it treats foreign investors but does not permit such inde-
pendent impartial review with respect to its laws that may harm the human rights of oth-
ers appears to say to the world that it values foreign investors property rights more than it
does any other civil, political, economic or social rights. The response that the United States
has typically giventhat its investors abroad need supranational scrutiny in order to se-
cure their rights despite biased local courts but that no one (investor or natural person)
needs such assurances when they enter rule of law states such as the United Statesno
longer satisfies critics of investment treaties such as the NAFTAs Chapter Eleven.88 This is
not a convincing answer in a world where the United States is the third leading respondent
state in terms of investor-state claims against it and where much of the world has real rea-

85. Indeed, there is a long line of critical literature addressing the inordinate power deployed by foreign
corporations, including within the United States, despite the formal limits imposed on their political
participation, such as restrictions on lobbying. See, most famously, RAYMOND VERNON, SOVEREIGNTY AT
BAY: THE MULTINATIONAL SPREAD OF U.S. ENTERPRISES (1971).
86. Citizens United, 130 S.Ct. at 979 (Stevens, J., dissenting).
87. See, e.g., HOWARD MANN ET AL., INTL INST. FOR SUSTAINABLE DEV., IISD MODEL INTERNATIONAL AGREEMENT
FOR INVESTMENT FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT (2005),
http://www.iisd.org/pdf/2005/investment_model_int_handbook.pdf.
88. Of course, agreements such as the NAFTA, which accord reciprocal rights to investors from all three
NAFTA parties to bring claims against any NAFTA party, contradict the contention that the United
States has uniformly dismissed the need for supranational scrutiny over its own actions. If Canadian
investors can challenge the actions of U.S. courts, federal and state regulations or federal and state
laws under the NAFTA, why shouldnt a Canadian national who is not an investor be able to do the
same before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights?

19
.

9 SANTA CLARA JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL LAW 1 (2011)

sons to doubt whether the United States rule of law really protects all natural persons,
from unlawful belligerents caught up in our war on terror to non-U.S. citizens em-
broiled in our Kafkaesque immigration procedures.89 Much of the world thinks of the Unit-
ed States as no better than Europe when it comes to such matters, but, whereas the Euro-
peans have accepted supranational scrutiny on behalf of the rights of both foreign
investors (as under their BITs and the Energy Charter Treaty) and natural persons (as un-
der the European Convention on Human Rights), the United States has failed to equalize its
exposure to international review.
The lack of equal access to an international remedy for human rights violations is prob-
lematic for those who would equate corporations with natural persons, for both political
and legal reasons. This is especially the case when, for example, a foreign investor brings a
claim against a state and that state cannot assert, even as a counterclaim before the same
arbitral body, that the foreign investor has violated local laws relating to human rights, la-
bor rights or the protection of the environment.90 For many critics of the investment re-
gime it is not an answer that local courts remain available to adjudicate such complaints.
Local courts that are insufficient to protect the rights of foreign investors cannot be count-
ed on to protect these other common values of the international (and local) community.

2. Lack of Equal Remedies

Even with respect to states that otherwise submit to international adjudication with re-
spect to human rights and are parties to, for example, the Inter-American or European
Conventions of Human Rights, there are awkward inequities with respect to the remedies
available to foreign investors as compared to other rights-holders. While violations of hu-
man rights under human rights conventions are generally subject to exhaustion of local
remedies, foreign investors under some BITs or FTAs, including those negotiated by the
United States, do not face such a hurdle.91 Further, investors are privileged in another
sense: Unlike human rights claimants, investors get to appoint one of their own judges to
decide their arbitral claim.92
In addition, while international human rights remedies (including those before regional
human rights courts) tend to focus on preventing future harm by forcing the state to re-
move laws that offend human rights, the remedies given to foreign investors are not so lim-
ited. Investor-state awards are not merely intended to get states to remove offending laws
prospectively; they give retrospective relief which may involve multimillion dollar damage
awards, often far in excess to any given by international courts even with respect to those

89. See, e.g., DAVID COLE, ENEMY ALIENS: DOUBLE STANDARDS AND CONSTITUTIONAL FREEDOMS IN THE WAR ON
TERRORISM (2003).
90. For criticisms of the investment regime along these lines, see, e.g., Peter Muchlinski, Trends in Inter-
national Investment Agreements: Balancing Investor rights and the Right to Regulate, in 20082009
Y.B. INTL INV. L. & POLY 35 (Karl P. Sauvant ed., 2009).
91. See, e.g., Jacomijn J.Van Haersolte-Van Hof & Anne K. Hoffman, The Relationship Between International
Tribunals and Domestic Courts, in THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF INTERNATIONAL INVESTMENT LAW, supra
note 50, at 962, 100001.
92. Brower, supra note 68, at 20304. As Brower notes, investment treaties provide powerful claimants
with powerful remedies. Id. at 204; see also Gus Van Harten & Martin Loughlin, Investment Treaty Ar-
bitration as a Species of Global Administrative Law, 17 EUR. J. INTL L. 121 (2006).

20
.

Are Corporations Subjects of International Law?

who have suffered the most grievous harms to their human rights.93 Furthermore, unlike
global human rights regimes that are only subject to mobilization of shame enforcement
techniques (such as the issuance of non-binding opinions by U.N. human rights treaty bod-
ies), investor-state arbitral awards are legally binding and generally result in compliance.94

3. Threats to Human Rights Remedies

A third type of concern arises from the prospect that some investment treaties may pre-
clude states that are hosts to foreign investment from taking remedial measures to ad-
vance widely accepted human rights values. Government affirmative action type programs
that, for example, require all employers to prefer certain minorities in hiring may be chal-
lenged as a violation of BITs or FTAs national treatment provisions. Indeed, the threat
posed to South Africas Black Economic Empowerment Act has led that state to modify its
more recent BITs to expressly permit such actions.95 Of course, some international treaties,
such as the Convention Eliminating All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW),
anticipate that such affirmative action programs may not only be legal but may be required
to promote equality.96 Other governmental measures intended to correct inequities in in-
come or job distribution, such as requirements on foreign investors to hire local workers,
locate in disadvantaged regions, or transfer advanced technology, might also be deemed
inconsistent with investment treaty prohibitions on performance requirements or bans on
discriminatory treatment.97

4. Alleged Conflicts with Other Fundamental Rights

To the extent BITs and FTAs protect the rights of foreign investors who have taken over
formerly government-owned utilities and are now supplying basic commodities such as
water or gas to large portions of a nations citizens, protecting the rights of such privatized

93. Compare GUS VAN HARTEN, INVESTMENT TREATY ARBITRATION AND PUBLIC LAW (2007) (suggesting that
investor-state arbitrations generally result in multimillion dollar awards and contending that that
this demonstrates the pro-investor bias of its arbitrators), with Susan D. Franck, Empirically Evaluat-
ing Claims about Investment Treaty Arbitration, 80 N.C. L. REV. 1 (2007) (concluding, after an empirical
survey, that most of the publicly available arbitral awards result in either a win for the respondent
state or relatively small awards for the investor and suggesting that the evidence does not support a
pro-investor bias).
94. Argentinas recent failure to pay a number of outstanding investor-state awards that have been is-
sued against it is the outlier. Even in that situation, it is not clear how long Argentina will be able to
defy compliance with the international arbitration system. The duty to pay commercial or investor-
state awards under treaties such as ICSID or the New York Convention on the Enforcement of Arbitral
Awards is subject to a number of formal and informal enforcement tools. Among the most effective is
the market for capital. Commercial risk insurers and global suppliers of capitalfrom the Interna-
tional Monetary Fund to regional development banks to other foreign investors contemplating en-
tryare likely to extract a serious economic penalty over time on states that renege on their treaty
commitments to comply with arbitral awards.
95. See, e.g., Luke Eric Peterson, South Africas Bilateral Investment Treaties, OCCASIONAL PAPERS, Nov.
2006, available at http://library.fes.de/pdf-files/iez/global/04137-20080708.pdf; see also LUKE ERIC
PETERSON, HUMAN RIGHTS AND BILATERAL INVESTMENT TREATIES 13 (Rights & Democracy 2009), available
at http://www.dd-rd.ca/site/_PDF/publications/globalization/HIRA-volume3-ENG.pdf.
96. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women art. 4, Dec. 18, 1979,
1249 U.N.T.S. 13.
97. See, e.g., North American Free Trade Agreement [NAFTA] art. 1106, Dec. 817, 1992, 31 U.S.T. 4919,
reprinted in 32 I.L.M. 605 (1993) (performance requirements).

21
.

9 SANTA CLARA JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL LAW 1 (2011)

utilities may conflict with evolving affirmative international obligations to respect, protect
and fulfill under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights
(ICESCR).98 Thus, a number of BIT claims involving privatized utilities have drawn consid-
erable criticisms from civil society and are seen as posing problematic conflicts between
investors treaty rights and emerging international law rights with respect to access to wa-
ter, food, or health.99

5. Alleged Conflicts with the Residual Sovereign Right to Regulate

As the preceding suggests, investment treaties and their interpretations by arbitrators
are seen as imposing constraints on a nations general ability to regulate in the public in-
terest. To the extent, for example, that investor guarantees ensuring fair and equitable
treatment (FET) are interpreted broadlyas under the interpretation of that right given
in TECMIDthe result may hinder the ability of governments to respond to the needs of
their citizenry in ways that are comparable to those imposed under controversial stabiliza-
tion clauses contained in imbalanced investor-state contracts.100 To the extent a standard
such as that in TECMID protects foreign investors from regulations that change over time
because of changing information about health risks or changes in a governments capabili-
ties or willingness to respond to such concerns, such protections of investors legitimate
expectations are controversial. Investment treaties are particularly likely to be seen as un-
just to the extent that they prevent governments from taking any of a number of actions (to
regulate the environment, protect against child labor, insure labor rights, and so on) that
are increasingly expected of all governments and may even be required by other interna-
tional legal regimes.101 Even to the extent such conflicts between international obligations
do not occur, poorer states may find the high expectations for the transparency and pre-
dictability of government action implicit in the TECMID standard impossibly difficult to
satisfy.

98. See, e.g., ECOSOC, Substantive Issues Arising in the Implementation of the International Covenant on
Economic, Social and Cultural Rights: General Comment 12, U.N. Doc. E/C.12/1999/5 (May 12, 1999)
(discussing states duties to respect, protect and fulfill with respect to the right to food).
99. See, e.g., Aguas del Tunari S.A. v. Bolivia, ICSID Case No. ARB/02/03, Petition of La coordinadora Para
La Defensa Del Agua y Vida et al. of Aug. 29, 2002, available at
http://www.earthjustice.org/library/legal_docs/Bechtel.pdf. For a survey of this and other human
rights concerns involving the investment regime, see, e.g., Peterson, supra note 95.
100. For a case study involving stabilization clauses, see, e.g., Paul Kuruk, Renegotiating Transnational In-
vestment Agreements: Lessons for Developing Countries from the Ghana-Valco Experience, 13 MICH. J.
INTL L. 43 (199192). For a more recent survey of the continuing use of stabilization clauses, see An-
drea Shemberg, Stabilization Clauses and Human Rights (2003),
http://www.ifc.org/ifcext/sustainability.nsf/AttachmentsByTitle/p_StabilizationClausesandHumanR
ights/$FILE/Stabilization+Paper.pdf. Of course, such stabilization clauses may receive treaty protec-
tion under some BITs and FTAs umbrella clauses. See generally CAMPBELL MCLACHLAN, LAURENCE
SHORE & MATTHEW WEINGER, INTERNATIONAL ARBITRATION 10917 (2007).
101. See, e.g., Brower, supra note 68, at 209.

22
.

Are Corporations Subjects of International Law?

III. The Risks of Corporate Personhood

Human rights advocates have paid little attention to the fundamental contradictions of
insisting that corporations are international legal persons or subjects for purposes of
imposing obligations on them (as in ATCA litigation) and resisting that outcome when it
comes to finding international rights for corporations (as in the investment regime). The
principal lesson to take from decisions like Citizens United is simple: Beware the conse-
quences of equating corporations to persons.102
The following are some of the possible implications within the investment regime of
seeing corporations as international legal persons or subjects.

A. Espousal or New Dispute Settlement Mechanism?

If foreign businesses are, within the context of BITs and FTAs, really subjects of interna-
tional law because they are given the ability to make claims directly against host states, ar-
guably the investment regime is not just a particularized application of traditional espousal
practice. If, as some scholars and arbitral decisions are beginning to suggest,103 investor-
state arbitration is a wholly new mechanism designed to permit a new subject of interna-
tional law to have equal standing alongside an old (state) subject of international law, a
number of legal consequences could emerge. If the right of this new subject of international
law is in no sense derivative of the right of its home state (as it was under espousal prac-
tice) it could follow that home states no longer retain the right to waive the right of their
investors to file a claim. Alternatively, the personhood of investors could mean that only
they get to waive their rights if they so choose, even if in a particular instance their home
states wants to press a claim in order to establish a beneficial precedent or embarrass a ri-
val government. Personhood could also encourage arbitrators to be more willing to find
implicit limits on whether or when state parties to investment agreements (or to treaties
facilitating investor-state arbitration such as the ICSID Convention) can terminate or re-
strict their previous treaty commitments, at least with respect to investors who have ac-
quired rights under these treaties. While under traditional international law, the state par-
ties to a bilateral treaty are usually free to change their minds through formal amendment
or even mutual subsequent practice, such rules might be seen to apply only with respect to
the state parties obligations inter se, but not with respect to the obligations of another sub-
ject of international law, namely these treaties third party beneficiaries.104 Moreover, if

102. It is not as if todays ATCA litigants have not been given fair warning. From Wolfgang Friedman to
Andrew Clapham, a number of international lawyers have reiterated the risks of seeing corporations
as subjects of international law over the years. Thus, Friedman was prescient when he reminded us,
long ago, that [i]t would be as dangerous to uncritically accord subjectivity to the private corporation
in international law as it would be to deny its factual participation in the evolution of public interna-
tional law. Duruigbo, supra note 17, at 181; see also CLAPHAM, supra note 22, at 7880.
103. See supra note 62.
104. Compare Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties art. 39, May 23, 1969, 1155 U.N.T.S. 331, reprinted
in 8 I.L.M. 679 (enabling parties to amend a treaty among themselves), with art. 35 (precluding trea-
ties from obligating third parties unless those parties consent).

23
.

9 SANTA CLARA JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL LAW 1 (2011)

corporate personhood is taken seriously, this could have an impact on whether arbitrators
are likely to accept the state parties interpretations of their treaties, even when the in-
vestment treaty authorizes such joint interpretations (as does the NAFTA).105 Finally, a
finding of corporate personhood might also impose implicit limits on the scope or effect of
the state-to-state dispute settlement provisions that are typically found in most investment
treaties, alongside investor-state arbitration provisions. It could mean, for example, that
despite these state-to-state dispute settlement provisions, interstate arbitral decisions
could not lead to binding interpretations of the underlying treaty at odds with the rights of
these treaties third party (investor) beneficiaries.
As these questions suggest, if corporate investors are seen as the recipients of direct
rights and obligations under international law, at least some of favored routes for re-
calibrating BITs and FTAs that states are now exercising or contemplating may prove
more difficult. Perhaps arbitrators would be less inclined to permit states, such as Bolivia,
Ecuador or Venezuela, to terminate their BITs or curtail their acceptance of ICSID arbitra-
tion to the extent such exit threatens the existing rights of the corporate third par-
ty/subjects of these treaties.
If corporate investors are really subjects of international law, the implications for other
features of investor-state dispute settlement are unclear. Would states alone remain free to
change the rules of the investment arbitration game to force greater transparency or to re-
quire acceptance of NGO amicus briefs, even when this is resisted in a particular case by
this new subject of international law?106 Braun, a proponent of personhood for investors
under BITs and FTAs, suggests that states will nonetheless always remain in firm control of
these treaties and investor-state dispute settlements,107 but it is not clear whether arbitra-
tors will agree with himnot if investors rights are no longer seen as derived from and
dependent upon state consent. It is impossible to predict with confidence what conse-
quences will ensue if investors come to be seen as equal stakeholders alongside states in
the international investment regime.

B. Personhood and the Residual Rules of International Law

Debates are already emerging among scholars and arbitral panels concerning another
contested question: To what extent are the underlying rules of customary international
law, which now often apply as valuable gap-fillers unless expressly ousted by the terms of
a treaty, affected by investor personhood? To what extent do the underlying Articles of
State Responsibility, containing guidance on everything from attribution to remedy to de-

105. See NAFTA, supra note 97, art. 1131, 2 (permitting the NAFTA parties to issue binding interpreta-
tions of their agreement). But see Pope & Talbot v. Can. (NAFTA Chap. 11 Arb. Trib/UNCITRAL),
Award in Respect of Damages of May 31, 2002, 2342, reprinted in 41 I.L.M. 1347 (discussing
whether this provision could authorize the parties to issue what are in fact amendments and not
merely interpretations of their agreement).
106. See Methanex Corp. v. U.S., Decision of the Tribunal on Petitions from Third Persons to Intervene as
Amici Curiae, Jan. 15, 2001,
http://naftaclaims.com/Disputes/USA/Methanex/MethanexDecisionReAuthorityAmicus.pdf (decid-
ing to accept amicus in that case despite the opposition of Mexico).
107. Braun, supra note 56.

24
.

Are Corporations Subjects of International Law?

fenses, continue to apply?108 One can see two possible contrary arguments emerging from
the proposition that corporate investors are international legal persons.
On the one hand, to the extent corporations (or investors) are treated as distinct sub-
jects of international law, some would contend that the Articles of State Responsibility are
no longer relevant as these apply solely to the relationship of states inter se. Douglas ar-
gues, for example, it is manifest that a breach of a treaty obligation owed directly to an in-
vestor does not necessarily entail a liability on the inter-state plane governed by the sec-
ondary rules of state responsibility for international wrongs.109 Hints of such an approach
are appearing in decisions such as BG v. Argentina, where the arbitrators noted that per-
haps Argentina could not resort to the defense of necessity (codified in Article 25 of the
ILCs Articles of State Responsibility) because that defense could not be asserted against a
non-state party.110 Although BG ultimately found it unnecessary to decide that question,
that case suggests that subject-hood could prove to be a tremendous boon to investor
rights. If the dictum in BG is taken seriously, investor rights would receive greater protec-
tion than those of states inter se, an absurd but totally logical outcome if one believes that
customary law anticipates no other defenses as between obligations incurred between a
state and non-state subject of international law.111
On the other hand, some might conclude that, to the extent corporations are persons, it
is all the more justifiable to apply the rules that ordinarily apply to other international per-
sons under international law, including the Articles of State Responsibility, to the extent
these prove amenable to application.112 This is certainly suggested by some ATCA cases

108. See Report of the Intl Law Commn on the work of its fifty-third session (Apr. 23June 1 and July 2
Aug. 10, 2001), Draft Articles on Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts, U.N. Doc.
A/56/10 (Dec. 12, 2001), available at
http://untreaty.un.org/ilc/texts/instruments/english/commentaries/9_6_2001.pdf [hereinafter Ar-
ticles of State Responsibility].
109. Douglas, supra note 59, at 184. For these reasons, Douglas contends that investment treaties create an
independent sub-system of state responsibility. Id. at 185.
110. BG Group v. Argentina (UNCITRAL), Final Award of Dec. 24, 2007, at 408. See also Bundesverfas-
sungsgericht [BverfG], Decision of May 8, 2007, summarized in Stephan W. Schill, German Constitu-
tional Court rules on Necessity in Argentine Bondholder Case, ASIL Insight, July 31, 2007,
http://www.asil.org/insights070731.cfm (German court ruling that necessity was not available as a
defense to Argentina because no such defense was applicable as between a state and a private indi-
vidual).
111. Crawfords and Greenwoods respective expert opinions in Talisman, see supra note 2, also appear to
be based on the proposition that the residual rules of state responsibility do not apply with respect to
non-state entities.
112. For a comparable contention with respect to international organizations, see the discussion infra of
the ILCs proposed rules on IO responsibility. Some of the arbitral decisions rendered against Argen-
tina, such as CMS Gas Transmission Co. v. Argentina ((ICSID Case No. ARB/01/8), Award of May 12,
2005), Sempra Energy Intl v. Argentine Republic ((ICSID Case No. ARB/02/16), Award of Sept. 28,
2007), and Enron Corporation v. Argentine Republic ((ICSID Case No. ARB/01/3), Award of May 22,
2007), suggest a variant of this approach. In those cases, the tribunals suggested that investors were
owed the same consideration that states owe inter se, at least for purposes of the necessity defense.
Thus, in these three cases, the tribunals assumed that the defense of necessity, codified as article 25
of the ILCs Articles of State Responsibility, supra note 108, which requires consideration of the de-
fenses impact on other members of the international community, required consideration of the im-
pact of this defense on the rights owed under the BIT to the investor. LG&E Energy Corp. v. Argentine
Republic ((ICSID Case No. ARB/02/1), Award of July 25, 2007), however, resisted this re-
interpretation of article 25. For a discussion of these cases, see Jos E. Alvarez & Kathryn Khamsi, The
Argentine Crisis and Foreign Investors: A Glimpse into the Heart of the Investment Regime, in YEARBOOK

25
.

9 SANTA CLARA JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL LAW 1 (2011)

which have applied the Articles of State Responsibility rules concerning state attribution
by analogy to infer when, for example, a corporation can be said to be aiding or assisting
a state.113
Neither of these black/white outcomes dictated by a finding of person/subject-hood is
desirable. Deciding whether underlying rules of custom, including the matters dealt by the
Articles of State Responsibility, ought to be applicable in the investor-state context should
not be a question that turns on whether the investor is or is not an international legal per-
son and therefore can be analogized to a state. Determinations of what constitutes an in-
ternational legal person are, for reasons noted, hardly intellectually rigorous. Those who
rely on the circular reasoning involved in personhood determinations may find their con-
clusions challenged over time. Personhood may be a thin reed on which to rely for specific
conclusions about what corporate responsibility actually entails under customary interna-
tional law. In any case, such a top down approach to finding international corporate obliga-
tions is precisely the wrong way to figure out what obligations make sense or reflect what
the principal makers of international law, namely states, actually want. Most importantly,
such a top down approach loses sight of the ways that corporations are distinct from states
or natural persons. It makes it more difficult to contextualize corporate obligations in light
of these realities.114
A decision as to whether a corporation is aiding or assisting a state under the ATCA
ought not be resolved through a mechanical application of rules devised for resolving the
entirely different question of whether one government is aiding or assisting another, at
least not on the sole premise that both states and corporations are subjects of international
law. Guidance on such questions should be sought from the usual state practice/opinio juris
exercise or perhaps from examining general principles of law. In the absence of clear inter-
national law on point, it would be far better to examine what national laws provide with
respect to corporate responsibility in comparable instances.115 Those sources are more
likely to be attentive to the ways corporations are distinctive actors operating in distinctive
ways. Those sources are also more legitimate bases to establish corporate obligations pre-
cisely because stateswhich remain, after all, the most legitimate kind of law-makers
continue to be involved in determining their content. Drawing such conclusions from in-
ternational personhood, on the contrary, threatens to remove the element of state con-
trol from such important questions and may itself threaten the credibility of international
law itself, especially if states resist the outcome.116

OF INTERNATIONAL INVESTMENT LAW & POLICY 20082009, supra note 90, at 379.
113. See supra note 108, art. 16.
114. This is precisely the appeal of the protect-respect-remedy efforts of John Ruggie, as elaborated by
Backer. See Backer, supra note 19.
115. As is attempted in the Brief for Intl Law Professors as Amici Curiae Supporting Apellees, Balintulo et
al. v. Daimler AG (2d Cir. 2009) (No. 09-2778) [hereinafter Balintulo Amici Brief].
116. Cf. Carlos M. Vsquez, Direct vs. Indirect Obligations of Corporations Under International Law, 43
COLUM. J. TRANSNATL L. 927, 95058 (2005) (noting the possibility of such adverse outcomes should
obligations be directly imposed on corporations without the intervention of states). Interestingly,
Vsquez contends that it is conceptually plausible to ground primary liability for violations of the
primary rules of international law on corporate actors if these are violations of primary rules appli-
cable to individuals precisely because corporations are artificial persons comprising groups of nat-
ural persons. Id. at 944.

26
.

Are Corporations Subjects of International Law?

C. Personhood and the Rights at Stake: What Does Personhood Mean for
Investor and Human Rights?
The elevation of the rights holders in the investment regimefrom third party benefi-
ciaries of treaty rights ultimately under the control of states to full scale subjects of inter-
national lawmay affect the substance of the rights that are protected by this regime (and
possibly by other regimes). Consider the debate over the meaning of fair and equitable
treatment recently decided in the NAFTA Glamis case.117 In that case, the question was
whether the arbitrators would find, consistent with what was stated by the NAFTA parties
in their binding interpretation of their treaty, that the FET guarantee was indistinguishable
from the customary rules for the treatment of aliens. Prior NAFTA tribunals had suggested
that the FET guarantee in the NAFTA was not limited to such customary rules, or if so lim-
ited, that those customary rules had evolved in accordance with evolving notions of due
process.118 In Glamis, the tribunal limited its inquiry to the older cases that had been explic-
itly based on an application of the international minimum standard as applied to aliens. It
accordingly upheld a far more limited interpretation of what FET requires than that found
in, for example, TECMED. The Glamis tribunal found that FET was violated only by egre-
gious or shocking state conduct.119
Whether the result in Glamis is right or wrong is not my concern. My point is that seeing
investors or corporations as subjects or persons may play a subtle role in all-important
determinations of the scope and meaning of investor protections such as FET. Are inves-
tors merely aliens, that is, a special kind of invitee to a host state subject to a delimited
realm of protection, or are they persons who, like natural persons, ought to be entitled to
a wider panoply of protections under international human rights law?120 If investors are
seen as persons or subjects of international law, it may be easier to convince investor-state
arbitrators that the old rules applicable only to aliens under espousal are anachronistic
and irrelevant.121 This may encourage interpretations of FET that are closer to the pro-

117. Glamis Gold Ltd. v. U.S. (NAFTA Chap. 11 Arb. Trib/UNCITRAL), Award of June 8, 2009, available at
http://state.gov/documents/organization/125798.pdf; see also Brower, supra note 68.
118. See David A. Gantz, Pope & Talbot, Inc. v. Canada, 97 AM. J. INTL L. 937 (2003) (describing the Pope &
Talbot line of NAFTA decisions).
119. Glamis Gold Ltd. v. U.S. (NAFTA Chap. 11 Arb. Trib/UNCITRAL), Award of June 8, 2009, 609 (distin-
guishing TECMID). In doing so, Glamis recognized a schism in the meaning of the FET guarantee
among investment agreements. But see Jordan C. Kahn, Striking NAFTA Gold: Glamis Advances Inves-
tor-State Arbitration, 33 FORDHAM INTL L.J. 101 (2009) (contending that while Glamis purported to
apply a customary international law standard, it actually used U.S. takings jurisprudence to inform its
interpretation of the NAFTAs FET guarantee).
120. Rob Howse argues, for example, that Glamis ignored modern conceptions of customary law that, in his
view, encompass the contemporary jurisprudence of human rights tribunals. He contends that FET
should accordingly be seen in light of the accountability of public authorities urged by those who ana-
lyze global administrative law. He suggests that this more generous view of what FET requires is jus-
tified precisely because that right no longer is about, as it was in the days of espousal, protecting the
dignity of the state but is about protecting individual rights. To Howse, the meaning of FET should
be inspired by not only the universe of BITs but also the universe of human rights law in the broad-
est sense . . . it would arguably also be responsive to the obligations of the sate with respect to the
human rights of its own citizens[.] Robert Howse, CUSTOM IN INTERNATIONAL INVESTMENT LAW: GLAMIS
GOLD AND OTHER DEVELOPMENTS, New York University Investment Forum presentation notes (Feb. 8,
2010) (cited with permission of the author), http://www.iilj.org/research/documents/IF2010-2.pdf.
121. Perhaps predictably, the Dunoff, Ratner, and Wippman casebook suggests that the rules relating to

27
.

9 SANTA CLARA JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL LAW 1 (2011)

investor standard in TECMID than to those in Glamis.122

Equating corporate and natural persons could also encourage the transjudicial commu-
nications between international dispute settlers and among these and national courts that
many scholars and human rights advocates crave and praise.123 For some, the prospect that
investor-state arbitrators or WTO panelists will draw from the jurisprudence of regional
human rights courts suggests the welcome dawning of humanitys law, that is, progres-
sive jurisprudence that respects the dignity of the individual across the
trade/investment/human rights/international criminal divides.124 This may be overly san-
guine. Increased resort to human rights standards by investor-state arbitrators (or by WTO
adjudicators for that matter)125 may not be desirable from a human rights perspective. The
importation of human rights law into investor-state arbitration is, after all, most likely to
enhance the rights of the investornot humans rights as traditionally construed. This is
likely to be the case at least insofar as the jurisdiction of investor-state tribunals remains
restricted to reviewing the rights of the investor (and not the respondent states counter-
claims or those of natural persons injured by the investor).
Once a corporation is accepted as a person, it is more likely that the due process (and
possibly other guarantees) applied to other persons (as in human rights regimes) would be
seen as relevant and applicable within the investment regime. Depending on the context,
this could enhance the rights of investors vis--vis the host state. This is most evident con-
cerning the FET standard noted above but the same might be said of other BIT/FTA guar-
antees, such as the rights to full protection and security, non-arbitrary treatment, non-
discrimination, respect for all commitments made by a state (as under the typical um-
brella clause), or national treatment. While we know that what natural persons should be
entitled to expect in terms of full protection from a state and what businesses should be
entitled to expect differ in reality (and perhaps morally), such distinctions may vanish (as
they did in Citizens United) as corporate and other persons are assimilated.
It is questionable whether the types of arbitrators now sitting in investor-state disputes
will, given their largely commercial expertise, draw the human rights-friendly conclusions
that advocates of transjudicial communications or humanitys law anticipate. Human
rights advocates may not like what happens to their human rights as these get translated to
the commercial setting of investor-state disputes. Do such advocates really want investor-

state responsibility to aliens, along with the rules governing espousal, are anachronistic and have
been displaced by modern human rights law. See generally DUNOFF ET AL., supra note 14, at 44143.
122. Although a broad interpretation to FET under the NAFTA is now less likely given the NAFTA parties
explicit interpretation limiting the scope of FET, such an interpretation is far more plausible in the
context of BITs or FTAs which simply include an FET guarantee that omits any reference to or limits
itself to customary rules applicable to the protection of aliens. See NAFTA Notes of Interpretation of
Certain Chapter 11 Provisions, FOREIGN AFFAIRS AND INTERNATIONAL TRADE CANADA,
http://www.international.gc.ca/trade-agreements-accords-commerciaux/disp-diff/nafta-
interpr.aspx?lang=en (last visited August 7, 2010).
123. See, e.g., Anne-Marie Slaughter, Judicial Globalization, 40 VA. J. INTL L. 1103 (2000); Anne-Marie
Slaughter, A Global Community of Courts, 44 HARV. INTL L.J. 191 (2003).
124. Ruti Teitel & Robert Howse, Cross-Judging: Tribunalization In a Fragmented But Interconnected Global
Order, 41 N.Y.U. J. INTL L. & POL. 959 (2009).
125. See, e.g., Jos E. Alvarez, How Not to Link: Institutional Conundrums of an Expanded Trade Regime, 7
WIDENER L. SYMP. J. 1 (2001).

28
.

Are Corporations Subjects of International Law?

state arbitrators to conclude, from the famous Inter-American Court of Human Rights opin-
ion in Velasquez-Rodriguez, that capital importing states need to respect and to ensure
the rights of foreign companies in their midst and protect them from, for example, disrupt-
ing protestors or union organizers?126
We should also consider the possible impact on the human right that is imported. As
is also suggested by Citizens United, what is recognized as a civil right may subtly change
once it is applied to a corporation. The meaning of political speech in the United States
after Citizens United is likely to change over time thanks to that decision.127 There is poten-
tial for considerable two-way traffic between the substantive rights applied in the human
rights and investment regimes once all are seen as ostensibly dealing with persons. No
one can confidently predict that any and all transformations of the rights being trafficked
will actually benefit natural persons.
Consider the most often cited right in investor-state dispute settlement: fair and equita-
ble treatment. If FET comes to be seen as the applicable due process standard for all per-
sons under international law, at least in non-criminal settings, what implications does that
have for the rights of natural persons? Consider, for instance, TECMIDs insistence on pro-
tecting legitimate expectations and the right to transparent government action as applied
in non-investment settings, from agencies denying a tax rebate to those issuing drivers li-
censes. Although this might be seen as a boon to human rights, not all of those in the global

126. Compare Restatement, supra note 21, 702, Reporters Note 2 (noting that a state violates customary
norms of human rights when it encourages or condones certain conduct as state policy), with Ve-
lsquez Rodrguez Case, Inter-Am.Ct.H.R. (Ser. C) No. 4 (July 29, 1988) (affirming that governments
are under a direct obligation to act to prevent private action in violation of the enumerated rights in
the American Convention of Human Rights). Given the fact that human rights tribunals are increasing-
ly turning to compensation as a remedy for human rights violations, see DINAH SHELTON, REMEDIES IN
INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS LAW (2d ed. 2006), it is possible that corporate investors might turn to
such precedents in order to demand compensation when their operations are disrupted or their
property is damaged by private parties. While BITs and FTAs lack the to ensure clause that appears
in the American Convention on Human Rights (or in the International Covenant of Civil and Political
Rights), arbitrators who are convinced that corporations ought to be treated like natural persons may
find that investment treaties as well as human rights instruments expect states to respect and to
ensure all the rights accorded in these instruments. A view that states are obligated to ensure corpo-
rate investors protection from rights violations committed by private parties could have significant
expansive potential for a number of BIT/FTA rights, including full protection and security, FET, and
their umbrella clauses. The scope of all these guarantees remains subject to interpretation. While few
would deny that a private individual who faces a violent mob is entitled to reasonable police protec-
tion under full protection and security, for example, the scope of that guarantee when it comes to a
corporation and its economic interests is more ambiguous, especially given other relevant laws (such
as labor legislation). The right to full protection and security might be amenable to considerable ex-
pansion if the corporations right is analogized to that of a private individual. Another area of lively
debate exists among arbitral tribunals and scholars about the scope of umbrella clauses in investment
treaties, including whether such clauses enable an investor to seek investor-state arbitration for the
states repudiation of a debt or commercial breach of a contract. See DOLZER & SCHREUER, supra note
55. Elevating corporate investments to full scale subjects of international law could help encourage
expansive interpretations of umbrella clauses or other comparable guarantees, especially where it
helps convince arbitrators that all contractual commitments or specific assurances made to investors
through law or regulation are entitled to enforcement under the principle of pacta sunt servanda.
127. Quite apart from whether Citizens United results in a greater role for corporations in the U.S. political
process or an actual increase in corporate contributions to political causes, the Courts decision is
likely to change Citizens perceptions of the role of corporate wealth and power in political decisions.
At least in this respect, the Courts decision has changed what political speech will now mean in the
United States. Citizens United v. FEC, --- U.S. ---, 130 S. Ct. 876 (2010).

29
.

9 SANTA CLARA JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL LAW 1 (2011)

south may agree since TECMIDs standard appears to assume technical and other resources
that exceed those available to many governments. Expanding the reach of TECMIDs (West-
ern?) concept of good governance may not ultimately redound to the legitimacy of the
human rights movement.128 On the other hand, what would human rights advocates think
if Glamiss far narrower view of FET, which provides a remedy only for egregious or
shocking government action, begins to gain traction in human rights settings?
And what would two-way traffic between the investment and human rights regimes do
to the right of property under international law? Human rights law has been notoriously
reticent about accepting property rights as human rights. That right does not appear in the
two human rights Covenants and within the European Convention on Human Rights the
right to property is balanced against the states ample regulatory interests.129 For its part,
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognizes protection against arbitrary dispos-
session but not a right to compensation.130 None of these human rights instruments accord
property holders the absolute right to prompt, adequate, and effective compensation that
is guaranteed by most investment treatiesa right that some investment treaties recog-
nize even with respect to regulatory takings.131 It is not likely that human rights advocates
will take kindly to any attempt to export the investment regimes far more generous views
of property rights elsewhere.
For these reasons, transjudicial communications between human rights and investor-
state tribunals may not produce the anticipated progressive virtuous circles some expect.
We need to consider the dissents insight in Citizens United that the rights and obliga-
tions of corporations and natural persons ought not be treated as equivalent. Such equiva-
lence is not necessary for corporate responsibility and accountability. Close readers of the
work of leading advocates of such responsibility, namely Clapham and Ratner, will discover
that neither relies on such equivalence. What they assert, correctly, is that given the very
real differences between corporations and other participants in the international legal sys-
tem, the only viable approach is to delineate corporate rights and obligations inductively
from the bottom up: to define the rights and obligations of corporations by what those en-
tities are and what they are not. This is, in effect, what Justice Stevens urged in his dissent,
where he argued for case-by-case determinations of how best to regulate political speech
by corporations. This careful delineation of corporate rights and obligations is made more
difficult to the extent that corporations are assumed to be international legal persons

128. Indeed, it would appear to be a prime example of the dark side of human rights as portrayed by crit-
ical scholars. See, e.g., Makau Mutua, Savages, Victims, and Saviors: The Metaphor of Human Rights, 42
HARV. INTL L.J. 201 (2001).
129. See Protocol to the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, as
amended, art. 1, Mar. 20, 1952, 213 U.N.T.S. 262. Of course, the existence of a property right under in-
ternational law is a distinct question from whether, assuming such a right exists, it applies to juridical
entities such as corporations or is recognized with respect to shareholders. Note that the U.S. Re-
statement anticipates that aliens are entitled to all human rights that states are obligated to respect
for all persons subject to its authority and would include the right to property or another economic
interest that under international law a state is obligated to respect for persons, natural or juridical,
of foreign nationality. Restatement, supra note 21, 711.
130. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, supra note 13.
131. See generally August Reinisch, Expropriation, in THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF INTERNATIONAL INVESTMENT
LAW, supra note 50.

30
.

Are Corporations Subjects of International Law?

(and/or subjects) and particular corporate responsibilities are simply derived from that
assumption.

IV. Conclusion
As David Millon has demonstrated, there is a long historical tradition, at least within U.S.
law, of using characterizations of the corporate person as a vehicle to justify regulatory
agendas with respect to it.132 Ostensibly objective or academic descriptions of the corpora-
tion as either a distinct entity artificially created by the state or a natural aggregation of
natural persons have been respectively advanced at various times and by various authori-
ties in order to justify particular normative claims concerning, for example, whether
shareholder wealth maximization or other social goals ought to be the appropriate objec-
tive of corporate law.133 It would appear that at least some of the litigants in ATCA cases
are engaged in comparable efforts. Like Millon, I believe that efforts to derive ought from
what advocates contend is objective reality (namely that corporations are or are not like
natural persons or other international legal persons like states) stand in the way of ad-
dressing the truly urgent questions raised by international corporate activity.134 Interna-
tional lawyers should spend their time addressing which international rules apply to cor-
porations rather than whether corporations are or are not subjects of international law.
Skepticism about the personhood of corporations should not be confused with doubts
about whether international corporations have responsibilities (as well as rights) under
international law. Clearly they now have both.135 There are a number of ways that human
rights litigants in ATCA cases could conclude that certain international obligations apply to
corporations. They could base such conclusions on analogies drawn from direct obligations
imposed under specific treaty regimes (as in recent treaties that specifically extend their
obligations to corporations with respect to counter-terrorism).136 They might find such ob-
ligations in general principles of law (as through a showing that national laws impose civil

132. Millon, supra note 10.

133. Id. at 23. Millon contends that such characterizations have been used to distinguish corporations
from or analogize them to partnerships, to encourage rethinking of the states traditional regulatory
authority generally, to distinguish or compare corporations to the rights of shareholders or other
natural persons, to conceptualize the corporation as a citizen and not only a vehicle for shareholder
wealth, to use corporations as a vehicle to protect property rights, or as a basis for establishing cor-
porate social responsibilities. Id. at 34, 78, 1321. Millon contends that contemporary (and as yet
inconclusive) debates between contractarians who focus on shareholder primacy and communitar-
ian corporate scholars who focus on corporate duties owed to the community, are really normative
arguments masquerading as positive assertions. Id. at 25.
134. Cf. id. at 29 (At least in the area of corporate law, efforts to derive ought from is have not succeed-
ed. Indeed, such intellectual exercises may have stood in the way of careful examination of the truly
urgent questions raised by corporate activity.).
135. One need not agree with Crawfords and Greenwoods expert opinions that the absence of explicit in-
ternational law examples making corporations criminally liable establishes that no ATCA liability is
possible. See First Declaration, supra note 2; Second Declaration, supra note 2. Even assuming that un-
der the ATCA, this aspect of a viable claim is to be determined by international and not U.S. law, the
question that might be posed is whether international law precludes finding corporate liability not
whether it explicitly authorizes it. Cf. The S.S. Lotus (France v. Turkey), 1927 P.C.I.J. (Ser. A) No. 10
(requiring evidence to demonstrate that international law precludes the exercise of national jurisdic-
tion).
136. See, e.g., Ratner, supra note 20, at 485.

31
.

9 SANTA CLARA JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL LAW 1 (2011)

or criminal penalties on corporations in comparable circumstances).137 They might even

find implicit duties on corporate entities (as well as other non-state actors) from the prin-
ciple of universal jurisdiction as applied to jus cogens prohibitions. Alternatively, they
might infer corporate liability from the application of rules for secondary liability (such as
the application of international rules governing aiding and abetting in distinct internation-
al legal regimes, including under international criminal law).
Larry Backers description of John Ruggies innovative protect-respect-remedy gov-
ernance project suggests yet another, even more promising and far more nuanced, ap-
proach to finding corporate responsibility.138 Ruggies approach is appealing precisely be-
cause it departs from the hierarchical rigidity embedded in demarcating subjects and
objects of international law. Ruggies delineation of corporate responsibility is bottom-
up, not top-down. As elucidated by Backer, it is based not on a priori assertions of person-
hood but on facts on the ground, including the reality that corporations operate under a
social and not only a legal license; have unique systems of monitoring, information gather-
ing, assessment and disclosure; may be made accountable through their own conceptions
of due diligence to shareholders and the wider public; and may owe differing human
rights obligations depending on their sphere of business, their corporate structure, or their
relationships with partners and suppliers.139 Backers and Ruggies conception of corporate
responsibility/accountability is evidence-based and pragmatic. It is the very antithesis of
deducing obligations from formal subject-hood or personhood.
My warnings here concern only those arguments for corporate responsibility that, un-
like Ruggies rich conception, try to establish such responsibility on the premise that cor-
porations are subjects of international law or are international legal persons.140 Despite
Ruggies efforts, it is not clear that ATCA litigants will follow his lead instead of becoming
mired in positivist formalism over subject-hood and its ostensible consequences.
Some might object that my concerns are misdirected. While it is true that the possible
adverse consequences enumerated here for purposes of investor-state arbitrations may
emerge in any case, without any reliance on the ostensible personhood of corporate inves-
tors, to date investor-state arbitrators have been notoriously reticent about many of the
questions canvassed in this essay. There is as yet no consistent case law on questions such
as whether states retain control to waive investor state disputes or whether residual inter-
state rules of custom should invariably apply to resolve investor-state disputes. That these
questions remain open should give us pause about closing them prematurely (and possibly

137. See, e.g., Balintulo Amici Brief, supra note 115.

138. Backer, supra note 19.
139. Id. Perhaps the fact that Ruggie is not a lawyer gave him an advantage in this respect. As is clear from
the Reparation Case, international lawyers (and international judges) find it nearly inconceivable to
posit an obligation without a prior finding of personhood. This is presumably why the International
Court of Justice insisted, in that instance, on answering a question that was not posed to it by the Gen-
eral Assembly, namely whether the U.N. was a legal person. At bottom, I am suggesting that at least
with respect to corporations, we resist being drawn into Higgins intellectual prison of our making
when addressing the real issue of what responsibilities corporations actually have. See HIGGINS, supra
note 27.
140. Despite his reliance on finding that corporations are limited international legal persons, Clapham
appears to endorse this view as well. See CLAPHAM, supra note 22, at 83 (suggesting that we concen-
trate on the rights and obligations of entities rather than their personality).

32
.

Are Corporations Subjects of International Law?

wrongly) through the easy gambit of corporate personhood.

Nor is it an answer to suggest that my concerns are overstated. Some might contend that
speculating about the consequences of seeing corporations as full scale subjects or per-
sons of international law is a straw argument. It is true that those who suggest that corpo-
rations are subjects of international law never suggest that they are the equivalent of
states. This has been true since 1949 when the ICJ, in the Reparation Case, concluded that
while the U.N. was an international legal person its capacities were not the same as those
of a state.141
But while formal positivist theory accepts the premise that not all of our international
law subjects or persons are functionally equivalent, there is a strong tendency in the litera-
tureand in lifeto assimilate all such persons in practice. Citizens United is not the on-
ly instance where personhood has been taken to absurd lengths. Despite the ICJs warning
in the Reparation Case that the U.N. was certainly not a person in the same sense that a
state is, there has been a strong tendency to assimilate the personhood of international or-
ganizations to those of states. A leading exemplar of this tendency is the International Law
Commissions (ILC) decade-long effort to draft articles of international organization (IO)
responsibility. That effort has yielded an enumeration of draft rules that are almost entire-
ly based on the ILCs earlier Articles of State Responsibility.142 Some, including this author,
have been critical of this effort precisely because IOs should not be treated in law (or in
fact) as states for this purpose.143 There is, for example, no concept of IO equality compara-
ble to sovereign equality and the practice of states has yet to yield uniformly applicable
primary or secondary rules of liability that are applicable for entities as distinct as the U.N.
Security Council, the World Bank, or the World Health Organization. The single set of rules
of IO responsibility that the ILC contemplates ignores the very real differences that distin-
guish these entities as well as the differing expectations the international community has
with respect to their accountability and responsibility for wrongful acts. There are huge
difficulties in assuming that the single set of secondary rules that the ILC appears to con-
template can encompass the responsibilities of such disparate organizations or that even if
a single set of rules can be envisioned that these should replicate those that apply to states.
It is not clear that there is any relevant state or IO practice supporting the proposition that,
for example, despite the fact the WTO itself is not a party to the International Covenant on
Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, a WTO Appellate Body ruling might still be said to
violate that treatyor even if that were the case, whether this means that the organiza-
tion (and not merely its member states) is liable. Nor is clear that states or other constitu-
encies want all of their IOs to be held accountable; indeed there is evidence to suggest that
states established some IOs and gave them unique responsibilities (such as the Security
Councils power to sanction the world if needed to maintain international peace and securi-
ty) precisely to avoid the responsibilities that bind each state individually (such as the

141. See Reparation Case, supra note 1.

142. For discussion of these, see Jos E. Alvarez, Can. Council of Intl L., Luncheon Address at the 35th An-
nual Conference on Responsibility of Individuals, States and Organizations: International Organiza-
tions: Accountability or Responsibility? (Oct. 27, 2006), available at
http://www.asil.org/aboutasil/documents/CCILspeech061102.pdf.
143. Id.

33
.

9 SANTA CLARA JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL LAW 1 (2011)

rules governing the use of force in cases of humanitarian interventions).

What the ILCs misguided effort demonstrates is the sheer power of language. Once in-
ternational lawyers decided to call IOs persons in line with the Reparation Case, we imag-
ined them to be so. Now we (or at least the luminaries on the ILC) are apparently imagining
as well that they have the same obligations as stateseven though no IO can be a party to
the human rights covenants or the Geneva Conventions, for example, and even though
there is a serious work of translation still to be done before we can extrapolate many hu-
man rights duties owed by states to the world of our Geneva- or New York-based organiza-
tions. Absent considerable serious work to elaborate applicable primary rules of obligation
(some of which may vary depending on the organization), the ILCs proposed secondary
rules for IO responsibility are likely to encounter some bumps in the roadas the positiv-
ist imaginings of some scholars meet the real desires and needs of states.
The take away point of this essay is simple: If collectivities of states ought not be con-
fused with the states themselves, this is all the more true with respect to corporations.
Whether or not one agrees with their conclusion, the dissent in Citizens United was right to
point out that corporations are not merely groups of natural persons. They can no more be
reduced to natural persons than they can to states. Personhood talk misleads.144 Interna-
tional lawyers should heed the cautionary tale suggested by the ILCs draft rules on IO re-
sponsibility. We should not replicate the ILCs mistake. Neither IOs nor corporations are
the equivalent of states or natural persons and we should beware simple-minded efforts to
draw out comparable obligations based on that flawed premise.
We should not lose sight of first principles. States, whatever their flaws, remain the sin-
gle greatest repository for the legitimate enforcement of both national and international
law.145 They remain as well the most legitimate and effective international law-maker.
Even today most of us rely on states for our protection and even undemocratic states are
usually seen as more legitimate representatives of their citizens collective interests than
any NGO, international civil servant, or corporate official. As Benedict Kingsbury has sug-
gested, while the age of globalization has greatly weakened the power of governments,
they remain the central defense of their respective peoples.146 States can protect us from
globalizations excesses, including the potential harms produced by or in the name of free
capital flows.147 States are expected to address all the concerns of their polities, from the
economic to the social. They are specifically charged with respecting the rights of their citi-
zens under international law.
Corporations have none of these traits. As Jgers points out, corporations are not the in-
tended beneficiaries of human rights and have no inherent ability to suffer the harmful

144. Indeed, Backer describes at great length the many ways corporations are different from either natural
persons or states. Backer, supra note 19. Unlike the circularity of personhood determinations, Back-
ers effort is an impressively thorough explication of why the delineation of corporate human rights
responsibilities needs to take into account those differences if it is to succeed.
145. See, e.g., CHARLES R. BEITZ, THE IDEA OF HUMAN RIGHTS (2009). Having a state as ones protector is after
all, as Hannah Arendt suggested, the right to have rights. HANNAH ARENDT, THE ORIGINS OF
TOTALITARIANISM 298 (Harcourt, Inc. 2009) (1951). See also James D. Ingram, What is a Right to Have
Rights? Three Images of the Politics of Human Rights, 102 AM. POL. SCI. REV. 401 (2008).
146. Benedict Kingsbury, Sovereignty and Inequality, 9 EUR. J. INTL L. 599 (1998).
147. Id.

34
.

Are Corporations Subjects of International Law?

consequences associated with human rights deprivation.148 Under mainstream U.S. corpo-
rate law, their principal mandate is to pursue profit for their shareholders.149 Indeed, un-
der most of the national laws under which they operate, if they deviate from that goal they
may be punished, including by their shareholders. We should never confuse the economic
rights of corporations (or of investors) for the rights of natural persons to live in dignity.
Human rights lawyers, who have been so good at demonizing corporations under the
ATCA, should be the last ones to humanize them by turning them into international law
persons.

148. JGERS, supra note 26, at 29.

149. But see Millon, supra note 10 (describing competing communitarian views of the corporation).

35
.

9 SANTA CLARA JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL LAW 1 (2011)

***

36