When Corporations Harm

Good afternoon everyone and welcome to our first justice talk for the spring session. It's lovely to see those of you who are here in the room. Uh and also uh welcome to those of you who are joining us online. I think they're all trickling in as we begin roughly on time. Uh for those of you who I haven't met yet, my name is Anthea Vogl. I'm the faculty co-director of the Brennan justice program. Uh I co-direct the program with your awesome LSS co-directors, Alexis Dezotti and Mel Davis. Uh they couldn't join us today, but I'm sure you'll meet them as Brennan Justice students if you haven't already. Uh most importantly though, it's my pleasure to be welcoming associate dean of education Penny Crofts and associate professor Honni van Rijswijk as our special guest speakers today who are here presenting on their wonderful, and hot off the press new book, Corporate Harms a Horror Story. I think this could be the first, has there been a book launch? This is the launch. Okay, we're the first launch of the book. I'm sure there'll be some other ones along the way. So, uh we are a very privileged and exclusive audience. Uh before I introduce Penny and Honni, uh in a little bit more detail, uh I want to acknowledge uh the that we uh uh the UTS law faculty and uh where we teach and learn and meet together is situated on the unceded lands of the Gadigal people. Uh I pay my respects to elders past and present acknowledging them as the traditional custodians of this land. We acknowledge that these lands have always been places of law and today exist in plural legal worlds. Uh and we often talk about this in the Brennan justice program. Acknowledgement of country are a really big part of the program because what we do when we come together and and join as Brennan justice community and students is think about the role of the law in both progressive and I would say regressive and negative ways in kind of working towards indigenous justice, indigenous sovereignty and indigenous self-determination. Um and those questions are part of all of the topics that we look at. So not siloed into one area. uh and part of coming together is thinking about those interconnections uh as we meet uh as in the Brennan Justice program. So uh I now want to introduce some of you would have met both Honni and Penny uh in the classroom uh but for those of you who haven't um Penny is an international expert on criminal law models of culpability and corporate crime. Her research is cross-disciplinary, drawing upon a range of historical, philosophical, empirical, and literary materials to enrich her analysis of law. Associate Professor Honni van Rijswijk. is a graduate of Sydney Law School and received her PhD from the University of Washington, where she was a fellow in the Society of Scholars at the Simpson Centre. Honni researches on theories of responsibility and harm across a number of areas, including corporations, law, technology, and gendered harms. So um we will begin with a presentation from Honni and Penny on the book uh and giving you some insights into their work. After that we will have time for Q&A for both um people who are in the room and those of you who are joining online. Uh so please uh think of your questions and store them and we'll have a chance to discuss afterwards. Uh and then we'll conclude around 5:00 pm. Great. Thanks. Thank you. Let me hand this over to you, that, Honni can have that. She'll wave her arms less than me. Okay. Less of a hazard. 

I'm a bit twitchy. 

So, welcome everyone. Thank you very much for coming um and for having us here today to do a talk. This is very much, This book is very much a labor of love. That took us a few years, didn't it, Honni? Yeah, it did. Um, and we had to watch a lot of horror films while we were writing, which was very difficult. Um, so we're going to read corporate wrongdoing through the lens of horror. And this isn't decoration, but it's a serious analytic for why criminal law keeps failing to respond to the largest harms in our society. And it is very strange when you do research in this area. It's as though we have a blind spot and we keep using euphemistic language when we talk about corporate harms. So we talk about them as accidents, disasters or tragedies when we should be talking about them as crimes. Like these are foreseeable, foreseen actually, foreseen and avoidable crimes. Um and we don't use that language. So, we're arguing that in the absence of crime, you should be thinking about it. That's horror. So, we do want to give you a content warning. Uh we discuss um some nasty corporate harms, including the opioid epidemic and addiction, mass death at Bhopal, and medical harm to women's bodies. So, if you feel uncomfortable, please um step out if you need to. Oh, that's me now too. So, first up, the question is, well, why would we talk about horror? Why have we turned to horror? And the central theoretical anchor that we use throughout the book is the definition of horror. And there used to be disagreement amongst scholars, but also horror directors of what is horror. Um and it used to be regarded as a combination of fear and disgust. And then recently these emotion theorists called Taylor and Yoshida said no no no horror is an effective response to schema incongruence. And so they said, for example, if you see a spider or a snake, you know what it is and you're scared and you might not react well, but you know, like the fear is not because of, you you know what it is and you it's an understandable reaction kind of thing. Whereas if you saw a zombie, even if you were a horror film fanatic, you would be filled with a sense of what is this? Why is this? you know, so so that capturing that sense of schema incongruence. And so this works really well like there's some fabulous poststructuralist theorists in this area um who talk about um transgressive objects and things simultaneously recognizable and unrecognizable within our categories. Things that are both and neither the same thing at the same time. And the classic representation of this is in horror, is monsters. So zombies are alive and not both dead, you know. So there, so there, and once you start breaking apart that binary of the living dead, then what other binaries do you break apart as well? And this concept of schema congruence is a great critical tool for law because law holds out schemes. Law holds out orders. So what happens when things transgress those orders? So not just break the rules, but transgress them. So they're both and neither at the same time. So corporations are a classic example of that where they are criminal legal subjects and yet they just don't fit within the categories. You almost never get prosecutions of corporations for criminal law. And our claim also is that the focus that um criminal law has an individualistic bias and Honni is going to talk about this in a moment. And what this means is most the categories were set up with human beings in mind and we tend to think about it oh it's really hard to figure out what a corporation is thinking so mens rea but we are taking a step before that and we're saying criminal law imagines an individual perpetrator. But corporations can cause harms that massively exceed what even the most motivated super villain can achieve. Um, and so our argument, our central argument is that corporate harms are too big, too bad, too nasty for criminal law. So they're recognizable. The reason why they're not being handled by criminal law is actually because they're too much. And that is horrifying, because criminal law claims as its own the worst harms. That is what criminal law does. The worst harms, public harms. And these are the essence of public wrongs, widespread harms. And so they should be the subject of criminal law. And yet they're not because they're too much. Yep. Um, so in a way what we're trying to redress is a failure of legal imagination. So even though as Penny said criminal law is meant to deal with the worst most condemnable harms, like that's one of its main purposes. Um, and I'm sure you can all think of massive harms that have been caused by corporations, whether that's environmental harms or like heinous medical negligence devices. um you know the Asbestos case where James Hardy just um employed um asbestos Julie Julie Bishop to basically just delay and delay any kind of legal process so that the victims of that asbestosis died before they got justice. Um so we're kind of so aware of these harms um that are of course by corporations we almost become a bit immune to it. they become normalized. And when we look at what the criminal law does judge, um, it was built, as Penny said, for one kind of villain, which is essentially an individual human, not a corporation. So, if you think back to your criminal law subject and lectures, um, you're dealing with a single body, a single mind. So, you probably remember mens rea, one discrete act at one point in time. Um and different theorists think of this in different ways. So Nafine for example talks about the responsible human being as the, the paradigmatic subject here and Nori talks about the abstract theoretical subject, and what they mean by that is what is law conceptualizing when they think of responsibility and they're not thinking of something like a corporation. So therefore, the um hideous widespread harms that corporations actually do cause don't come under the umbrella of criminal law, even though they should because as a society um as a matter of public policy, we generally say that criminal law should be dealing with those harms. So when we look at what corporations do and the sorts of harms they cause, they're diffuse. So they usually spread um across um many people and across an institution. So sometimes it's hard to, I guess, locate the origin. Um they're also collective. So you can't think of a single mind to hold to account. Um the corporation itself is effectively mortal. Um sometimes that actually becomes quite interesting when you think about um holding corporations liable. But the criminal law hasn't really advanced too much. Um, but there's an interesting case um in the US in the early 2000s where they did some um slavery collective actions against corporations and traced them back to the time of slavery and sued insurance companies who had insured slaves as property for example. And that's a really creative fascinating way that um some really creative lawyers used that corporate immortality to try and get justice. that those cases all failed um because the the judges um couldn't really countenance that use of of law. Um and also we have corporations acting over decades across borders. So if you think of James Hardy and Asbestosis that happened over a long period of time environmental leaks it takes years sometimes decades for the harm to even be calculated and law doesn't easily deal with those kinds of harms. So we um one of our central points is that in the absence of criminal law, these kind of corporate harms have more in common with what you're likely to see in horror than in criminal law. Um and so the genre, the genre of horror, the central aim of it is to arouse horror. And one of the ways it does this is with excessive harm, schema incongruent harm. And so we make the point that there are a lot of commonalities with horror. And the first one is magnitude. Just the sheer scale of corporate harms. And something that we'll point to later is, is when we were trying to write this magnitude chapter, we were trying to uh get concrete numbers of harms. And a lot of the time even for well the opioid epidemic is an example. There is a language of estimation there as though these harms are incalculable. They were, they are schema incongruent for basic systems of logic which is counting and if you can't count it then all has difficulty in compensating for example and recognizing. So you've got this issue of magnitude of mass victimization. On top of that you've got a spatial element. So criminal law is the law of the land. So a lot of these corporations are multinational and, or the harms that they cause are multinational as well. And so I've recently been doing analysis of well, where do these corporate harms fit that are international? They don't fit into international law. They don't fit into criminal law. Like where are they being held to account? You've also got a temporal aspect to corporate harms. A lot of these corporate harms, not all corporate harms are incredibly slow moving. So they're lacking that kind of beginning and middle and an end of an event, which is, you know, if you think about an assault versus something like asbestos, which has a 40 and tobacco, 40 years between exposure and then any disease resulting. So there's, So that was really I think when we started having fun with the temporal frame in horror and and one of the things was also where you have an immortal corporation. So where they've profited from these harms and they're sentient beings that have you know lived across decades um and made decisions you know in the 30s in the 50s and then now we become aware of the harms manifesting. And then possibly our favorite type of harm is nastiness. Um so, in, in, in criminal law the you know the worst thing that can happen is you die whereas in horror there's fates worse than death. And and and horror is all about exploring different ways to inflict harm. And one of the things also which we regard as a harm is the failure of authority. So uh we'll talk about that as well that, that is a harm where you stop trusting authority as a consequence of its failure. So horror films are great at um, I suppose ,as Penny's put it, kind of filling in and giving us a language to think about the harms and the responsibility that law has failed to do and that ultimately we argue law should do. Um and so the point of nastiness, so nastiness is basically a set of tropes in horror films if you're a horror fan. Um, one of the tropes of nastiness would be the familiar becoming horrific. So, for example, the doll, the haunted doll, right? Like that's kind of a trope. Um, the, the child who is, you know, bonded to his doll and the doll starts murdering. And also part of that is usually like the family brings the doll in and then, you know, then the doll becomes evil and, and kills everyone. uh and, and in that situation, so there's the horror of the banal entity becoming possessed and then the fact that you as the mom bought the doll kind of thing. And so an example we were talking about in the book was lead lead paint where you paint you think you're doing the right thing and you're painting your nursery and it's with lead paint which then, um causes long-term harm to your babies for example. Yeah. Yeah. And baby powder is another example. So um so it's not done anymore, but I remember when I was babysitting back in the day, whenever you change a baby's nappy, you'd use this thing called um Johnson Johnson baby powder. And when, when you, when our oldest kid was born, who's only 11, we got a Johnson and Johnson baby pack, which included baby powder. Did it? Oh wow. Okay. So yeah, so it's been around for a very long time. Um but 1971 um scientists find asbestos in the baby powder. Um and this is linked to bad things, bad diseases. The company is told um and the knowledge just stays inside the company. It's just kind of and you know this is um a story that we hear with lots of companies. you know, tobacco would be the biggest example that um harm there's objective evidence of harm and it's, it's hidden and part of the structure of the company in a way is kind of used to, to sort of shut it all down like that knowledge is not considered to have spread. So, so 1971 they have the discovery um the knowledge continues and the product keeps being sold for nearly five decades. Um so back so not back but in in 2018 Reuters says Johnson Johnson knew for decades that asbestos um lurked in its baby powder. Um and another really nasty twist on this is as they were starting to be found out um they did a little marketing turnaround. This was, no, this was 95. So in 95 they're like it's bad for babies to be using this baby powder cuz they might get mesothelioma. It's a bad look for our signature product. Let's market it to overweight women and women of color. So they shifted marketing to cover female loaders. So it's this idea of you that you become addicted to something that you, you don't even need. Yeah. Yeah. that's the invention of the market for feminine hygiene, which is much more of a US thing, but it it is it does still exist here. Um, and so yeah, apparently they've made 10 billion dollars over that time. Um, and there are tens of thousands of women who have claimed ovarian and other gynecological cancers as a result of that. And they and yeah, they started getting caught out. So America and Canada, it got too hot for them in 2020. So they stopped uh marketing there, kept selling it everywhere else including Australia until 2023. Um and yeah, deny, deny, deny in relation to the um ovarian cancers that have resulted as a consequence. Yeah, I kind of regard Johnson and Johnson as one of the slashes of the Johnson and Johnson is is recurring in the book. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And they also they are franchised because then they then they reappear with Ethicon. Yeah. Next one. So they um if if you've done company law or you've kind of paid attention to what companies do, they often in Phoenix, right? So they kill themselves off and then they rise again um in order to kind of shut off um or limit liability and then start all over again um or you just have um a a different sort of entity break off. So they, they had um Ethicon, which is a great name for a company that's causing harm. Um sorry, it's my phone. Um so and and this company sold vaginal tape and pelvic mesh. And you've probably sort of heard of those pelvic mesh cases kind of in the last few years in Australia and different jurisdictions which have horribly injured women. Um so they were marketed worldwide for women's pelvic um pain and different conditions. Um and there had been almost no prior clinical evaluation which is absolutely shocking on men but not on women. So there had been no testing on women. Shocking because women are cheaper to compensate than men. So yeah, not lots of cost benefits. Um and the um the idea behind the mesh was that it's designed to provoke an inflammatory response to produce scar tissue which is meant to solve your problem which yeah it's just kind of monstrous as an idea to heal people through deliberate harm. Um and then through that process it becomes a permanent part of women's bodies. Uh it, it caused irreversible pain and suffering. Just people basically saying they weren't suicide. They're in so much pain, infection, chronic pain, inability to have penetrary sex, just just heinous. Um so Justice Katsman in the 2019 federal court case around these products said that it had been brought to market with unseemly haste. Um and then the quote on the right there is from the New Yorker um that essentially they were experimenting on women. There's a sense, um, that it is okay to experiment on women's bodies in real time. Yeah. That it's horrific like it, just that is, that could be, well that would be, probably is, the subject of a horror film. Um yeah, there's a lot of horror movies around reproduction and things like that. Oh, dead ringers. Dead Ringers. Yeah. and Rosemary's Baby. And so in our in a different chapter in I think it was a gendered crime handbook, we did a chapter on corporate crime because there is a willingness to experiment on with uh women by corporations. Um yeah, and they invent these um objects and medicines and then they don't test them on women and then they're kind of surprised when things don't work out. Yeah. But also deny deny. So yep. Um so yeah so one of the things that we found quite fascinating was thinking around if you think around the human legal subject, corporations are potentially immortal. So one of my friends has pointed out that lots of corporations don't survive for very long. Um and, and there's some interesting questions about well what does it mean when you're immortal? Um, and you know, and in, in horror, there's an exploration of that. For example, vampires, a classic, and a lot of vampire literature is kind of coping with, you know, longevity. You know, how do you live for so long and, and continue to care? How do you live for so long and continue to care? but also, and evil corporations. So you think about classic horror films like Aliens, Weyland Yutani, you might kill off the aliens and you kill off a lot of the individuals. You might even kill off the CEO of the corporation, but the corporation, the evil corporation comes back. So you have these sentient entities in horror that continue for generations and generations. And there's a way to then theorize that temporal aspect of corporations that have committed past wrongs from which they continue to profit. And some of them sometimes even forget that they've done the past wrongs um but nonetheless have profited from it. But in relation to corporations, it makes you think about the profit. So for example, the slavery one as well. So they might have forgotten their origins, but they still have it. We analyzed it in terms of a haunted house. But another one is where they um and this is a classic move, use the law to set up subsidiaries that have their legacy liabilities um and then move their money offshore. So then they're not liable for those legacy liabilities. Um and this is something that was a classic move that Johnson and Johnson did. James Hardy did it as well. Um and then you contrast the immortality of the corporation with the mortality of the victims as well and the harm the people who are being harmed. Yeah. Me too. Okay. So another one which um we have analyzed separately but also recurs uh throughout the book um is Oxycontin which was launched in 1995. Um but they had actually been starting to do uh research and take over uh research like in the 70s. Um and it claimed that it had minimal addiction risk um even though it had no peer, peer-reviewed evidence behind it. They had direct to consumer advertising using testimonials from real patients who themselves did not realize that they were increasingly getting addicted. And when doctors started saying, "I think I think they're getting addicted." They're like, "No, no, no. That's pseudo addiction. Just give them more." Um, and there's a big, there's a big um area of writing here on the production of ignorance. And I think that it is incredibly concerning in today's world where you, the, the institutions and organizations that you rely on academia, you know, um universities, scientific research, um is it, can we rely upon it? Is it safe? It is. So you think about a lot of these products were coming from America where you've got this production of ignorance and people talk about tobacco as you know the providing the handbook for how you produce ignorance. I actually think I don't know if that's true. I think they're the ones who've been caught. I think there's way more industries. So the asbestos industry still claims that asbestos is safe, Chrysotile industry. And so asbestos continues to be traded um internationally because of this kind of uh production of ignorance. So yes it's um and what it means then is it does damage to uh the institutions that you should be relying upon because where, who do you trust, like it is a horror movie. Who do you trust? What information do you trust? What should you do? Um, and yeah, the, the numbers for the opioid epidemic, the fact that we call it an epidemic, the fact that these corporations that profited from it are completely separate from it is astounding. And so many, Yeah. And we don't use the language of people being killed by opioids even though they knew that people would get addicted and die. They knew that. Still no prosecutions. Yeah. They were prosecuted for false labeling. Yeah. And nuisance. Yeah. And and they also um Phoenixed. Um and so Purdue Pharma is the the company it was behind Oxicontin. Um yeah. The big the original. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Before Phoenix. Um and then behind them is the Sackler family. There there's a great horror series about them basically. And the House of Usher. Very good. Very fun. Um it plays on Edgar Allan Poe's different short stories. Um and it's a great vengeance narrative actually. Um but in because in terms of real consequences neither the family nor the corporation have had any. Um and as Penny said it it was also a failure of the medical community, the research community and the regulatory community and really the courts later on when when the the cases were heard. But um when they started saying that this highly addictive chemical was not addictive, they were everyone's just sort of um assuming that that was valid, right? And that if Purdue Pharma was saying that they had the uh research behind them to support that and it ended up being a letter to the editor that they were relying on. Um and this was only kind of gradually released because no one kind of wanted to look um too closely. And at some point they actually captured the regulator um who then went on to work for the individual who was the head of the regulation agency went on to work for them and all sorts of dodgy stuff but I suppose technically legal things um happened like that. Um so one um idea that we looked at in terms of conceptualizing harm. So on the the harm side was how do you think about how do we think about could centralize the people who were harmed through this opioid epidemic and actually Penny had this great idea that so popular culture usually reaches for the zombie when you think of people who are addicted um and a theorist called Linnemann um says that you know the zombie is um kind of used to justify criminal sanctions against people who are addicted to drugs right which we kind of know are unjustifiably harsh. Um, but as Penny pointed out that it's the wrong monster. It's the wrong metaphor because the, the walking dead is actually not what they are. Do you want to explain it because it's your So zombie zombies don't know they're zombies, you know? I mean, there's some I don't know how many horror fan, There are some exceptions, of course. There's Warm Bodies. It's a romcom. uh but also uh eye zombie as well where you have sentient zombies but usually a feature of zombies is they don't know so it's sad for the family but not for the zombie but one of the things that we thought that was particularly horrific is that people would know what they lost you know but you would be aware of what you have lost and and what harms you have caused as a consequence of addiction Um and then also another aspect that we thought was that often your family members would be the ones that would have taken you to the doctor and possibly even encouraged you to take oxycontin so they would have to live that like there there's this kind of abounding horror but the yeah yeah so many stories about people having like work injuries or um car accidents and going to a doctor and and doctor reassuring them sort saying, "Well, we've just they on the market, they've just released this non-addictive opioid." Um, and the person just goes down this absolute tunnel of hell. Um, with the parents or, you know, partner or siblings standing next to them sort of thinking that the doctor said it was fine and then when they kind of said this is not working um as per Purdue Pharma Pharma's um outlines, they would increase the dose. So therefore making the problem even bigger. So if you think about like being that person inside um that environment or being an onlooker and of course in society we have this narrative of individual responsibility for people anyway. So it just kind of compounds the harm. Yes. And so I think I'm on the next page. So but the failure of authority. Yeah. So yeah. So one of the an aspect in horror is the failure of authority. Um, and basically in horror you should not do what the government tells you to do. Like if the government's telling you to stay at home, get out. Um, and the question is in horror is this failure like one of often and and police officers always die pretty unless they are the monster kind of thing. And so there's this idea that you have the failure of authority partly to establish schema incongruence. So the usual policies that you would say to people, oh don't worry, you know, stay inside, you know, aren't going to work in horror because they're exceptional harm. So it's kind of to underline the exceptionality or you often have where authority itself has been contaminated. So um the disorderly are polluted and polluting. So if you're bitten by a zombie, you become a zombie. Um so that that's that idea of contamination. So um and and one of the things from horror is we don't for the victims it actually doesn't matter why authority failed in a way like all that matters is that they did. Um and so you've got some in in in in a lot of these cases you've got failure of science. Um and there's some fabulous analysis if you're if you're interested in following up failure of medicine, failure of regulation and also failure of law. Um and these are across all the cases that we analyzed and often it was you know um yeah it was a systemic failure uh across the board. And one of the horrific things is that including with Oxycontin, but with a lot of these harms, they're entirely predictable and actually imagined by law. These are, you know, not weird harms. We've we've we just don't even see them as that. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, it's not that they're not there, it's just that we fail to imagine them in the the right way. Um so as you probably sensed throughout the lecture um the um these harms are very racialized heavily gendered um the more um removed people are populations are from you know census like the US and the UK the more vulnerable they are. So, one case we looked at was um the global 1984 leak where 30 to 45 tons of methyl isocyanate escaped from Union Carbide pesticide plant into a sleeping city. It's genuinely horrific if if you kind of look up anything about this. Um and it's the worst industrial disaster in history and it's not sort of commonly disaster dump out. Yeah. So like that that idea tragedy, disaster, accident. So one thing that we noticed about this is that there are no accurate numbers about um the harm like who died um and and part of this is temporal, right? So at what point do you stop the sort of flow and effects but another aspect aspect I suppose is just the willingness to count. So, so some estimates we saw were 8,000 people died within 3 days. Um, and then that accumulated accumulated to 15 to 25,000. Other experts say um there were actually 30,000 immediate deaths. Um, and then over half a million were injured. Um, one entry we found about this was uh um kind of hedged in by modify. So around this number, probably over this amount. Um, and there's this sense that the the number of victims and the amount of suffering just kind of overwhelms our ability to um to count the um the the deaths and the injured. Uh, and there's this reluctance to sort of say things plainly as well. Yeah. And there's a spatial element here which comes back to, you know, criminal law as being the law of the land. And there's definitely with a lot of these corporate harms is poor people and poor countries are basically worse off uh 100%. Um and there is an intentionality there and in relation to Bhopal, Union Carbide had you know a factory that you know in in America that had all these uh rules and safety procedures and tech to protect against exactly what happened and it didn't bother to do that in Bhopal and that is all too common. Um, and another example was the Johnson and Johnson example. Can't sell it in Canada or in America. Let's sell it somewhere else. The same with the litomide was another one where it was sold internationally once it was banned. We've got five more minutes. Um, so yeah, so there's definitely a geographical element um to these farms and and a sense in which like where do they fit? They don't fit into our categories of jurisdiction. Yeah. So for um bhopal there uh it was years and years 18 years I think. Yeah. From 1985 to 2010 before a handful of employees were convicted for negligence given two-year sentences. Um and compensation still hasn't been made. there was some sort of agreement between Dow Chemical, which um now owns Union Carbide, um and the the government that they would sue on their behalf, but there's been no actual meaningful compensation. Yeah. And I think one of the key things is that horror uh portrays laws failures and the failures of authority. And I I'm definitely a believer in the capacity of criminal law, but then some of these cases or or just the lack of cases in this area is just truly astounding. Yeah. Yeah. And and I think also the idea that it doesn't have to be that way is really what so yeah. Yeah. And that's where we kind of end that do we want to stay stuck in a horror story? Yeah. Um there's things you can do with horror. So monsters justify and require extreme measures. So you could, you know, have extreme measures. It it also um discussed justifies an it requires a response. Discuss requires a response. You can't just kind of go, "Oh, I don't like that." You've got to kind of go wash your mouth out with soap, you know, like it's it's intense sort of thing. So, there's an intensity there. There's things that we can and also monster versus monster. So, corporation versus corporation. Anyway, there's things you can do with horror, but one of our arguments is that we need to rejig criminal law and expand the categories and actually think about, well, what does it mean if there's a corporate perpetrator? So we've got a system that's geared for individuals who are small change seriously compared to the kind of harms that corporations are committing. Yeah. And we also have some more particular questions for people who want to be challenged. Um but Anthea, Anthea is lurking. No, no, no. They we'll just leave those up to inspire people if if anyone has any questions or anything. Yep. Yeah. Thank you. Oh, should I put the Oh, yeah. Wait, wait, there's one more. So, your all struggling students. It's hard cover and it's a $300 at the moment. So, but we've got a voucher. 

20% off a $300 book is actually pretty good. Like 60 bucks. You save. 

So, we brought some vouchers in, but um yeah, no pressure. Does anyone have any questions? Oh, is in charge. You're in charge. 

Yeah. Um, aside from I think Yeah. Great. Um, aside from obviously all these horrible harms that are just on an inconceivable scale, what sort of inspired you both to come together and produce outside of like sort of the obvious, but like the underlying motivation for you both in writing this. We love horror, but like um I'm an expert in suffering and he's an expert in evil. So, so I used to focus on individual perpetrators and then when the Royal Commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse occurred, I was an expert witness and I was really thinking about well why are sex offenders in particular organizations operating successfully for so many years and not in others? And I, I that was when I started thinking about the bystanders and the organizations. Um, and I started kind of thinking there's something really wrong here in our focus because, and that was the thing with the Royal Commission, like I read a lot of crime, but when I was reading the Royal Commission, it was sickening because it was like if just one person had done their job, you know, and and if the structures had been up set up better, then this perpetrator would not have got away with it, you know, or they wouldn't even have been employed in the first place kind of thing. And so that was when I started thinking on an organizational level. Um, and yeah, and Honni and I, we both love horror. Uh, but yeah, there was definitely, so Honni is more torts than I'm um crime and and it does, it just felt like our attention, it almost feels like a slate of hand or a glamour. Like why don't we see corporate harms? Like it's so bizarre. And why do we use and and academics are guilty of it too? We use so Woolworths and coles are charged with some like random regulatory offense when they're committing fraud, you know, and the banks, you know, fees for no service, fraud, you know, and Yeah. So anyway, yeah. Did you want more? Yeah, I want to say more. Yeah. I think that's like I think we both feel this kind of absolutely disgust which is something that we write about in the book um about that disproportionality that you know if you think of the way in which people are criminalized in Australia you know especially if you're outside the majority if you're non-white if you're vulnerable like like there's so you know shoplifting I can't tell you how much on because I'm a parent now my mother's groups and I hear about people witnessing shoplifting and being, you know, like just our um it's a cultural thing as well, right? Like that we had this idea of the thief who's ripping us all off and, and yet coles and woolworths, you know, banks, like we're just getting don't want to pick on Coles or woolworths. No, I'm joking. I just looked at you in horror. So I I think there's this sense that you know the wrong people and you know I I think this is quite a common feeling but we just kind of or you know actually what is horrific are these corporate harms that we've been trained not to see and that the law doesn't really adequately see and maybe the horror genre could actually teach law how to see it in any way which is kind of our evangelical kind of um message that that Yeah. Yeah. And, and part of it is actually talking to students and, and trying to get people to think differently and notice the elephant in the room, you know, like and it's almost this sense, you know, corporations are so massive and we know about the harms. We know about them and yet we don't, you know, like and law is complicit. So Dreamworld, they were charged with three breach of safety offenses rather than manslaughter. They should be charged with manslaughter or even murder. Yeah. For example, I have a question, but I will not um be ahead of the student. We have some questions from online. Great. 

Okay. Oh, lots of questions here. Okay. So, uh we have over 40 people joining us online. So, welcome to everyone there. And Harriet H has asked you a question which is, so, you're embedding or transferring the horror framework in corporate harm to explore and investigate and analyze the harm to the audience. Um she says so the sentiment entities is the culture of the workplace manifest uh so the sentiment entities is is it the culture of the workplace manifested? I mean it could be but yeah we do, we do focus, um, some of the time on horror, horror's effect on the body of the audience. Um uh and because that's part of it is that it's acting through your bodies and and so then we kind of talk about how corporate harm ,like so horror, reminds you, you have a body, right? That you're not safe. Like we want to walk through the world. It's so weird having done this because then you start going, "Oh, that's not safe. That's not “anyway. You can't live like that. But um horror is kind of like, there's horror movies where you know the water is contaminated and you're just waiting for the person to drink the water and are they going to become a zombie or cabin fever, you know, that kind of thing. Um and so there's that kind of acting through it um aspect of horror. Another aspect of horror is the evil corporation um aspect and that was something that really came to the four in terms of the temporal spatial aspect and and so we I was talking about like vampires you know when everyone knows they're a vampire they kind of relocate to somewhere where no one knows they're vampires but you also have evil corporations kind of relocating um or sending people out to dangerous places and things like that so that that kind of um knowing being wrongdoing and things like that. So, yeah, the sentient entity also comes in too. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry, I feel like you've got like a list of questions now. And so, yeah, but I'll see if anyone else in the room has a question before we go back online. Yeah. 

Hello. Um, I was wondering when you've said a solution would be to expand our existing laws with the Phoenix issue that a CEO or a board could come and go and change, how would you, what, what was your view on how the laws would expand? Like who would you hold accountable if the company's different and the people are different? 

I've got ideas. We both got ideas. Yeah. Yeah. funny gets with am I speaking too loudly on the microphone? Great. Okay, good. All right. Um well, I mean I also think this is um a question for you guys as the young generation of lawyers. Um and we're both critical legal theorists. So we don't accept the law as it is. We're kind of like liberal law, whatever. It wasn't made for us. Like it wasn't made for the majority of people who live in Australia today. It's not our law. So, we were always encouraging our students to be more radical and more creative. Um, there's a lot we can do with legislation. Um, why can't we hold the past individuals responsible? Why can't we confiscate assets? Why can't we like, like um claw it back from shareholders? I mean, think about what they do to individuals in criminal law. They'll take your assets. Um, they'll trace things through like they'll, they'll get all your networks. Um it's just kind of applying I think it's just a sort of failure of will, as, as well as imagination. Yeah. I think, um, I phrase it slightly different from Honni. I ,actually, I mean you know I love criminal law. Um and I, I'm a big believer in doing, using classic law to do radical things. And so I feel like uh so that's actually my project at the moment is working through murder and a corporate example um and just kind of thinking well why isn't this murder like what what's in the way and what is it like and for most of this situation, not, not much is in the way in relation to cor that corporate identity issue. One of the things that we forget is that you know if the corporation continues on but you've got different directors along the way the corporation can still be responsible as an entity right and that's something there is some interesting stuff then about what if the corporation changes there's some interesting child sexual abuse cases where you know I would say that the corporation has radically changed from how it was historically and you should take that into account for example. But yeah, I'd be interested. Uh yeah, and the corporate law, the subsidiary thing is very poorly handled. Like I feel like corporate law is in the way of criminal responsibility. Like corporate law is about protecting the corporation. And so for me, I'm like, well, what happens if we disregard corporate law and criminal law should win? Criminal law should apply to everyone, right? So why isn't it? So there's ways around a lot of these questions. Although I will say a lot of corporate law people go a little bit nuts when I speak like that. So yeah, thank you. Um we have a question online from Vanessa Kite and I'm going to add my question on to the end of Vanessa's because they're connected. Um Vanessa says a wonderful and nuanced talk which I would agree with. Uh and considering all the research you have done, do you have any ideas how to hold corporations accountable? So you've just spoken about that to some extent. Building on that question, I wondered there are, I guess, some exceptions to corporations being held accountable to some degree, even if not directly via the criminal law. I wondered if horror when you look to horror uh and the genre, where are the examples of kind of accountability or responsibility or does the genre kind of offer instances where there is some sense of accountability for what is seen as horrific or the monster or the kind of transgression where there is yeah a sense of responsibility or punishment that comes through um and could we learn from it? Wonderful. Um that's a nuanced question. Uh yeah, one of the things that we look at is whether it's extralegal or legal. Um, so often the killing the monster is a distraction almost in horror we argue. Um a lot of the time um and and killing the monster is really cathartic. Um the way that you tend to deal with evil corporations in horror is the face of the corporation is killed. usually in a rough justice kind of way. So if they've been protecting an alien, then the alien eats them, you know, like that kind of classic. And they do it in kids movies, I watch a lot, we, we watch a lot of kids movies too. Um and so that one's quite interesting because that's directing mindrop doctrine. The idea that if you get rid of the CEO, I mean it doesn't have to be the CEO in horror. quite often it is but isn't always that if you get rid of the CEO then the whole corporation will change kind of you know as a consequence um where whereas the corporation then continues on regard so in in fact horror portrays a very realistic and depressing uh situation where the corporation continues and there is no justice and and so one theorist talks about horror as what we can't think about. That horror is about the unthinkable and what is unthinkable for law and what is unthinkable for horror is justice for corporations but we can change that. 

Um so the house of Usher which looks at Oxycontin, the Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family. So um as I mentioned they they take um Alan Poe's short stories and kind of do an episode on each really what we get is kind of uh revenge tragedy as the genre and essentially something like natural justice right so it's about um each of the individuals in the family is individually and proportionately punished according to their own sins. So, it's it's sort of an interesting argument, but there's definitely punishes. Some people might say excessive punishment. Um, but that's part of the genre as well, right? Like it's not proportionate. It's not liberal legality. Um, and so it's a that's a really interesting series if you're looking at what does punishment look like when because there's one scene, for example, when one of the the villains, one of the Sacklers, I can't remember what they call them, but they're the Sacklers. He's standing at a corporate window and there are just like these bodies falling down to kind of show like all the thousands like uncountable thousands that have been killed and he could he couldn't care less. So, um, and then he's punished quite satisfyingly for them. 

We potentially have time for one more short question if there's one in the room. I think part of the problem is we answer long like a lecturer problem. We just talk. If there isn't another question, we're almost on five o'clock, so we will wrap up. Um it's been a real pleasure to talk about um corporate harms and horror. And um one of the pleasures of today I think is it's really great for you as the student body to hear from the people who lecture you potentially on um priestly 11 subjects and you don't get a sense of the research you do. So we're really grateful to Honni and Penny for coming to join us to talk about um their research and taking some time out of the busy start of the teaching session. Before we wrap up officially, I have some Brennan justice uh events for the rest of this session to promote to you. Um the first one is our next Brennan justice talk which will be part of law, tech and social justice week. Uh it our guest speaker is uh Professor Dastyari and she'll be talking about digital inclusion as the key to democracy. Uh and that's on the 31st of August at 6 p.m. and that one will be online only. And then we have coming up the very exciting live stream of the law tech challenge. Um it's the grand final. So probably some of your friends uh have been competing in that and it'll be a face off between all of the apps that they've created and the winner will be announced. Uh so inviting everyone to join us for that on the 19th August at 6 PM um uh to see the outcome of this year's Law Tech Challenge. And that brings us to the end of uh this horror show. The book is in the library. Uh but if you purchase the book, Honni and I will sign it for free. And is there an ebook in the library? Amazon ebook. There's an ebook. So there's lots of opportunities to uh read the book uh if you don't set foot in the library, which some of my students tell me they don't. And um follow up with Penny and Honni also in their elective subjects. Um and yeah, I'm teaching law and literature in the summer probably. Yeah, you're teaching. You're not teaching. Wickedness is running without me. Wickedness and Vice. Wickedness and Vice. If you're interested in these topics, this advice is running, but Penny won't be there. So, thank you everyone for coming. Thank you everyone online.