Brennan Program Justice Talk 2026 #3 When Corporations Harm

Join Professor Penny Crofts and Associate Professor Honni van Rijswijk for a discussion about their new book, which argues that the harms caused by corporations generate a category crisis for criminal law. Corporate harms raise categorical challenges because they are beyond the imagination of the criminal law in terms of magnitude, size, type, and quality. Drawing on criminal law, criminology, cultural legal studies, and horror as both genre and affect, Corporate Harms reconceptualises corporate harm through the lens of horror. It argues that corporate violence is structurally horrific in its scale, temporality, spatial reach, ordinariness, and institutional betrayal. 

Case study

The Sackler-led opioid crisis: Purdue Pharma aggressively marketed OxyContin while allegedly minimising addiction risks, even as overdose deaths mounted across decades and communities were hollowed out by dependency, grief, and economic collapse. The crisis reveals how corporations can generate mass death through ordinary commercial practices while dispersing responsibility across marketing departments, regulatory failures, medical systems, and legal settlements. Purdue transformed something ostensibly beneficial and trustworthy into a source of contamination and death; medicine itself, which should function as care and protection, became uncanny and threatening. The horror lies not only in the scale of suffering, but in the recognition that the systems ostensibly designed to protect the public instead facilitated, absorbed, and normalised the violence as a cost of doing business.

The event is open to all UTS Law students.

This talk will be delivered in a hybrid mode via Zoom webinar or the Postgraduate Law Student Lounge (CB02.14.130). 

In-person registration

Zoom Webinar registration