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Repeat Players, the Law, and Social Change: Redefining the Boundaries of Environmental and Labor Governance Through Preemptive and Authoritarian Legality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Annabel Ipsen
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Abstract

Powerful corporations leverage the law to shape the regulatory environments in which they operate. A key strategy for achieving this is litigation. I ask under what conditions corporations litigate, and specifically, what happens when two repeat players, transnational agribusiness firms and local governments, face each other in court. I compare outcomes of two cases—Hawaii and Arica, Chile—documenting how different sociopolitical contexts and legal systems shape how actors engage the law. Interviews with firm managers, unions, government officials, lawyers, and advocacy organization leaders and document analysis reveal that firms seize on existing institutional norms and politics to define their localized legal strategies. Through strategic legalism, a defensive legal strategy that is outcome-oriented and context-specific, firms accomplish legal compliance and political containment of their opposition. In Hawaii, firms rely on preemptive legality, a strategy that moves controversial issues like pesticide safety from one domain of democratic politics to another that is largely incontestable because it is preempted by a higher authority. In Chile, firms use authoritarian legality, an approach that draws on authoritarian structures and policies within the state, to sway legal outcomes. These cases reveal the mechanisms that corporations draw on to institutionalize their power advantages through the law, offering a typology for future scholars to better understand how the strategic behavior of corporations shapes regulatory outcomes.

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Articles
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Law & Society Review , Volume 54 , Issue 1 , March 2020 , pp. 201 - 232
Copyright
© 2020 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

I would like to thank Sida Liu, Joe Conti, Jane Collins, and Alexandra Huneeus for commenting on earlier drafts of this article. A special thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and the editors for their guidance. I take sole responsibility for any errors. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under Dissertation Improvement Grant number 1334375; the Robert F. and Jean E. Holtz Center for Science & Technology Studies; the Latin American, Caribbean, and Iberian Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; and the Graduate School and the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with funding from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.

References

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