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.

中文翻译：

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重复参与者，法律和社会变革：通过先发制人和专制的合法性重新定义环境和劳动治理的边界

强大的公司利用法律来塑造其运营所在的监管环境。实现这一目标的关键策略是诉讼。我问公司在什么条件下提起诉讼，特别是当两个重复参与者，跨国农业综合企业和地方政府在法庭上面对面时会发生什么。我比较了两个案例的结果，即夏威夷和智利的阿里卡，这些案例记录了不同的社会政治背景和法律制度如何塑造行为者如何参与法律。对公司经理，工会，政府官员，律师和辩护组织负责人的访谈以及文件分析表明，公司利用现有的机构规范和政治来确定其本地化的法律策略。通过战略法制这是一种以结果为导向，针对特定环境的防御性法律策略，公司可以实现法律合规性并对其反对派进行政治遏制。在夏威夷，公司依靠先发制人的合法性，这种策略将诸如农药安全之类的有争议问题从民主政治的一个领域转移到了另一个基本上无可争议的领域，因为它被上级当局抢占了。在智利，公司使用威权主义合法性，这是一种利用州内的专制结构和政策来摇摆法律结果的方法。这些案例揭示了公司通过法律将其权力优势制度化的机制，为未来的学者提供了一种类型，以更好地了解公司的战略行为如何塑造监管成果。