Abstract

There has long been recognition that the criminal legal system has great difficulties in ascribing responsibility to corporations for harms caused and crimes committed. This article turns to the film Aliens (1986) to enrich the corporate criminal law imaginary. This article argues that the film Aliens delivers a complex representation of the evil corporation Weyland Yutani and a depressing, realistic depiction of our (low or lack of) expectations of law and justice for corporations. The film portrays the dehumanizing effect of the corporate form, an entity with legal personality but with almost no interest in humanity except as a means of labor and profit. Aliens depicts the routinization of harms, whereby the harms of Weyland Yutani are rendered banal and normal and not even categorized as criminal but just part of doing business. Despite holding up untrammeled rapacious inhuman exploitativeness for critique, no solution is proffered or even suggested. Aliens bleakly portrays the consequences of the legal failure of imagination in conceptualizing and attributing corporate responsibility. If law continues to regard corporations as monstrous, incomprehensible and capable of great systemic harms, then law can and should import the insights of horror and use extreme measures to resolve the corporation. Alternatively, we can recognize corporations as a fiction of our own creation and move the story and genre of corporations away from horror, and rewrite the corporation.

摘要

长期以来，人们一直认识到，刑事法律制度在将造成的损害和所犯罪行的责任归咎于公司方面存在很大困难。本文借助电影《异形》（1986）来丰富公司刑法的想象。本文认为，电影《异形》对邪恶公司 Weyland Yutani进行了复杂的描绘，并对我们（低或缺乏）对公司法律和正义的期望进行了令人沮丧的现实描绘。这部电影描绘了公司形式的非人性化效果，该实体具有法人资格，但除了作为劳动和利润的手段外，几乎对人性毫无兴趣。外星人描绘了伤害的常规化，因此 Weyland Yutani 的伤害变得平庸和正常，甚至没有被归类为犯罪，而只是做生意的一部分。尽管为批评提出了肆无忌惮的贪婪的非人剥削，但没有提出甚至建议解决方案。外星人黯淡地描绘了在概念化和归因公司责任方面想象力的法律失败的后果。如果法律继续认为公司是可怕的、难以理解的并且能够造成巨大的系统性危害，那么法律可以而且应该引入恐怖的洞察力并使用极端措施来解决公司问题。或者，我们可以将公司视为我们自己创造的虚构，并将公司的故事和类型从恐怖中移开，并重写公司。