Entrapped in Territoriality: The Alien Tort Statute, Daimler v. Bauman and the Transnational Mode of Production

Abstract

This paper elaborates on the voluminous literature on the Alien Tort Statute (ATS) and looks at the Statute through the prism of Political Economy and the state-capital nexus. In particular, it tries to locate the recent decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in Daimler v. Bauman within the theoretical framework depicted by the French geographer Henri Lefebvre and by Van Apeldoorn et. al. Adopting the Lefebvrian notion of the “State Mode of Production,” the global system or production is defined around the centrality of the State apparatus in the production, adjustment, protection and internationalization of capital. The adjudication of corporate misconducts, i.e. the exercise of public authority against transnational corporations, certainly has an impact on this nexus. On the other hand, when authority and legal procedure are utilized to deny jurisdiction over transnational corporations, it protects private accumulation and the dispossession of public goods, and the pendulum shifts in the opposite direction.