Performing Power: The Deal, Corporate Rule, and the Constitution of Global Legal Order

Abstract

This article presents a stylized account of legal work involved in doing a corporate deal transnationally, drawing inspiration from the work of American legal realist, Robert Hale. In so doing, it seeks to show that legal institutions on which transnational corporate power depends are far more plastic, discordant, and irresolute than commonly recorded. By tethering global legal order to the decisive interiority of the transnational corporation, while taking that interior for granted, recent accounts (such as those of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri or A. Claire Cutler) may do more to fortify than query the contemporary ‘rule’ of global capital.