Corporate killing law reform: A spatio-temporal fix to a crisis of capitalism?

Abstract

The first decade of the new millennium saw the governments of Canada and the United Kingdom enact criminal legislation intended to hold corporations accountable for negligently killing workers and/or members of the public. Drawing empirically from document analyses and semistructured interviews, as well as theoretical insights concerning the crisis-prone tendencies of capital, this article demonstrates how both laws were conceived in ways that spatio-temporally delimited the ‘problem’ of corporate killing and re-secured the (neoliberal) capitalist status quo. In so doing, we argue that the inability of the state to hold powerful corporations and corporate actors to account for their serious offending presents strategic opportunities for demanding improved accountability measures and changes to a system responsible for so much bloodshed and killing.