7 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2024
    1. Dubbed “litigation terrorism” by Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel prize-winning economist. ISDS is a corporate tribunal system

      for - litigation terrorism - ISDS - corporate tribunal system - Michael Levin - multi-scale competency architecture - example - adjacency - evolutionary biology - corporate law - climate crisis

      adjacency - between - corporate law - climate crisis - evolutionary biology - cultural evolution - adjacency statement - Biologist Michael Levin's multi-scale competency architecture of evolutionary biology seems to apply here - in the field of corporate law - Corporations can be viewed as one level of a social superorganism in a cultural evolution process - Governments can be viewed similiarly, but at a higher level - The ISDS is being weaponized by the same corporations destroying the global environment to combat the enactment of government laws that pose a threat to their livelihood - Hence, the ISDS has been reconfigured to protect the destroyers of the environment so that they can avoid dealing with their unacceptable externalizations - The individual existing at the lower level of the multi-scale competency architecture(the corporation) is battling to survive against the wishes of the higher level individual (the government) in the same multi-scale competency architecture

  2. Jan 2024
  3. Jun 2023
  4. Mar 2023
    1. He said he and Arkush “went through every possible objection” and found no legal barrier for prosecutors to raise criminal charges against companies that he said have lied about their knowledge of the danger of burning fossil fuels. “What’s really probably stopping them is that no one has done it before,” Braman said. “The level of culpability and the extent of the harm is so massive that it’s not the kind of thing that prosecutors are used to prosecuting.”
      • Quote
    1. In addition, at least two justices have ties to the oil industry writ large. Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s father was a Shell attorney for nearly three decades and served in leadership positions with the American Petroleum Institute, and Justice Samuel Alito owns stock in ConocoPhillips and Phillips 66 (Alito recused himself from the Baltimore case but Barrett did not).
      • The supreme court is tilted in favor of the fossil fuel industry through these appointments.
      • The battle to keep fossil fuel litigation away from state courts and in federal court is big oil's attempt to leverage their conservative allies
      • Title: Climate Homicide: Prosecuting Big Oil for Climate Deaths

      • Author:

        • David Arkush
        • Donald Braman
      • Abstract

      • Paraphrase
        • Prosecutors regularly bring homicide charges against individuals and corporations
          • whose reckless or negligent acts or omissions
          • cause unintentional deaths,
          • as well as those whose misdemeanors or felonies cause unintentional deaths.
        • Fossil fuel companies learned decades ago that
          • what they
            • produced,
            • marketed, and
            • sold
          • would generate “globally catastrophic” climate change.
        • Rather than alert the public and curtail their operations,
          • they worked to
            • deceive the public about these harms and
            • to prevent regulation of their lethal conduct.
        • They funded efforts to
          • call sound science into doubt and
          • to confuse their
            • shareholders,
            • consumers, and
            • regulators.
          • poured money into political campaigns to elect or install
            • judges,
            • legislators, and
            • executive officials hostile to any
              • litigation,
              • regulation, or
              • competition
            • that might limit their profits.
        • Today, the climate change that they forecast
          • has already killed thousands of people in the United States,
          • and it is expected to become increasingly lethal for the foreseeable future.
        • Given the
          • extreme lethality of the conduct and
          • the awareness of the catastrophic risk
            • on the part of fossil fuel companies,
            • should they be charged with homicide?
        • Could they be convicted?
        • In answering these questions,
          • this Article makes several contributions to
            • our understanding of criminal law and
            • the role it could play in combating crimes committed at a massive scale.
        • It describes
          • the doctrinal and
          • social predicates of homicide prosecutions
        • where corporate conduct endangers much or all of the public.
        • It also identifies important advantages of
          • homicide prosecutions
          • relative to
            • civil and
            • regulatory remedies,
          • and it details
            • how and
            • why
          • prosecution for homicide may be the most effective legal remedy available in cases like this.
        • Finally, it argues that,
          • if our criminal legal system cannot focus more intently on climate crimes soon
          • we may leave future generations with significantly less for the law to protect.
  5. Oct 2020