Debadatta Bose (University of California, Berkeley – School of Law) has posted The Tort of Irresponsible Contracting: Supply Chain Liability Explained Through Begum v Maran (Forthcoming in Cambridge Handbook on Law and Responsible Business (Cambridge University Press, 2025)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This book chapter challenges the notion that business decisions are isolated from human rights considerations. It places a large emphasis on the UK case of Begum v Maran, where a corporation was held potentially liable in tort for harms in a Bangladeshi shipyard where a ship it sold ended up for demolition. The case introduces a principle of Global Value Chain (GVC) liability, scrutinizing ordinary business dealings as decisions that affect human rights beyond the bilateralism of contracts. As in demonstrated in this chapter, Begum drifts away from the interpretation in US and UK case law that contracts are exclusively bilateral and economic instruments. The argument of the chapter is two-pronged: that irresponsible contracting is a tortious act, and the fact that it is tortious means that contracting itself is circumscribed by tort law.