Corporate Attribution in Private Law

by Rachel Leow

Looking at key questions of how companies are held accountable under private law, this book presents a succinct and accessible framework for analysing and answering corporate attribution problems in private law.

Corporate attribution is the process by which the acts and states of mind of human individuals are treated as those of a company to establish the company's rights, duties, and liabilities. But when and why are acts and states of mind attributed in private law?

Drawing on a wide range of material from across the disparate areas of company law, agency law, and the laws of contract, tort, unjust enrichment, and equitable obligations, this book's central argument is that attribution turns on the allocation and delegation of the company's own powers to act. This approach allows for a much greater and clearer understanding of attribution. A further benefit is that it shows attribution to be much more united and coherent than it is commonly thought to be. Looking at corporate attribution across the broad expanse of the common law, this book will be of interest to lawyers across the common law world, including the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and Singapore.

280 pages, Hardcover

Published February 24, 2022

About the author

Rachel Leow is a university lecturer in Modern East Asian History at the University of Cambridge. She received two full Ph.D. scholarships from the Bill and Melinda Gates Scholarship Foundation and from the Tunku Abdul Rahman Scholarship Fund at St Catharine's College, Cambridge. She was subsequently appointed as a Prize Fellow for the inaugural Prize Fellowships in Economics, Politics and History at Harvard University, Massachusetts.

Dr. Leow's research is broadly concerned with the social, cultural and intellectual links between China and Chinese communities in maritime Southeast Asia, especially Malaysia and Singapore; with British imperialism in Asia; and with histories of ideas beyond Europe. Her work strives to be sensitive to the complex transformations of ideas and identities in motion. Her earliest research sought to understand the mutations and idiosyncrasies of Chinese practices of female domestic servitude in their Southeast Asian contexts. She is the author of Taming Babel: Language in the making of Malaya, which addresses the construction and disciplining of Chineseness and Malayness across the colonial and postcolonial transition.