This presentation examines Brazil's pioneering 1937 law holding parent companies liable for their subsidiaries' labor obligations—a response to concerns about foreign corporate groups evading responsibilities toward local workers. The research reveals how nationalism and the geographic divide between capital and labor have shaped corporate law evolution, challenging conventional narratives about limited liability and showing a broader trend toward eroding corporate separateness to protect workers, particularly in the Global South. The topic gains contemporary relevance through Brazil's 2024 Supreme Court decision applying this doctrine to freeze Starlink's assets to enforce orders against Elon Musk's X platform
Speaker
Mariana Pargendler, Beneficial Professor of Law, Harvard Law School.
Moderated by Steven Levitsky, Professor of Government, Harvard University; Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. Alisha Holland, Gates Professor of Developing Societies, Government Department, Harvard University. Frances Hagopian, Jorge Paulo Lemann Senior Lecturer on Government, Harvard University.
About the Speaker
Mariana Pargendler is the Beneficial Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Her scholarship focuses on corporate law, corporate governance, and contract law from economic and comparative perspectives. Before joining Harvard Law School, she served as Professor of Law at FGV Law School in São Paulo, Brazil, where she also directed the Center for Law, Economics, and Governance. She holds LL.M. and J.S.D. degrees from Yale Law School and LL.B. and PhD degrees from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil.
About the Moderator
Steven Levitsky is David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Government, Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard. He is also a Senior Democracy Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a Senior Fellow at the Kettering Foundation. His research focuses on democracy and authoritarianism, political parties, weak and informal institutions, and most recently, the crisis of democracy in the United States. He and Daniel Ziblatt are authors of How Democracies Die, which was a New York Times best-seller and was published in 30 languages, and Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point. Levitsky has written or edited 11 other books, including Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America: Argentine Peronism in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press 2003), Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (with Lucan Way) (Cambridge University Press, 2010), and Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism (with Lucan Way) (Princeton University Press, 2022). He and Lucan Way are currently writing a book on the sources of global democratic resilience in the 21st Century.
Alisha Holland is the Gates Professor of Developing Societies in the Department of Government at Harvard University. Her research examines the comparative political economy of development, with a focus on urban politics, social policy, and Latin America. She is the author of Forbearance as Redistribution: The Politics of Informal Welfare in Latin America (Cambridge University Press), which explores state enforcement practices around property law violations such as squatting, street vending, and electricity theft. Her current book project studies the politics of large infrastructure projects in Latin America. Holland’s broader interests include law, migration, crime control, subnational governance, and corruption. Before joining the Harvard faculty, she was an Assistant Professor at Princeton University and a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. She holds an A.B. from Princeton University and a Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University.
Frances Hagopian is Jorge Paulo Lemann Senior Lecturer on Government at Harvard University. She specializes in the comparative politics of Latin America, with emphasis on democratization, political representation, political economy, and religion and politics. She is the author of Reorganizing Representation in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and Traditional Politics and Regime Change in Brazil (Cambridge University Press, 1996), and editor or co-editor of several volumes, including Religious Pluralism, Democracy, and the Catholic Church in Latin America (University of Notre Dame Press, 2009) and The Third Wave of Democratization in Latin America: Advances and Setbacks (Cambridge University Press, 2005, with Scott Mainwaring). Her current research focuses on the development of social welfare regimes in Brazil and the political economy of inequality in Latin America. Hagopian has previously taught at the University of Notre Dame, Tufts University, and Harvard, and has held visiting positions at the London School of Economics, MIT, and Nuffield College, Oxford.