Publications

Book chapter | Peer reviewed

The exercise of corporate office ↗

by Timothy Peters

2026
Law, Ethics, and the Office of the Jurist

Much work on holding corporations to account has focused on the nature of the role of directors and their duty to act in the best interests of the corporation. In particular, critiques of the best interests of the corporation as being purely attached to profit or shareholder-value maximisation have called for a broader understanding of the interest of the corporation to include social purpose and the interests of stakeholders. Such calls often propose to adjust the ends to which corporations are put whilst sustaining the underlying form of the corporation and do not interrogate the nature of the director as an office itself. This chapter seeks to provide an account of the exercise of corporate office by directors, raising questions about whether the concerns around corporate irresponsibility are tied more fundamentally to the institutional form that the corporation encompasses—including its governance by officers. First, the chapter traces the genealogy of modern directors’ duties to the oaths of office sworn by officeholders of the imperial trading companies and the later association of the director as a form of office in the seminal case of Charitable Corporation v Sutton. Second, it situates contemporary debates over the ‘purpose’ fo the corporation in relation to a ‘jurisdictional account’ of the board of directors. Finally, it turns from a consideration of the ‘duties’ of corporate office to a thicker notion of obligation within whicih corporations are always-already situated.

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Journal article | Peer reviewed

Benchmarks for Australian Law Researchers’ H-Index and Citation Count Bibliometrics ↗

by Timothy D Peters and Kieran Tranter

2025
Law, Technology and Humans

This article reports on Australian-based law researchers’ bibliometric measures, as recorded on Google Scholar in September 2024. It presents benchmark findings by academic position for H-index and raw citation count. In the context of the shift towards—and the need for—more nuanced and sophisticated research assessment measures, this article provides guidance to the Australian legal academy on Australian-specific data in relation to existing bibliometric measures. At the same time, it acknowledges the significant limits of using Google Scholar as a repository and the use of bibliometric measures more generally. It therefore reflects on ways of living with bibliometrics in the context of the neoliberal university and digital capitalism.   Disclosure Statement: The first author serves as an Editor for Law, Technology and Humans. To maintain the integrity of the publication process and to comply with the COPE guidelines, the article submission, blind peer review, and revisions were conducted independently of the Journal’s publishing environment.

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Book chapter | Peer reviewed

Corporate Office, Corporate Irresponsibility and the Constitutive Vicariousness of Corporate Power ↗

by Timothy Peters

2025
Evil Corporations: Law, Culpability and Regulation

This chapter develops a theory of ‘corporate office’ that understands the exercise of corporate power as constitutively vicarious – always exercised on behalf of another – and, therefore, never fully reducible or attributable to a particular agent or actor. This constitutive vicariousness gives rise to a structural irresponsibility at the core of the corporate form, which the attempts to impose corporate responsibility consistently come up against. This is because, when acting on behalf of a corporation, an individual's personal responsibility is separated from the ultimate effects of the actions taken, emphasising instead the fulfilment of the duties and requirements of the role or office to be performed.

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Book chapter | Peer reviewed

Political theology, 1001 cars long: Emblems of corporate sovereignty in Netflix's Snowpiercer ↗

by Timothy D. Peters and Thomas Giddens

2025
Science Fiction as Legal Imaginary

This chapter reads the first season of Netflix's Snowpiercer as an exercise in political theology. Specifically, it argues that the season demonstrates the hermeneutic quality of political power: that the sovereign appears - and only ever appears - through its signs and symbols. The absent space of power remains absent, just as Mr Wilford remains absent from the train he created. Through exemplary analysis of key features of the first season's depiction of the train Snowpiercer (its use of corporate emblems, corporal and mirroring structures and punitive rituals) it is argued that Snowpiercer signals the repetition of tired political tropes and forms beyond their apparent collapse in the face of the climate apocalypse. This undermines science fiction's seeming potential to reimagine legal form and suggests instead a need for the self-conscious management of, or 'working with', inherited traditions of power.

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Journal article | Peer reviewed

On 'Divine Democracy' and 'Corporate Bodies' ↗

by Timothy Peters

2024
Etica e Politica

This essay seeks to draw from Miguel Vatter's Divine Democracy: Political Theology after Carl Schmitt some implications for thinking about the legitimacy of corporate power. It takes up the trajectory of Vatter's argument about the significance of the theory of representation for political theology and his placing of Carl Schmitt in relation to the pluralist thinkers of corporate bodies on the one hand, and the centrality of corporate personhood to Ernst Kantorowicz's genealogy of liberal governmentality on the other. In doing so, I hope to highlight some of Vatter's novel contributions to the field of political theology, whilst also drawing out the usefulness of his work for thinking critically about corporate power and its legitimacy as parallel questions to the concerns with contemporary state power.

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Grants

19 June 2024 - 21 August 2024

SPARK Essence of Research Leadership Program Silvia Tavares

University of the Sunshine Coast (Australia, Sunshine Coast) - UniSC
Grant no. 0980029361.

Silvia Tavares and Timothy Peters

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3 February 2020 - 31 December 2023

New Approaches to Corporate Legality: Beyond Neoliberal Governance.

Australian Research Council (Australia, Canberra) - ARC
Grant no. DE200100881.

Timothy Peters

Teaching

• Law and Criminology

Course leader

• LAW100 Introduction to Law
• LAW108 Law and Society

Program coordinator

• Bachelor of Laws
• Bachelor of Laws / Bachelor of Arts

Supervision

Doctoral Thesis Supervision - Completed

Cultural Legalities of the Corporation in Science Fiction: Biopolitics, Technology, Data ↗

Students: Jordan Belor

Associated Researchers: Timothy Peters, Dale Mitchell and Ashley Pearson

2021 - 20 May 2026

This thesis engages in a cultural legal analysis of the corporate form. More specifically, it analyses the intersections between the corporation and technology through a critical reading of a series of science fiction texts. Central to each of these readings is an understanding of the corporation’s reliance upon, and deployment of, digital data. In engaging in its cultural legal readings, the thesis takes-up and draws upon the theories of biopolitics, applying them specifically to the corporate form and its use and abuse of technology and data. What this highlights is not only the ‘impactful’ nature of the corporation—both the benefits and harms they cause—but how such an entity collects, manipulates and deploys data in the name of improving overall quality of life, whilst producing multiple externalities and subordinating life to its own profitability and continuity. The thesis engages in four readings of science-fiction texts: Marvel’s WandaVision (2021); a modern adaptation of Phillip K Dick’s Autofac (2018); Netflix’s Altered Carbon (2018); and Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One (2018). Each of these readings, take-up and critically analyses a key aspect of the corporate form: corporate identity, corporate personality, perpetual succession as a form of immortality, and corporate ownership—both of and by the corporation. At the same time, each of the texts look to the way in which a certain technology or technological development represents or alters the traditional understanding of these features of the corporation: the way a synthetic person challenges questions of identity metaphysics that undergird the corporate form; how automated corporations resituate debates over corporate purpose; the way visions of technologically-enabled human immortality question the need for corporate perpetual succession; and whether forms of virtual property and virtual worlds provide a critique of the ownership of corporate persons. What ties each of these readings together is the way in which both contemporary developments—and the speculative future envisionings in the cultural texts—reveal the corporation’s reliance upon, and manipulation of, digital data. The ownership, control and manipulation of data has become essential to the corporation’s survival while positioning the representation and image of the human person as ancillary or subordinate to its image. This focus on the capturing of the human within the digital, that is then controlled and manipulated by corporate entities, situates the thesis within the field of biopolitics—a rendering of the human as only that which is observable, measurable, datafiable and caught within the web of corporate control. That is, the human legal subject has become a site or source of data for the corporation, which is then deployed for its owned continuity and profitability. As such, this thesis interrogates the corporation’s use of legal devices where, on the surface, it improves quality of life, but in actuality captures life only to reproduce it as artificial. The goal of transforming life into something resembling anything artificial is central to this thesis’ inquiry to understand our current experiences as well as our possible futures with the corporation. As such, this thesis explores representations of the corporate form in science fiction which offers a series of possible futures to observe the plasticity of the corporate form and how we engage with it. This thesis becomes a jurisprudential anthology on legal relations between the artificial and the natural, persons and things, reality and imaginary, and the corporation and the human. With each substantive chapter, the thesis engages with possible futures that illustrate the corporation’s ability to create, produce, use, own and control artificial life, placing itself as the apotheosis of this legal and unescapable artificial reality where even death is simply a datafiable event. This thesis’ critical analysis on each of these science fiction texts interrogates the corporate form’s plasticity in possible futures where fantasised technologies become reality and its artificiality affects law, life, and culture. In particular, this thesis engages with both the theoretical understandings of corporate jurisprudence ranging from biopolitics to data while also aligning that with how they are reimagined in popular culture. As such each of the substantive chapters reveal different aspects of the corporation reliance on humanity in form and substance that cannot be ignored. By interrogating the corporate form in contexts that do not yet materially exist, they have afforded an opportunity to examine the interconnections between the schools of biopolitics, cultural legal studies, law and technology (including data), law and film, personhood, metaphysics, and corporate jurisprudence. By bringing these schools together in this cultural legal exploration, the violence embedded within biopolitics not only forms at the centre of each text it also serves as a testament. This testament is that each point text reveals that artificiality is used in both a means to deliver violence as a means of control, but also one of relations. That is, artificiality at its core directly implicates and amplifies the way that technology—both mechanical and legal—influences the way that persons interact with each other and the law.

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Doctoral Thesis Supervision - Completed

The Imperatives of Prudence and Responsible Investing: A critical analysis of the legal and ethical duties of a prudent superannuation fund manager. ↗

Students: John Cronin

Associated Researchers: Timothy Peters and Jay Sanderson

2019 - 22 April 2026

This study fills a current gap in the literature by advancing a new and substantive prudential approach to investment decision-making for superannuation fund managers that considers the impact of their investing decisions on the social, political, and ecological exigencies that will shape the future of humankind and the stewardship of the biosphere that supports it. It brings together doctrinal and socio-legal analysis of the Australian superannuation system with the philosophical-ethical theory of Hans Jonas to propose an investment decisionmaking process that is consistent with the exercise of the care, skill, and diligence of a prudent superannuation fund manager acting in the best financial interests of the fund’s membership. The Australian superannuation guarantee system and its regulatory framework support a multi-trillion-dollar collective investment pool of investible capital that continues to grow at a considerable pace. Superannuation fund managers are responsible for making decisions on how their fund’s capital should be invested. In doing so, they are required to exercise the care, skill, and diligence of a prudent superannuation fund manager acting in the best financial interests of the fund’s membership. But their decisions also have the power to impact the social, political, and ecological exigencies that will shape the future of humankind and the biosphere that supports it. Hans Jonas observed that ‘[c]are for the future of [hu]mankind is the overruling duty of collective human action in the age of a technical civilisation that has become “almighty”, if not in its productive then at least in its destructive potential’. (Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technology Age, The University of Chicago Press, 1984, 136.) Perhaps nowhere is that destructive potential more evident than in the power afforded to superannuation fund managers to invest trillions of dollars of member entitlements on behalf of a cohort of largely conscripted superannuation fund members. At the time of the introduction of the superannuation guarantee, the esteemed British jurist Lord Browne-Wilkinson speaking at the February 1992 Australian National Conference for Lawyers on Superannuation noted that the way in which funds are invested can have ‘a critical impact not only on the members but also on the welfare of companies in whom the investments are made … and the national economy as a whole’. (Nicholas Browne-Wilkinson, Equity and its Relevance to Superannuation Schemes Today - presentation to the 1992 Superannuation Conference reprinted in M Scott Donald and Lisa Butler Beatty (Eds) The Evolving Role of Trust in Superannuation (The Federation Press, 2017) 64.) Given the now enormous and growing size of the investible pool of superannuation member entitlements, that observation can be extended to the global economy and indeed to the permanence of humankind and the biosphere that supports it. This study highlights the current state of legal indeterminacy in superannuation law in respect of what it means for a superannuation fund manager to make prudent investing decisions in the best financial interests of superannuation fund members.3 It distinguishes previous determinations of prudence and best interests. It proposes an interpretation of the role of a prudent superannuation fund manager grounded in the social purpose for which the superannuation system was introduced. It shows that, in making investing decisions, superannuation fund managers have an obligation to act in accordance with Jonas’ imperative that the effects of their actions are compatible with the permanence of genuine human life and the protection of humankind and the biosphere that supports it to that end. It endorses the application of investment ethics to propose a foundational ethical framework for an ethics of investment that is grounded in Jonas’ categorical imperative. It provides substantive guidance on how to act according to those principles and how to apply those principles to everyday investing decisions. Superannuation fund managers can, and should, adopt a new and substantive prudential approach to investment decision-making that incorporates ethical considerations and emphasises the importance of considering social and environmental impacts alongside financial returns. It argues for an ethics of investment and a supporting legal regime that acknowledges and legitimises the influence of prudent superannuation fund managers’ investing decisions on the future of humankind and the biosphere that supports it.

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Thesis Supervision - Completed

Exceptionality, Neoliberalism and Corporations in COVID Times: JobKeeper and the legal shaping of economic order in crisis ↗

Students: Vincent Goding

Associated Researchers: Ashley Pearson and Timothy Peters

2021 - 2024

This thesis argues that the shaping of economic order in crisis is contingent upon both exceptional and normative forms of legal power and the interaction of these forms. It argues that extraordinary economic interventions are made possible by the partial suspension of normative politico-economic order during crisis, which enlivens an exceptional but fundamentally normalising state power. It shows how these exceptional interventions and their outcomes are influenced by their interaction with other elements of normative order which continue to function despite the crisis. Specifically, it demonstrates how extraordinary economic measures intended to stabilise and shape economic order during crisis depend upon and are influenced by an intimate relation between the institutions of the state, law and the corporation. This thesis makes these conclusions via a critical analysis of the Australian Commonwealth Government’s JobKeeper wage subsidy scheme, examining it through a theoretical lens which brings together Carl Schmitt’s theory of the state of exception and critical accounts of neoliberalism.

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Doctoral Thesis Supervision - Current

Regulating Corporate Technologies: Feminist Perspectives, Critiques and Possibilities

Students: Research student (name withheld)

Associated Researchers: Timothy Peters, Ashley Pearson and Naomi Smith

2024

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Doctoral Thesis Supervision - Current

The Grammar of Judicial Bias: A comparative analysis of the lexical qualification of Judicial Impartiality in the Australian Judicial Systems.

Students: Research student (name withheld)

Associated Researchers: Alessandro Pelizzon and Timothy Peters

2024

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Student research opportunities

Opportunites can be listed here

Professional activity

Professional Membership

President - Law, Literature and the Humanities Association of Australasia ↗

Timothy Peters

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Professional Membership

Management Committee Member - Society of Corporate Law Academics ↗

Timothy Peters

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Professional Membership

Member - Asian Law and Society Association ↗

Timothy Peters

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Professional Membership

Member - Law and Society Association of Australia and New Zealand ↗

Timothy Peters

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Editorial

Editorial Board - TechnNomos: Law, Technology and Culture Book Series, Routledge ↗

Timothy Peters

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