Corporations, comity and the ‘revenue rule’: a jurisprudence of offshore

Abstract

This article contrasts the territorial unboundedness of company law, arising from ‘comity’, with the territorial constraint imposed on tax law i.e. ‘the revenue rule’. ‘Comity’ is found to be a judicial fig-leaf disguising a form of corporate sovereignty arising from the fact that economic relations are always already constituted through the corporate form before any scrutiny of their ontology. This observation is developed into a theory of ‘offshore’. The prevailing view of offshore is that the state bifurcates its sovereignty to create juridical spaces where international capital is relieved of local tax/regulatory regimes. This article seeks to underpin that view with an analysis whereby corporate capital and state sovereignty are rival species of property regime, existing in a state of mutual antagonism. On this view offshore is the juridical space, manifesting itself through the aforementioned bifurcations, where the company is sovereign over the state rather than vice-versa.