“I’d Like My Life Back”: Corporate Personhood and the BP Oil Disaster

In this essay, I analyze British Petroleum’s initial attempts to manage its enormous environmental catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico and its concomitant public relations crisis through the use of its Chief Executive Officer Tony Hayward. In his public interviews and statements, he both personifies the corporation and distances himself from its decisions. At stake in these attempts to make use of life stories either to limit the damage (and liability) that have resulted from the disaster or to hold the corporation accountable is the continued viability of “corporate personhood,” a concept central to American corporate law.