He served as a law clerk to Chief JusticeBrian Dickson in 1985. During his tenure as clerk,Dickson authored the judgment R v Oakes,among others. Bakan then pursued a master's degree at Harvard Law School. After graduation,he returned to Canada,where he has taught law at Osgoode Hall Law School of York University and the University of British Columbia Faculty of Law. He joined the University of British Columbia Faculty of Law in 1990 as an associate professor. Bakan teaches constitutional Law,contracts,socio-legal courses,and the graduate seminar. He has won the Faculty of Law's Teaching Excellence Award twice and a UBC Killam Research Prize.[4]
Bakan authored The Corporation:The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (2003),a book analyzing the evolution and modern-day behavior of corporations from a critical perspective. It was made into a film The Corporation by directors Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott the same year and won 25 international awards. His book Childhood Under Siege:How Big Business Ruthlessly Targets Children was published in 2011.[5] Joel Bakan writes in The Corporation:
The law forbids any motivation for their actions, whether to assist workers, improve the environment, or help consumers save money. They can do these things with their own money, as private citizens. As corporate officials, however, stewards of other people's money, they have no legal authority to pursue such goals as ends in themselves– only as means to serve the corporations own interests, which generally means to maximise the wealth of its shareholders. Corporate social responsibility is thus illegal– at least when its genuine.[6]
Bakan and his wife Rebecca Jenkins released a jazz album, Blue Skies[7] in 2008, an album of Jenkins' original songs, Something's Coming, in 2012, and Rebecca Jenkins: Live at the Cellar in 2014.
In 2020, he was codirector with Abbott of The New Corporation: The Unfortunately Necessary Sequel, a sequel to the original film version of The Corporation.[8] A follow-up book The New Corporation: How "Good" Corporations Are Bad for Democracy was released in the same year.[9]
Bibliography
Just Words: Constitutional Rights and Social Wrongs (1997).
The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (2003).
Childhood Under Siege: How Big Business Ruthlessly Targets Children (2011).
The New Corporation: How "Good" Corporations Are Bad for Democracy (2020, ISBN9781984899729).
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