Session Themes

Group Theme 1: The “Corporate Purpose” Contestation: Wake-up call or Business-as-Usual? From CSR to the rise of ESG, EDI, CRT and the Purpose Economy.

Introductory Readings:

• Peer Zumbansen, The Corporation in an Age of Divisiveness, TLI Think! Paper 01/2023.

• Lenore Palladino, The Contribution of Shareholder Primacy to the Racial Wealth Gap, Roosevelt Institute Working Paper (5 February 2020), online

• Harvard Law School, Center on the Legal Profession, Law Firms in the ESG Game. ESG practices pervade the legal industry (January/February 2023), online.

• Concepcíon Galdón et al, Business Schools Must Do More to Address the Climate Crisis, Harvard Bus. Rev. (Feb ‘22).

• Kristina Minnick, Gender Pay Gap Across Cultures, H.L.S. Forum for Corporate Governance (18 August 2022), online.

• Iseoluwa Akintunde/Richard Janda, Bringing Corporate Purpose Into the Mainstream (David Suzuki Found., 2023)

• Lisa M. Fairfax, Empowering Diversity Ambition: Brummer and Strine’s Duty and Diversity Makes the Legal and Business Case for Doing More, Doing Good, and Doing Well, 75 Vanderbilt Law Review 131-155 (2022).

Group Theme 2: Implementing Sustainable Finance in the Business Corporation and in Institutional Investment: Conceptual Approaches, Practical Solutions for Corporations, Banks, Institutional Investors and Asset Managers

Introductory Readings:

• PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Sustainable Finance, a new era for asset managers, 24 March 2020.

• Jason Halper, Asset Management Industry Confronts the Challenges Presented by Climate Change Transition, 28 Feb. 2022.

• UNEP, 2022: a year of milestones on the road to implementing sustainable finance, 7 December 2022.

• Benjamin Braun, Fueling financialization: The Economic Consequences of Funded Pensions, 31 New Labor Forum 70-79 (2022)

• Lenore Palladino, Financialization at work: Shareholder primacy and stagnant wages in the United States, 25 Competition and Change, 382-400 (2021).

• Simon Deakin, The Corporation as a Commons: Rethinking Property Rights, Governance and Sustainability in the Business Enterprise, 37 Queens Law Journal 339-381 (2012).

Group Theme 3: Climate Change Changes Everything: Law, Finance and Sustainability – Public and Private Approaches

Introductory Readings:

• Sara Seck, Business, Human Rights, & the Triple Planetary Crisis: Confronting Overconsumption, Paper prepared for UConn Business & Human Rights Workshop, March 10, 2022, online + Sara Seck, A relational analysis of enterprise obligations and carbon majors for climate justice, Onati Socio-Legal Series 2020, online

• Lisa Benjamin, Companies and Climate Change (Cambridge UP, 2021), Ch. 2, 20-45 (Theorising the Company in the Context of Climate Change).

• Owen Pell, The ESG Triangle: How Lithium Mining in Latin America Could Point the Way Toward Long-Term Environmental and Social Value Strategies, in: Sophia Kalantzakos (ed.), Critical Minerals, the Climate Crisis and the Tech Imperium, Springer 2023), 179-201

• Emily Webster and Laura Mai, Transnational environmental law in the Anthropocene, 11 Transnational Legal Theory, 1-15 (2020)

• Louise du Toit and Louis J. Kotzé, Reimagining international environmental law for the Anthropocene: An earth system law perspective, 11 Earth System Governance, 1-10 (2022).

Group Theme 4: Managing Global Value Chains in a New Era of Human Rights, Modern Slavery Law and New Imaginaries of Diligence

Introductory Readings:

• Elsa Savourey and Stéphane Brabant, The French Law on the Duty of Vigilance: Theoretical and Practical Challenges Since Its Adoption, 6 Business and Human Rights, 141-152 (2021).

• Stefan Koos, The German Supply Chain Due Diligence Act 2021 and Its Impact on Globally Operating German Companies, Advances in Social Sciences, Education and Humanities Research (Atlantis Press) (2022), 111-115.

• Frank Bodendorf, Fabian Wonn, Kristin Simon and Jörg Franke, Indicators and countermeasures of modern slavery in global supply chains: Pathway to a social supply chain management framework, Business Strategy and the Environment, 1-29 (2022).

• Judy Fudge, Bad for business: the construction of modern slavery and the reconfiguration of sovereignty, 10 London Review of International Law, 3-31 (2022).

• Katherine Leann Christ, Roger Leonard Burritt and Muhammad Azizul Islam, Modern slavery and the accounting profession, British Accounting Review (2023), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bar.2023.101174

Group Theme 5: Corporations and Democracy in an Age of Digitization and Artificial Intelligence

Introductory Readings:

• Christian Fuchs, The Digital Commons and the Digital Public Sphere: How to Advance Digital Democracy Today, 16 Westminster Pap. Comm. & Cult. 9 (2021).

• Paul Nemitz, Democracy through law. The Transatlantic Reflection Group and its manifesto in defence of democracy and the rule of law in the age of “artificial intelligence”, European Law, 1-12 (2021).

• Jürgen Habermas, Reflections and Hypotheses on a Further Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere 39 The., Cult. & Soc’y 145 (2022).

• Dirk Helbing et al, Will Democracy Survive Big Data and Artificial Intelligence?, Scientific American, 25 February 2017.