Law Commons^™

The Case For An International Court Of Civil Justice, Maya Steinitz

Faculty Scholarship

We live in a world in which the victims of cross-border mass torts de facto (not de jure) have no court to turn to in order to pursue legal action against American multinational corporations when they are responsible for disasters. 1 The only way to provide a fair and legitimate process for both victims and corporations is to create an International Court of Civil Justice (ICCJ). This Essay seeks to start a conversation about this novel institutional solution. It lays out both a justice case, from the plaintiffs' viewpoint, and an efficiency case, from a corporate defendant's viewpoint, for why …

More Burden Than Benefit? Analysis Of The Benefit Corporation Movement In California, Sarah Thornsberry

The Journal of Business, Entrepreneurship & the Law

The benefit corporation movement has been associated with the separate camps of social entrepreneurship, nonprofit organizations, and for-profit corporations, while trying to establish itself as a community of businesses that pursue not only profit, but also environmental and social good. This article examines the legal attributes of benefit corporation legislation and articulates why incorporating as a benefit corporation can be an excellent business decision. Lastly, the article looks at how the movement can further expand in California.

Anglo-American Directors' Legal Duties And Csr: Prohibited, Permitted Or Prescribed?, Benedict Sheehy, Donald Feaver

Dalhousie Law Journal

The interaction between corporate social responsibility (CSR) obligations and directors' legal duties is underexamined. This article addresses that void by examining directors' duties in case law and legislation across the major commonwealth countries and the U.S.A. It provides an analysis of leading cases and examines how they deal with directors' duties, the doctrine of shareholder primacy, corporate legal theory and CSR. The article reviews fiduciary relations and duties and analyzes the directors'duties toexercise power in the best interests of the company as a whole and for proper purposes. The article concludes that CSR is well within the accepted range of …

Slides: “Human Sustainability” In Natural Resources Industries: The New Frontier In Compliance, Social Responsibility, Disclosure, And Transparency, T. Markus Funk

Natural Resource Industries and the Sustainability Challenge (Martz Winter Symposium, February 27-28)

Presenter: T. Markus Funk, Partner, Perkins Coie

21 slides

Organizational Fields, Transnational Business Governance Interactions And The Diffusion Of Csr, Melanie Coni-Zimmer

Transnational Business Governance Interactions Working Papers

The paper analyzes the process of global diffusion of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in the oil industry and how interactions between different actors have contributed to this outcome. It starts from the empirical puzzle that CSR has spread globally among transnational corporations since the mid 1990s (diffusion of CSR as a dependent variable). To explain this phenomenon, the paper presents a theoretical argument based on insights from sociological neo-institutionalism. It uses the concept of organizational fields as social spaces where organizations interact with one another. The structuration of an organizational field leads to processes of homogenization among the organizations belonging …

Rethinking Social Ventures In Hong Kong, Damian Alexander Bethke, Jedrzej Gorski

Richmond Journal of Global Law & Business

Hong Kong has experienced a significant transformation in its understanding of business, which concerns the phenomenon of social ventures that attempt to combine a make money and do good approach and to apply business skills to address social needs. Social ventures live a mystical existence, as they are fully ignored from a legal perspective despite the recent reform of laws on charitable activities. This causes problems as to their general understanding, which the authors try to address with their own typology, systematically characterizing social ventures. Then the authors examine the legal environment of social ventures in Hong Kong and identify …

The Law Of Corporate Purpose, David Yosifon

Faculty Publications

Delaware corporate law requires directors to manage firms for the benefit of the firm’s shareholders, and not for any other constituency. Delaware jurists have been clear about this is in their case law, and they are not coy about it in extra-judicial settings, such as in speeches directed at law students and practicing members of the corporate bar. Nevertheless, the reader of leading corporate law scholarship is continually exposed to the scholarly assertion that the law is ambiguous or ambivalent on this point, or even that case law affirmatively empowers directors to pursue non-shareholder interests. It is shocking, and troubling, …

Corporate Social Responsibility For Enforcement Of Labor Rights: Are There More Effective Alternatives?, Barbara J. Fick

Global Business Law Review

This article addresses the concept of corporate social responsibility (hereinafter CSR) as it relates to labor rights. It considers the following issues: is the CSR model, as evidenced by the adoption of corporate codes of conduct (hereinafter CoC), effective in protecting labor rights; and is this model the best way to protect labor rights? These issues are examined from two perspectives: practical and philosophical. Lastly, some alternative enforcement mechanisms are considered and their respective advantages and disadvantages for purposes of ensuring labor rights are discussed.

Performance Track’S Postmortem: Lessons From The Rise And Fall Of Epa’S “Flagship” Voluntary Program, Cary Coglianese, Jennifer Nash

All Faculty Scholarship

For nearly a decade, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) considered its National Environmental Performance Track to be its “flagship” voluntary program — even a model for transforming the conventional system of environmental regulation. Since Performance Track’s founding during the Clinton Administration, EPA officials repeatedly claimed that the program’s rewards attracted hundreds of the nation’s “top” environmental performers and induced these businesses to make significant environmental gains beyond legal requirements. Although EPA eventually disbanded Performance Track early in the Obama Administration, the program has been subsequently emulated by a variety of state and federal regulatory authorities. To discern lessons …

The Law And Economics Of Corporate Social Responsibility And Greenwashing, Miriam A. Cherry

Faculty Publications

In this symposium article, I explore the link between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and the threat of greenwashing. In the first part of the article, I start with first principles, examining the origins of greenwashing, structuring its definitions, and identifying the economic incentives that lead firms into the practice. The second part of this article examines the legal structure that allows greenwashing to occur, and with it, explores the pervasiveness and extent of greenwashing. The third part of this article articulates the harms of greenwashing. Intuitively, greenwashing involves deception, falsity, and hypocrisy that reflexively seem problematic. Identifying the actual harm …