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War, Cacophony & Beyond: Reexamining And Adding Security To Environmental, Social & Corporate Governance Investing, Seongjun “Spencer” Park*

Fordham International Law Journal

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has exposed the current ESG approach’s weakness in many ways, most noticeably in the form of real-world consequences of negative screening strategies against defense and energy sectors. This Note attributes this weakness to a cacophony of risk and impact—a conceptual conflation between the two concepts in the relatively nascent ESG space. However, this Note finds that, even after resolving this cacophony, ESG investing still has significant problems that challenge its efficacy: (1) insufficient fairness and reasonableness of ESG ratings; (2) its uncertain future viability as an effective investment methodology under unfavorable economic conditions; and (3) its …