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Boden Lecture: Of Chameleons And Esg, Ann M. Lipton

Marquette Law Review

Ever since the rise of the great corporations in the late nineteenth and early

twentieth centuries, commenters have debated whether firms should be run

solely to benefit investors, or whether instead they should be run to benefit

society as a whole. Both sides have claimed their preferred policies are

necessary to maintain a capitalist system of private enterprise distinct from

state institutions. What we can learn from the current iteration of the debate—

now rebranded as “environmental, social, governance” or “ESG” investing—

is that efforts to disentangle corporate governance from the regulatory state

are futile; governmental regulation has an inevitable …