The Cambridge Handbook Of Corporate Law Corporate Governance And Sustainability

The emerging field of corporate law, corporate governance and sustainability is one of the most dynamic and significant areas of law and policy in light of the convergence of environmental, social and economic crises that we face as a global society. Understanding the impact of the corporation on society and realizing its potential for contributing to sustainability is vital for the future of humanity. This Handbook comprehensively assesses the state-of-the-art in this field through in-depth discussion of sustainability-related problems, numerous case studies on regulatory responses implemented by jurisdictions around the world, and analyses of predominant strategies and potential drivers of change. This Handbook will be an essential reference for scholars, students, practitioners, policymakers, and general readers interested in how corporate law and governance have exacerbated global society's most pressing challenges, and how reforms to these fields can help us resolve those challenges and achieve sustainability.

The emerging field of corporate law, corporate governance and sustainability is one of the most dynamic and significant areas of law and policy in light of the convergence of environmental, social and economic crises that we face as a global society. Understanding the impact of the corporation on society and realizing its potential for contributing to sustainability is vital for the future of humanity. This Handbook comprehensively assesses the state-of-the-art in this field through in-depth discussion of sustainability-related problems, numerous case studies on regulatory responses implemented by jurisdictions around the world, and analyses of predominant strategies and potential drivers of change. This Handbook will be an essential reference for scholars, students, practitioners, policymakers, and general readers interested in how corporate law and governance have exacerbated global society's most pressing challenges, and how reforms to these fields can help us resolve those challenges and achieve sustainability.

This book advances an innovative, multi-jurisdictional argument for the necessity of company law reform to reorient companies towards environmental sustainability.

The corporate governance systems of Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States are often characterized as a single 'Anglo-American' system prioritizing shareholders' interests over those of other corporate stakeholders. Such generalizations, however, obscure substantial differences across the common-law world. Contrary to popular belief, shareholders in the United Kingdom and jurisdictions following its lead are far more powerful and central to the aims of the corporation than are shareholders in the United States. This book presents a new comparative theory to explain this divergence and explores the theory's ramifications for law and public policy. Bruner argues that regulatory structures affecting other stakeholders' interests - notably differing degrees of social welfare protection for employees - have decisively impacted the degree of political opposition to shareholder-centric policies across the common-law world. These dynamics remain powerful forces today, and understanding them will be vital as post-crisis reforms continue to take shape.

The book first discusses the concepts of corporate governance and corporate social responsibility (CSR) and provides a new framework to deal with these issues in the context of sustainability. It then explores the requirements of "an end state of global sustainability" and subsequently moves to a detailed analysis of the current governance regime, delving into the CSR-related liabilities and incentives at stake for both corporations and their directors. It concludes with a framework suggesting that there are four normative avenues for addressing environmental and social imperatives in company law, which helps reflect on how to tackle the "potentiality for a sustainability gap" in corporate governance and CSR. The author always discusses practical realities and incentives, at both the policy and corporate levels, in addition to theoretical aspects. The thesis on which this book is based received the distinction "Summa Cum Laude" and the 2023 Law Faculty Prize from the University of Lausanne. Dr Christophe George is a Research Associate at the Centre for Business Research in the University of Cambridge. He holds a PhD in Company Law and Management from the University of Lausanne, a Master of Law (LLM) from the University of Cambridge, a Master in Management from Harvard University, and a Master in Law and Economics from HEC Lausanne.

Introduction and overview -- Defining the corporation and Corporate Law -- Contextual drivers of difference -- Enduring controversies in Corporate Law -- The corporation as technology -- Corporate pathologies and corporate sustainability -- Re-calibrating governance : industry-by-industry approaches -- Re-imagining corporate accountability -- Conclusions.

Corporate law and corporate governance have been at the forefront of regulatory activities across the world for several decades now, and are subject to increasing public attention following the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. The Oxford Handbook of Corporate Law and Governance provides the global framework necessary to understand the aims and methods of legal research in this field. Written by leading scholars from around the world, the Handbook contains a rich variety of chapters that provide a comparative and functional overview of corporate governance. It opens with the central theoretical approaches and methodologies in corporate law scholarship in Part I, before examining core substantive topics in corporate law, including shareholder rights, takeovers and restructuring, and minority rights in Part II. Part III focuses on new challenges in the field, including conflicts between Western and Asian corporate governance environments, the rise of foreign ownership, and emerging markets. Enforcement issues are covered in Part IV, and Part V takes a broader approach, examining those areas of law and finance that are interwoven with corporate governance, including insolvency, taxation, and securities law as well as financial regulation. The Handbook is a comprehensive, interdisciplinary resource placing corporate law and governance in its wider context, and is essential reading for scholars, practitioners, and policymakers in the field.

This investigation of the barriers to and opportunities for promoting environmental sustainability in company law provides an in-depth comparative analysis of company law regimes across the world. The social norm of shareholder primacy is the greatest barrier preventing progress, and it also helps explain why voluntary action by companies and investors is insufficient. By deconstructing the myth that shareholder primacy has a legal basis and challenging the economic postulates on which mainstream corporate governance debate is based, Company Law and Sustainability reveals a surprisingly large unexplored potential within current company law regimes for companies to reorient themselves towards sustainability. It also suggests possible methods of reforming the existing legal infrastructure for companies and provides an important contribution to the broader debate on how to achieve sustainability.

Compliance has become key to our contemporary markets, societies, and modes of governance across a variety of public and private domains. While this has stimulated a rich body of empirical and practical expertise on compliance, thus far, there has been no comprehensive understanding of what compliance is or how it influences various fields and sectors. The academic knowledge of compliance has remained siloed along different disciplinary domains, regulatory and legal spheres, and mechanisms and interventions. This handbook bridges these divides to provide the first one-stop overview of what compliance is, how we can best study it, and the core mechanisms that shape it. Written by leading experts, chapters offer perspectives from across law, regulatory studies, management science, criminology, economics, sociology, and psychology. This volume is the definitive and comprehensive account of compliance.

Growing numbers of employees, consumers, and investors want companies to be truly good; these stakeholders will accept lower economic returns in order to support companies that prioritize sustainability, fair wages, and fair trade. Unlike charities or non-profit organizations, such companies - or social enterprises - are not only permitted but also expected to produce an economic return for investors. Yet, unlike traditional business ventures, social enterprises have no obligation to maximize profits, even on a long-term basis. In this comprehensive volume, Benjamin Means and Joseph W. Yockey bring together leading legal scholars and practitioners to offer an authoritative guide to social enterprise law and policy. The Cambridge Handbook of Social Enterprise Law takes stock of the field and charts a course for its future development. It should be read by entrepreneurs, investors, practitioners, academics, students and anyone else interested in how companies are evolving to address new demands for capitalism with a conscience.