Carol Liao

• University of British Columbia

This chapter offers a case study on the curious development of ‘good’ corporations and accompanying hybrid business law to reflect on the difficulties – and necessities – of transdisciplinary study and the methodological challenges in the application of theory to practice. The chapter first delves into past US debates on shareholder primacy and the...

The current model of corporate governance needs reform. There is mounting evidence that the practices of shareholder primacy drive company directors and executives to adopt the same short time horizon as financial markets. Pressure to meet the demands of the financial markets drives stock buybacks, excessive dividends and a failure to invest in pro...

New laws designed to foster and govern social enterprises are propagating throughout the world. Beyond American initiatives, relatively little has been written to date on the global contagion of lawmaking to address the burgeoning field of social enterprise. Increased corporate lobbying to transplant American “benefit” corporation legislation into...

The 28th Call to Action of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (“TRC”) is for law schools to “require all law students to take a course in Aboriginal people and the law, which includes the history and legacy of residential schools, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Treaties and Aboriginal rights, Indigenous law...

Corporations play a central role in modern economies. Certain beliefs about corporations and corporate law are widely held and relied upon by business experts, the financial press, and economists who study the firm. Unfortunately, some of these widely-held beliefs are mistaken. This has led to numerous common errors in the way corporate law concept...

The period when corporate social responsibility (CSR) only referred to corporate philanthropic donations has passed. Present day CSR is intimately intertwined with sustainable development, and its growth in the last several decades has been evident in Canada. The recent appearance of “hybrid” corporate legal structures on the international stage ma...

How do for-profit companies govern themselves in the act of social value creation when there are no existing policies in place? This article offers three initiatives as a starting point for Canadian social entrepreneurs who are eager to use the engine of a for-profit business to market their goods and services and consider the contribution of socia...

This article questions the efficiency of the shareholder primacy model of corporate governance in light of the financial calamities that have plagued the first decade of the 21st century. Reform efforts following the global financial crisis have focused on failures in securities regulation, but that is only part of the story. Effective reform measu...

This paper was produced for “In Berle’s Footsteps,” a symposium marking the launch of the Adolf A. Berle, Jr. Center on Corporations, Law and Society at the University of Seattle School of Law. It considers the light that the “derivatives revolution” sheds on the theoretical perspectives of Roberto Unger and Adolf Berle. While an unlikely pair, bot...