Cynthia Williams

• University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Set against the origins and consequences of the global financial crisis, this timely book offers an enriching and revealing narrative of the role that the state plays in regulating markets. Focusing on core areas of private law such as corporate, labour and banking law, the contributors offer a conceptual framework in which to examine the central t...

Recent developments in banking, including high-profile prosecutions for illegal activities, suggest further regulatory interventions on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet the structure of much banking regulation requires banks to make good faith determinations of the type of risks to which their loans give rise—determinations that can be and, in some...

The purpose of this invited essay is to assess the future of the CSR performance of American multinationals in light of several ongoing trends. These trends include companies’ voluntary CSR programs and the global self-regulatory standards for responsible company activities that are developing in almost every industry. Moreover, the decade-long pro...

This contribution is written by a number of participants and directors of the Network for Sustainable Financial Markets (NSFM), an international, non-partisan, non-profit organization comprised of financial market professionals and academics. We strongly welcome the Kay Review, in which the mechanisms of corporate control and accountability provide...

Banks might now seem odd candidates for the role of global sustainability regulator. Nonetheless, in limited areas of their operation, where global banks kept risk on their balance sheets and were financially exposed to many types of risk often otherwise treated as “externalities,” banks began to enact policies to encourage what they construe as “s...

The globalization of capital markets since the 1980s has been accompanied by a vigorous debate over the convergence of corporate governance standards around the world towards the shareholder model. But even before the financial and economic crisis of 2008/2009, the dominance of the shareholder model was challenged with regard to persisting divergen...

The globalization of capital markets since the 1980s has been accompanied by a vigorous debate over the convergence of corporate governance standards around the world towards the shareholder model. But even before the financial and economic crisis of 2008/2009, the dominance of the shareholder model was challenged with regard to persisting divergen...

The globalization of capital markets since the 1980s has been accompanied by a vigorous debate over the convergence of corporate governance standards around the world towards the shareholder model. But even before the financial and economic crisis of 2008/2009, the dominance of the shareholder model was challenged with regard to persisting divergen...

The globalization of capital markets since the 1980s has been accompanied by a vigorous debate over the convergence of corporate governance standards around the world towards the shareholder model. But even before the financial and economic crisis of 2008/2009, the dominance of the shareholder model was challenged with regard to persisting divergen...

The globalization of capital markets since the 1980s has been accompanied by a vigorous debate over the convergence of corporate governance standards around the world towards the shareholder model. But even before the financial and economic crisis of 2008/2009, the dominance of the shareholder model was challenged with regard to persisting divergen...

Much of the legal literature discusses regulation and regulatory forms with a seemingly implicit assumption that "those to be influenced" are inherently self-interested and thus motivated to comply with legal structures only when there are sufficient external incentives to do so. This view of the person is inconsistent with recent perspectives in t...

Two of the major problems that permeate complex modern production and distribution enterprises are coordination and enforcement. While mechanisms of coordination have been studied extensively in management science and organizational economics, issues raised by the second set of problems have been the focus of microeconomic theory, organizational ec...

Much has been written about the current crisis in the global financial system, and many thoughtful analyses have examined the causes and consequences of that crisis. This paper joins those analyses that argue that the crisis reveals flaws in the theoretical underpinnings of capital market regulation, particularly in those markets that had relied up...

La Porta, Lopez-de-Silanes, Shleifer and Vishny’s (LLSV) purported demonstration in Law and Finance (1998) of a correlation between the legal origins of a country and its stock market development and ownership dispersion, mediated through the protection of minority shareholders as against directors, has been subjected to enough further, careful ana...

Comparative studies of corporate social responsibility (CSR) are relatively rare, certainly as contrasted with other related fields, such as comparative corporate governance or comparative corporate law. This is to be expected in a field, such as CSR that is still 'emergent'. While theoretical perspectives on corporate social performance or stakeho...

Over the past decade, the business world has devoted an extraordinary amount of attention to the concept of "corporate social responsibility." CSR derives from the idea that the responsibility of a corporation extends beyond the traditional Anglo-American objective of providing maximal financial returns to its shareholders. Instead, CSR proponents...

In this article we examine the rapid emergence and expansion of standardized product and process frameworks and a private-sector compliance and enforcement infrastructure that we believe may increasingly be providing a substitute for public and legal regulatory infrastructure in global commerce. This infrastructure is provided by a proliferation of...

In this article we examine the rapid emergence and expansion of standardized product and process frameworks and a private-sector compliance and enforcement infrastructure that we believe may increasingly be providing a substitute for public and legal regulatory infrastructure in global commerce. This infrastructure is provided by a proliferation of...

In this Article we examine the fiduciary duties of boards of directors under Delaware law, and conclude that those duties today require Boards to consider the rights and interests of stakeholder groups, including those rights and interests exemplified in the international law of human rights. The Article will concentrate on three reasons why boards...

In this Article we examine the rapid emergence and expansion of a private-sector compliance and enforcement infrastructure that we believe increasingly may be providing a substitute for public and legal regulatory infrastructure in global commerce, especially in developing countries where rule of law is weak and court systems are absent or inadequa...

In this article we examine the rapid emergence and expansion of a private-sector compliance and enforcement infrastructure that we believe may increasingly be providing a substitute for public and legal regulatory infrastructure in global commerce, especially in developing countries where rule of law is weak and court systems are absent or inadequa...

This paper provides a multi-level theoretical model to understand why business Title VI National Resource Center Grant (P015A030066) unpublished not peer reviewed

We seek to bridge the macro concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) with micro research in organizational justice. A theoretical model is presented whereby employees' perceptions of CSR impact their subsequent emotions, attitudes, and behaviors, mediated by instrumental, relational, and deontic motives/needs, as well as moderated by organi...

This paper argues that key differences between the UK and the US in the importance ascribed to a company's social responsibilities (CSR) reflect differences in the corporate governance arrangements in these two countries. Specifically, we analyse the role of a salient type of owner in the UK and the US, institutional investors, in emphasising firm-...

This article uses the techniques of anthropology and linguistics to assess the behavior of corporations, non-governmental organizations, and other principals as they participate in the burgeoning worldwide movement to improve the social and environmental conduct of multinational companies. On a theoretical level, the article analyzes the corporate...

There is an active debate among corporate law professors about the extent to which European companies are converging on the Anglo-American shareholder-wealth-maximizing model of the corporation. In this model, the paramount obligation of corporate officers and directors is to maximize the near-term financial return to the company's shareholders. Th...

This paper provides a multi-level theoretical model to understand why business organizations are increasingly engaging in corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives, and thereby exhibiting the potential to exert positive social change. Our model integrates theories of micro-level organizational justice, meso-level corporate governance and ma...

The United States Supreme Court validated the misappropriation theory in United States v. O'Hagan, but unfortunately rendered a confusing opinion that left many questions unresolved. In this article we discuss the history of the Supreme Court's Section 10(b) jurisprudence as it relates to insider trading, giving particular attention to the Court's...

Acid-induced growth was compared to auxin-induced growth. After a transient pH 4-induced increase in the elongation rate was completed, auxin could still induce an enhanced rate of elongation in soybean (Glycine max) hypocotyl segments. This auxin response occurred both when the medium was changed to pH 6 before auxin addition, and when the auxin w...