The Emerging Law of Sustainable Corporations

Each of three parts this volume consists of represents an endeavour to delineate and to account for some of the most significant issues that are currently shaping the fascinating journey into the complex, articulated, multidimensional realm of “corporate sustainability” problems, which are deemed to extend beyond the usual legal survey of the conditions upon which a business organization could qualify as an economically and financially viable concern in a mid to long-term perspective. Upon the premise that the incorporated firm – i.e., the typical for-profit company that, albeit in different fashions, intensively populates and dominates the globalized economy – firmly and strategically stands at the intersection of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals set forth in the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development adopted in 2015, the book contributors – academics, experts, and law students – offer the reader a diversified (and sometimes diverging), substantive, cutting-edge analyses on several different aspects of corporate sustainability, including the corporate purpose «jigsaw», the role of institutional investors vis-à-vis sustainable responsible investing, the new sustainability provisions impacting corporate reporting and corporate governance structures, the sustainability-oriented principles emerging in the banking sector, the alternative business form represented by the benefit companies, the interactions between principles of corporate crimes and principles of sustainable corporate compliance and risk management, the stakeholders-oriented approach in corporate insolvency, and more. The leitmotiv underpinning the essays collected in the book lays in the multi-prong question about whether, to what extent, and how for-profit companies – and thus their directors, managers, shareholders, and the institutional investors engaging with them and with other stakeholders in various forms – could leave behind their traditional design, as well as the well-established principles currently shaping their usual corporate governance posture, so as to transform themselves, from social costs « externalizing machines», into sustainable business vehicles, operating within the stringent boundaries of legal restrictions, not just in a socially responsible fashion, but, more comprehensively, as ESG-compliant market players: that is, within a deeply renovated mindset that could hopefully characterized by what Alan Palmiter in his concluding essay called a new era of «awakening capitalism».