The Center for Advanced Studies on the Foundations of Law and Finance, in cooperation with the Center for Law & Economic Studies at Columbia Law School invite you to attend an interdisciplinary workshop on
Corporations, Contracts, and Corporate Law
There is nowadays a growing consensus in academic and policy circles that regulating corporations, financial institutions, and markets ideally postulates a truly interdisciplinary approach. The DFG LawFin Center supports the quest for fruitful interdisciplinarity by gathering economists and legal scholars for a critical discussion of each other’s work. As part of its mission, the LawFin Center organizes a bi-annual interdisciplinary workshop series that will serve as a forum for discussions regarding topical challenges.
Although economists and lawyers alike have long investigated the role of private ordering in the corporate context along many dimensions, fascinating questions with the potential to trigger an interdisciplinary debate are still waiting for an answer. To what extent is mandatory corporate law truly mandatory, if contracting parties can resort to shareholder agreements to bypass it? Are private ordering exercises in the corporate context valuable due to their ability to allow contracting parties to enforce their bargained-for rights, or, perhaps, because they outline a blueprint for collaboration that then relies on more informal means to ensure compliance? How do the apparently conflicting forces of standardization and innovation coordinate to shape the corporate contract? How is the corporate contract evolving to respond to the challenges associated with climate change and meet investors’ demand for sustainability-oriented governance? This interdisciplinary workshop now aspires to serve as a transatlantic forum where prominent academics will gather to answer these (and other) questions.
