Governments, the UN, citizens, and international and civil society organizations have long voiced concerns about the impacts of corporations on sustainability issues, particularly in relation to human rights and the environment. Yet attempts to address these issues have often been siloed to specific legal disciplines. Corporate lawyers argue that tweaks to corporate law would address these issues; international investment law proponents advocate for reform to investment treaties as a fix; while international lawyers lament international law’s inability to hold corporations accountable for these harms. This conference brings together experts from these three different areas of the law to tackle the problem of corporate harms to sustainability issues from a more holistic perspective. How do corporate governance and law, international investment law, and international law address the sustainability impacts of corporations? Do these areas overlap or build upon each other to worsen corporate abuse of sustainability harms? Are fixes to individual areas of the law sufficient to address the problem or does reform in any of these areas have to align with other areas of the law?
Join us as experts from these areas work together to answer these and other related questions.
Speakers
Sundhya Pahuja (Melbourne) · Sheri Meyerhofer (Canadian Ombudsperson for Responsible Enterprise) · Sara Seck (Dalhousie) · Peter Muchlinski (SOAS) · Peer Zumbansen (McGill) · Nicolas Perrone (Valparaíso) · Martin Petrin (Western) · Markus Krajewski (Erlangen) · Lorraine Talbot (Birmingham) · James Yap (CLAIHR) · Hassan Ahmad (UBC) · Gus van Harten (Osgoode) · Galit Sarfaty (Toronto) · Emily Dwyer (Canadian Network on Corporate Accountability) · Christopher Bruner (Georgia) · Carol Liao (UBC) · Barnali Choudhury (Osgoode) · Anil Yilmaz Vastardis (Essex).