Last year, I had the privilege of participating in ILEP’s 24th Annual Symposium, Deconstructing the Regulatory State, where I served as a discussant on papers presented by Jill Fisch and Hillary Sale regarding the role of disclosure in the securities regulatory landscape.  Those papers, Making Sustainability Disclosure Sustainable and Disclosure’s Purpose have now been published by the Georgetown Law Journal. 

Georgetown has also published my remarks on the two papers as part of their online series.  The title for my commentary is Mixed Company: The Audience for Sustainability Disclosure, and there’s no formal abstract, but this is the introduction:

In their symposium articles, Professors Sale and Fisch offer mirror-image visions of the role of mandated disclosure. Professor Sale addresses information that is typically relevant to an investing audience and recognizes its importance to the wider public. Professor Fisch, by contrast, addresses information that is most relevant to a noninvestor audience but only contemplates its importance to corporate financial performance. The gulf between their approaches highlights one of the significant tensions in our system of securities regulation: the distance between its intended purpose and its current function.

Close readers of this blog will recognize that my comments follow a theme that I’ve frequently visited in this space, namely, the need for a corporate disclosure system that is not centered on investors.  I’m actually working on a much longer article on this topic where I explore these ideas in depth, but for those who are interested, the elevator-pitch version is now available at Georgetown Law Journal Online.