In September, I was honored to deliver the Boden Lecture at Marquette Law School; a video of that lecture is available here. (I also gave a vaguely similar, but not identical, talk at College of the Holy Cross earlier this month, which is available here).
Anyway, the Boden Lecture, in a more formalized form, will be published in the Marquette Law Review. Here is the abstract:
Of Chameleons and ESG
Ever since the rise of the great corporations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, commenters have debated whether firms should be run solely to benefit investors, or whether instead they should be run to benefit society as a whole. Both sides have claimed their preferred policies are necessary to maintain a capitalist system of private enterprise distinct from state institutions. What we can learn from the current iteration of the debate—now rebranded as “environmental, social, governance” or “ESG” investing—is that efforts to disentangle corporate governance from the regulatory state are futile; governmental regulation has an inevitable role in structuring the corporate form.
The paper is available on SSRN at this link.