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Fixing the Business of Food: The Food Industry and the SDG Challenge
Get PDFIn collaboration with the Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition, the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, and the Santa Chiara Lab of the University of Siena, CCSI presented its first report on Fixing the Business of Food.
The document, part of a two-year effort, highlights the sustainable development challenge faced by the food industry. By proposing a Four Dimension framework, the report asks four overarching questions for companies in the food sector to address alignment with the SDGs: Does the company contribute to healthy and sustainable dietary patterns through its products and strategy? Are the company’s production processes economically, socially, and environmentally sustainable? Are the company’s global supply chains sustainable? Is the company a good corporate citizen?
After an initial analysis of ten major companies in the food industry, the report makes a series of recommendations that will be addressed through this collaboration. Under this project, the partners expect to engage with industry leaders, and to consult with representatives of key reporting standards, monitoring agencies, and academic disciplines to help build a consensus on best practices, reporting standards, and supply-chain monitoring to address the areas identified and highlighted in the report
Conflicted Mutual Fund Voting in Corporate Law
Get PDFRecent Delaware jurisprudence establishes a disinterested vote of shareholders as the pathway out of heightened judicial scrutiny. The stated rationale for this policy is that shareholders, the real party at interest, are better protected by the ballot box than by the courtroom. As long as informed, disinterested shareholders with an economic stake in the outcome of the vote can effectively express their preferences through voting — the court need not scrutinize the underlying transaction. Rather, it can defer to the outcome under the business judgment rule.
But shareholder voting is not always as direct as this reasoning implies. Instead, voting outcomes increasingly are determined not by those holding the ultimate economic interest but rather by institutional intermediaries who buy, hold, and vote shares on behalf of someone else. In this setting, there are several predictable circumstances under which institutional voting interests will depart from those of the underlying investors.
This Article develops a typology of institutional investor conflicts of interest. We focus on mutual fund intermediaries, which are the key deciders of corporate elections and represent the interests of millions of investors when voting. We describe and document instances of Cross-Ownership Conflict (situations in which funds have interests on both sides of a transaction), Corporate Client Conflict (situations in which funds have an interest in currying favor with the managers of portfolio companies), and Uniform Policy Conflict (situations in which fund sponsors enforce a uniform voting policy irrespective of individual fund objectives).
Our account provides a basis to reevaluate corporate law’s retreat from heightened judicial scrutiny. When mutual fund voting is subject to the conflicts we describe, the real parties in interest have not necessarily spoken in favor of the transaction. As such, courts should consider a broader set of conflicts when deciding whether the protection of the business judgment rule is warranted
African Mining and the SDGs: From Vision to Reality
No full textPrior to the adoption of the sustainable development goals (SDGs), the African Mining Vision set out a roadmap for mineral development to drive human development across the region. The vision was based on an assumption that under the right policy and regulatory regimes, mining could contribute to development by delivering significant revenues and economic linkages. This assumption has been tested in relation to the SDGs at a global level in the report on Mining and the SDGs: A preliminary atlas. The report is a joint effort of the United Nations Development Programme, the World Economic Forum, the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment and the Sustainable Development Solutions Network. This chapter focuses on the potential contribution of the mining industry to the attainment of the SDGs in Africa. The potential contribution of both large-scale formal mining and artisanal and small-scale mining to sustainable development is considered. We find that while some of the major global mining companies are able to show a contribution to the SDGs through specific projects in Africa, it is more challenging to implement, scale-up and measure the impact of the SDGs’ framework for the industry as a whole
Constitutional Reform in Japan: Prospects, Process, and Implications
Get PDFJapan\u27s constitution has remained unchanged for over 70 years since its adoption. With Prime Minister Shinzo Abe\u27s re-election as the leader of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party of Japan (LDP) in 2018, the issue of constitutional revision has gained renewed attention. On March 13, 2019 the Center for Japanese Legal Studies at Columbia Law School co-hosted, with the Council on Foreign Relations, a full-day conference on Constitutional Reform in Japan: Prospect, Process, and Implications. Three panels of distinguished experts examined the domestic political landscape in Japan, provided comparative legal perspectives, and considered the political, strategic, and social implications of proposed changes
Breaking the Cycle of Flood-Rebuild-Repeat : Local and State Options to Improve Substantial Damage and Improvement Standards in the National Flood Insurance Program
Get PDFCongress established the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) in 1968 to reduce flood damages nationwide and ease the Federal government’s financial burden for providing disaster recovery. Today, approximately 22,000 communities in all 50 states and U.S. territories participate in the NFIP. The program has 5.1 million flood insurance policies providing 20.5 billion in debt.
A proportionally small number of properties insured through the program are repeatedly flooded, repaired, and rebuilt. These properties, known as “severe repetitive loss” (SRL) properties, contribute disproportionally to the rising debts of the NFIP program. SRL properties represent just 0.6 percent of the roughly 5.1 million properties insured through the NFIP, but they account for 9.6 percent of all damages paid, as of 2015. Climate change impacts, including sea level rise, more intense and frequent precipitation events, and increased storm surge, put these already vulnerable properties at even greater risk and will greatly increase the number of properties caught in this cycle of “flood-rebuild-repeat.
Japan\u27s Constitution Across Time and Space
Get PDFConstitutional reform is a matter of time, the time when the original and the revisions were drafted; and of space, the global context which comprises the transnational constitutional expanse that influenced all modern constitutions from the late eighteenth century on. Of the some 198 written constitutions now in force, more than half were promulgated during the past sixty years. The U.S. Constitution of 1787 is the oldest, and if one counts the 1947 Constitution as an amendment of the Meiji Constitution of 1889 – which formally and technically it was – Japan’s is the world’s tenth oldest written constitution still in effect
The New Preemption Reader: Legislation, Cases, and Commentary on State and Local Government Law
No full textThe hottest issue in state and local government today is preemption – the conflict between states and cities over authority in a wide range of sharply-contested areas, including gun control, minimum wages and family leave, anti-discrimination law, environmental protection, and sanctuary policies. This pathbreaking reader comes straight from the front-lines of that conflict. It presents and analyzes in concise form the most important preemption statutes and cases, along with commentary from the leading scholars in the field. Virtually all the material involves disputes that have emerged and decisions handed down in just the last two to three years. Designed for use in courses dealing with states and local governments as a supplement to existing casebooks or on its own, the reader will be a unique and invaluable resource for students, teachers, scholars, and anyone involved in preemption and state-local relations more broadly today.https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/books/1308/thumbnail.jp
The Grammar of Criminal Law, Vol. 2: International Criminal Law
No full textTo understand the international legal order in the field of criminal law, we need to ask three elementary questions. What is international law? What is criminal law? And what happens to these two fields when they are joined together?
Volume Two of The Grammar of Criminal Law sets out to answer these questions through a series of twelve dichotomies - such as law vs. justice, intention vs. negligence, and causation vs. background events - that invite the reader to better understand the jurisprudential foundations of international criminal law. The book will appeal to anyone interested in the future of international cooperation in a time of national retrenchment, and will be of interest to students, scholars, and policymakers around the world.https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/books/1075/thumbnail.jp
Life Admin: How I Learned to Do Less, Do Better, and Live More
No full textReading this book should be at the top of your To Do list. Life Admin will give you many hours of your life back.
Every day an unseen form of labor creeps into our lives – stealing precious moments of free time, placing a strain on our schedules and our relationships, and earning neither appreciation nor compensation in return. This labor is life admin: the kind of secretarial and managerial work necessary to run a life and a household.
Elizabeth Emens was a working mother with two young children, swamped like so many of us, when she realized that this invisible labor was consuming her. Desperate to survive and to help others along the way, she conducted interviews and focus groups to gather favorite tips and tricks, admin confessions, and the secrets of admin-happy households.
Life Admin tackles the problem of admin in all its forms, from everyday tasks like scheduling doctors appointments and paying bills, to life-cycle events like planning a wedding, a birth, a funeral. Emens explores how this labor is created, how it affects our lives, and how we might avoid, reduce, and redistribute admin whenever possible – as individuals and as a society.
Life Admin is the book that will teach us all how to do less of it, and to do it betterhttps://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/books/1083/thumbnail.jp
Protecting Consumers in the Age of the Internet of Things
No full text“Wake up, baby!”
Imagine waking up in the middle of the night to the sound of a stranger speaking to your baby through the baby monitor. For one Texas couple, this horror story became reality when a man hacked their internet-connected monitors to watch and stalk their child. In a similarly horrifying scenario, a hacker stalked Miss Teen USA, Cassidy Wolf, for a year via her webcam. The stalker had 24/7 access to her webcam and also traced the keystrokes on her keyboard to learn her passwords for various web accounts. Subsequently, the hacker used private information he learned about her from those accounts to blackmail her into doing whatever he wanted. Unfortunately, as the amount of technology in use increases, frightening stories like these become more common. It is not difficult to envision a scenario in which hackers can gain access to financial information, medical records, and other critical private information. In light of ever increasing technological advances, Congress must respond by enacting legislation that addresses the specific security and privacy concerns that internet-connected technology presents