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In Search of Good Corporate Governance
Get PDFIn this Forum Response, Dorothy Lund considers whether the “corporate governance gap” between large and small public companies is the product of harmful or beneficial forces, and in so doing, rejects the idea that there is a single governance framework that is optimal for all public companies
Climate Action Needs Investment Governance, Not Investment Protection and Arbitration
Get PDFA response by the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment to the OECD Public Consultation on Investment Treaties and Climate Change.
The Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment (CCSI) — a joint research center of Columbia Law School and the Earth Institute at Columbia University — explores elements of the international investment legal framework, including the impact of investment treaties, investor–state dispute settlement, and home and host government policies governing inward and outward investment, among many other issues
Investment Incentives: A Survey of Policies and Approaches for Sustainable Investment
Get PDFIn order to effectively harness public funds and leverage them to support sustainable development, governments have to be strategic in their use of capital. This means ensuring that government funds are used to help compensate for market failures that lead to the underproduction of public goods. It also means ensuring that government funds are not used to provide redundant support for private actors and subsidize environmentally or socially harmful activities.
To achieve these policy objectives, governments need to be careful and deliberate in their use of investment incentives. Investment incentives, which may be defined (broadly) as nonmarket advantages used to influence the behavior of an economic actor, can represent significant costs to governments. These costs have the potential to generate various public benefits such as increased employment, development and dissemination of environmentally and socially sound technology, and other positive externalities. However, investment incentives are not often tailored or implemented in ways that ensure they produce the desired outcomes, or they do so at public costs that are less than their public benefits.
Investment incentives have the potential to advance sustainable development but can also be misused, undermining their goals, and wasting public funds. This report provides an overview of investment incentives, their policy implications, and strategies for understanding and managing their costs and benefits
Our Kind of People 3
No full texthttps://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/ross_smith_okop/1001/thumbnail.jp
The Enduring Importance of Parental Rights
Get PDFIn this symposium contribution for The Law of Parents and Parenting, we argue that parental rights are — and should remain — the backbone of family law. State deference to parents is warranted not because parents are infallible, but rather because parental rights, properly understood and limited, promote child wellbeing. This is true for several reasons, but two stand out. First, parental rights promote the stability of the parent-child relationship by restricting the state’s authority to intervene in families. This protection promotes healthy child development for all children, and it is especially important for low-income families and families of color, who are subject to intensive state scrutiny. Second, parental rights ensure that parents, rather than a private third party or state actor such as a judge or social worker, make decisions about what advances a child’s interests. The legal system defers to parents’ decisions both because parents are well positioned to know what an individual child needs, and because state intervention to vindicate the decision-making power of a nonparent would expose the child to significant risks of family disruption and contentious litigation.
There are clear limits to parental rights, however, and the child-wellbeing rationale for these rights, which we describe in this Essay, provides a self-limiting principle. When a parent’s conduct poses a significant risk to a child, the state may intervene, even when the parent’s actions are based on religious beliefs. And when there is broad societal consensus about what children need — such as education and health care—the state properly preempts parental authority, requiring all parents to send their children to school and to obtain necessary medical care. But in many other instances, especially where there is no societal consensus, the law properly defers to parental judgments, at least for young children. This deference to parents is especially important for marginalized families because the judgments of other parties may reflect bias and dominant parenting norms.
In this Essay, which builds on previous scholarship and our work drafting the American Law Institute’s Restatement of the Law, Children and the Law, we also evaluate scholars’ proposals to limit parental rights. We explain that we share with these scholars the goal of promoting children’s interests but differ on the importance of parental rights. In our view, the legal system can best promote child wellbeing by enforcing a strong, but self-limiting, regime of parental rights
Liability for Public Deception: Linking Fossil Fuel Disinformation to Climate Damages
Get PDFOver two dozen U.S. states and municipalities have filed lawsuits against fossil fuel companies, seeking abatement orders and compensation for climate damages based on theories such as public nuisance, negligence, and failure to warn, and alleging these companies knew about the dangers of their products, intentionally concealed those dangers, created doubt about climate science, and undermined public support for climate action. This Article examines how tort plaintiffs can establish a causal nexus between public deception and damages, drawing from past litigation, particularly claims filed against manufacturers for misleading the public about the risks of tobacco, lead paint, and opioids. A key finding is that courts may infer public reliance on false and misleading statements using multiple lines of evidence, including information about the scope and magnitude of the deceptive communications, defendants’ internal assessments of the efficacy of their disinformation campaigns, acknowledgements of intended reliance made by defendants, expert testimony on the effects of disinformation, public polling data, and more. The Article concludes with a discussion of these potential strategies and evidentiary sources
The Role of Investment Treaties and Investor–State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) in Renewable Energy Investments
Get PDFAchieving our global goals of universal access to clean energy and averting a climate crisis will require a mass scale-up of investments in renewable energy infrastructure, redirecting capital from carbon intensive energy and transport systems. The International Renewable Energy Agency estimates that the transformation of the energy system alone will need cumulative investments to reach USD 110 trillion by 2050 to keep the rise in global temperatures to well below 2°C and towards 1.5°C during this century. Of that amount, over 80% will need to be invested in renewables, energy efficiency, end-use electrification, and power grids and flexibility.
The private sector and private finance will play an important role in scaling renewable energy generation, transmission, and storage. Much of this investment will be cross-border, as capital and technology must flow to developing and emerging economies to bridge the widening regional differences in the rate and amount of renewable energy investments.
To help accelerate a shift of finance into renewable investments by foreign companies, it is critical to address the key constraints that hinder the scale-up of renewable investment, as well as the key determinants that would accelerate the necessary capital for a sustainable energy transition. Understanding these factors is a critical input to policy-making across a range of government agencies and functions, for development finance institutions, and for other international organizations
The Genius of Common-Law Intellectual Property
Get PDFAmong Richard Epstein’s influential contributions to legal scholarship over the years is his writing on common-law intellectual property. In it, we see his attempt to meld the innate logic of the common law’s conceptual structure with the realities of the modern information economy. Common-law intellectual property refers to different judge-made causes of action that create forms of exclusive rights and privileges in intangibles, interferences that are then rendered enforceable through private liability. In this essay, I examine Epstein’s writing on two such doctrines, hot-news misappropriation and cybertrespass, which embrace several important ideas to which modern discussions of intellectual property would do well to pay greater attention: the private-law nature of intellectual property claims, the interconnectedness of intellectual property and other basic areas of law, the compatibility of instrumental and noninstrumental considerations, and the valorization of judicial creativity in rule development
Class, Care, and the Equal Rights Amendment
Get PDFThis piece was submitted in connection with the 2022 Symposium The Equal Rights Amendment: A New Guarantee of Sex Equality in the U.S. Constitution. The event was co-sponsored by the Columbia Journal of Gender and Law and the Columbia Law School ERA Project
Opposition to Renewable Energy Facilities in the United States: March 2022 Edition
Get PDFAchieving lower carbon emissions in the United States will require developing a very large number of wind, solar, and other renewable energy facilities, as well as associated storage, distribution, and transmission, at an unprecedented scale and pace. Although host community members are often enthusiastic about renewable energy facilities’ economic and environmental benefits, local opposition often arises. This report updates a previous Sabin Center report, published in February 2021, and documents local restrictions on and opposition to siting renewable energy projects for the period from 1995 to early 2022. Importantly, the authors do not make normative judgments as to the legal merits of individual cases or the policy preferences reflected in local opponents’ advocacy, nor as to where any one facility should or should not be sited. Bracketing any such judgment, the report demonstrates that local opposition to renewable energy facilities is widespread and growing, and represents a potentially significant impediment to achievement of climate goals.
The report provides state-by-state information on local laws to block, delay or restrict renewable energy. These include moratoria on wind or solar energy development; outright bans on wind or solar energy development; regulations that are so restrictive that they can act as de facto bans on wind or solar energy development; and zoning amendments that are designed to block a specific proposed project. While local governments at times enact legislation in response to a specific project proposal, as discussed below, some municipalities have banned, placed moratoria on, or significantly restricted wind and solar energy development even absent a proposed project. On the other hand, many local governments have allowed or welcomed renewable energy