EVENT ANNOUNCEMENT AND CALL FOR PAPERS: 'Corporations, Contracts, and Corporate Law'

Online  |  January 29-30, 2024  | 15.30 CET / 9.30 EST

The DFG LawFin Center at the Goethe University in Frankfurt has joined forces with the Center for Law & Economic Studies at Columbia Law School to organize the 4th biannual interdisciplinary workshop on 'Corporations, Contracts, and Corporate Law.'  

Although economists and lawyers alike have long investigated the role of private ordering in the corporate context along many dimensions, fascinating questions with the potential to trigger an interdisciplinary debate are still waiting for an answer. To what extent is mandatory corporate law truly mandatory, if contracting parties can resort to shareholder agreements to bypass it? Are private ordering exercises in the corporate context valuable due to their ability to allow contracting parties to enforce their bargained-for rights, or, perhaps, because they outline a blueprint for collaboration that then relies on more informal means to ensure compliance? How do the apparently conflicting forces of standardization and innovation coordinate to shape the corporate contract? How is the corporate contract evolving to respond to the challenges associated with climate change and meet investors’ demand for sustainability-oriented governance? This interdisciplinary workshop now aspires to serve as a transatlantic forum where prominent academics will gather to answer these (and other) questions.

The workshop organizers aim to attract high-quality interdisciplinary research on topics broadly related to the workshop’s theme to be presented in this special forum. Therefore, they invite researchers from all disciplines—particularly law, economics, and finance—to submit their work-in-progress as a preliminary draft. Abstracts will not be considered. Submissions should be emailed to research@lawfin.uni-frankfurt.de by November 30, 2023. The organizers will select papers and inform authors of accepted submissions by December 7, 2023, and must confirm their participation and send their drafts by December 14, 2023. Here is the link to the event webpage; and here is the link to the call for papers.

The conference organizers are Talia B. Gillis (Columbia Law School), Zohar Goshen (Columbia Law School and ECGI), Rainer Haselmann (Goethe University, LawFin, and CEPR), Casimiro A. Nigro (Goethe University and LawFin), Giorgia Piacentino (USC Marshall, School of Business, and CEPR), Tobias H. Troeger (Goethe University, LawFin, SAFE, and ECGI), and Gad Weiss (Columbia Law School).