Let’s Make Corporate Law Great Again!
The La Trobe Law School hosted the Corporate Law Teachers Association (CLTA) in 2018.
The 65 registrants came from the UK, China, Taiwan, Malaysia and India as well as all States and Territories of Australia.
Conference Theme: Let’s Make Corporate Law Great Again!
Corporate Law has not always been on the forefront of people’s mind. In 2018, we wanted to bring researchers together who are passionate about changing this trend. It was time to make corporate law great again!
What can we speak about when creating new opportunities for corporate teachers and lawyers everywhere?
• LET’S – Who are we today to influence corporate law in this way? Is there any inhibition on our work? Do we want to make it great?
• MAKE – How does research in corporate law impact on corporate law? Is it rewarded? Should it be?
• CORPORATE LAW – What is corporate law? Of what is it comprised? What areas need to be reformed to be great?
• GREAT – What does ‘great’ mean? Perhaps we mean ‘grate’. How do we evaluate the law and changes in the law? What is corporate law’s function in society?
• AGAIN! – Was it ever great? If so, what happened to make it great then? What happened to make it not so great?
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Professor Paddy Ireland:
Is corporate law really about enterprise and its functional needs, as traditional presentations of the discipline suggest? Paddy Ireland suggested not, arguing that it is better understood as a historical construct arising out of the rise of joint stock companies and the needs of passive rentier investors. This, he suggests, would enable corporate law scholars and students to make better sense not only of corporate law’s peculiarities, but of ‘financialization’, contemporary capitalism, and the continuing shareholder/stakeholder debates
Professor Charles M Yablon
“Dynamic” economic models that focus on innovation and economic growth pose a challenge to traditional “static” models of corporate law which emphasise efficient use of existing resources. Accordingly, the greatest danger current corporate law and corporate finance pose to the innovation process is neither investor activism nor managerial inefficiency, but rather conformity of viewpoint within the financial community. Viewing debates around this dichotomy from the perspective of innovation leads to a caution against overgeneralization and a recognition that innovation and growth will be best served if unusual investing activity is considered on a case by case basis, with a nuanced set of rules that reflects different levels of deference to managerial discretion in different settings.
PLENARY WORKSHOP
This was an interactive working session, coordinated by Rosemary Langford from the University of Melbourne. Panel members included Paddy Ireland and Charles Yablon (our plenary speakers) and Jean du Plessis. The session presented some of the problems with the current scheme of directors’ duties (particularly the clash between statutory and general law duties) and brainstormed/sought comments on the way to resolve these (possibly by codification).
TEACHING SESSION
This session was focused on how people are responding to the imperatives of University teaching and learning reforms: what people are doing when they reform their offerings in line with University suggestions/requirements. Examples are flipped classrooms, blended learning, digital uplift and so forth.
The CLTA 2018 conference was sponsored by:
The Governance Institute of Australia
Cambridge University Press
LexisNexis Butterworths
Oxford University Press
Thomson Reuters
Wiley