Athens, Ga. – The University of Georgia School of Law will host “The New Roles of Corporations in Global Governance” conference Feb. 14 beginning at 9 a.m. in the Larry Walker Room of Dean Rusk Hall, located on North Campus.
The conference is free and open to the public; however, registration is requested for planning purposes.
The conference will include three panel discussions exploring the differing roles corporations now play in global governance and their influence on the international law-making process. The topics include how corporations:
• self-regulate by acting as transnational networks to create international voluntary standards that they collectively agree to follow.
• perform public functions that have traditionally been allocated to the state.
• influence the creation of domestic and international public policy.
The keynote address will be delivered at 1 p.m. by Bennett Freeman, who currently serves as senior vice president for sustainability research and policy at Calvert Investments. From 2003 to 2006, he led Burson-Marsteller’s global corporate responsibility practice. He previously served in three positions as a presidential appointee in the U.S. Department of State, including as deputy assistant secretary for democracy, human rights and labor from 1999 to 2001. In that capacity, Freeman led the effort to develop the Voluntary Principles on Security and Human Rights, the first human rights standard forged by governments, companies and nongovernmental organizations for the extractive sectors.
Business leaders and legal experts participating in the conference include Kelly M. Tullier, senior vice president and deputy general counsel for PepsiCo, and Errol Meidinger, director of the Baldy Center for Law & Social Policy and Wong Professor of Law at the State University of New York at Buffalo.
This event is organized by the Georgia Journal of International and Comparative Law in cooperation with the law school’s Dean Rusk Center for International Law and Policy and the law student organization Business Law Society.
For more information or to register, see www.law.uga.edu/gjicl-conference-2014 or contact Matt O’Brien at mdobrien@uga.edu. Information regarding continuing legal education credits for attorneys can be found on the conference’s website.
UGA School of Law
Consistently regarded as one of the nation’s top public law schools, the School of Law at the University of Georgia was established in 1859. With an accomplished faculty, which includes authors of some of the country’s leading legal scholarship, Georgia Law offers two degrees-the Juris Doctor and Master of Laws in U.S. Law-and is home to the renowned Dean Rusk Center for International Law and Policy. The school counts six U.S. Supreme Court judicial clerks in the last nine years among its distinguished alumni body of more than 9,700. For more information, see www.law.uga.edu.