Twenty-Ninth Annual Corporate Law Center Symposium: Corporate Social Responsibility and the Modern Enterprise: Foreword

Abstract

In December 2015, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, publicly pledged to give ninety-nine percent of their Facebook shares, then worth over $45 billion, to charitable purposes. As the receptacle for their philanthropy, the couple created a limited liability company. This touched off a flurry of commentary over the merits of limited liability companies (LLCs) versus nonprofit organizations and for-profit social enterprises such as benefit corporations. Anticipating the debates to follow, the Corporate Law Center at the University of Cincinnati College of Law (UC) held its 29th Annual Symposium (the Symposium) on corporate social responsibility and the modem enterprise. The Symposium engaged with the debate over how new forms of enterprise organizations serve social purposes, as well as the discourse on sourcing dilemmas and corporate social responsibility (CSR) in our globalized world. Several lines of scholarly work converge here-the pushback against shareholder wealth maximization, the theories governing choice-of-entity considerations, and the view of companies as social partners with citizens.' The contributions to this Symposium issue of the Cincinnati Law Review reflect this diversity. They range from analyses of model laws at the forefront of social enterprises, to a new unifying theory of the corporation and its implications for socially responsible behavior, to sourcing considerations in the manufacturing behemoth of China.