Law conference to address corporations’ growing role in international governance

Writer: Heidi Murphy, (706) 583-5487, hmurphy@uga.edu Contact: Matt O’Brien, (678) 677-3411, mdobrien@uga.edu Law conference to address corporations’ growing role in international governance Athens, Ga. – The University of Georgia School of Law will host “The New Roles of Corporations in Global Governance” conference April 18 at 9:00 a.m. in the Larry Walker Room of Dean Rusk Hall, located on North Campus. The event is free and open to the public; however, registration is requested for planning purposes. This conference will include two panels which will explore ways in which corporations are redefining the nature of international regulation. The topics include how companies operating in a globalized marketplace may influence the creation of public policy and how corporations may perform public functions that have traditionally been allocated to the state. The keynote address will be delivered at 1:00 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\u27s global corporate responsibility practice and prior to that he 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. Among the legal experts participating in the conference are Anita Ramasastry, director of the Graduate Program in Sustainable International Development and the Gittinger Professor of Law at the University of Washington School of Law, and Errol E. 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. Please note that this conference was previously scheduled for Feb. 14, 2014, but was postponed due to inclement weather. For more information or to register, please visit www.law.uga.edu/gjicl-conference-2014 or contact Matt O’Brien at mdobrien@uga.edu. Continuing legal education credits for attorneys are available for a fee. 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 three degrees—the Juris Doctor, the Master of Laws in U.S. Law and the Master in the Study of 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, please see www.law.uga.edu. #