3CL Seminar: 'Sustainability and the State'

Speaker: Professor Ernest Lim (National University of Singapore)

The ex ante and ex post mechanisms that have been or can be used to promote sustainability include ESG reporting, constituency directors, stewardship codes, directors’ duties, and restricting limited liability. This presentation explores the problems and prospects of doing so in state-owned enterprises, where the government, as the controller, is the world’s second largest type of shareholder. Further, it is suggested that the effectiveness of Asian states in promoting sustainability or responsible capitalism could be understood within a state-centric tripartite framework comprising dictatorships; quasi-authoritarian regimes which are market-oriented; and dynamic democracies with markets that are heavily regulated by the state.

Biography:

Ernest Lim is Vice Dean and Professor at the Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore (NUS). He obtained his DPhil and BCL from Oxford, LLM from Harvard, and LLB from NUS. His research interests include comparative corporate law and governance as well as private law.

He is the sole-author of three monographs with CUP: A Case for Shareholders’ Fiduciary Duties in Common Law Asia (2019), which won the SLS Peter Birks Runner-Up Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship; Sustainability and Corporate Mechanisms in Asia (2020), and Social Enterprises in Asia: A New Legal Form (2023). He is the co-editor of the forthcoming The Cambridge Handbook of Private Law and Artificial Intelligence. His full-length articles have been published in the CLJ, LQR and OJLS. He is an editor of the Asian Journal of Comparative Law.

He was elected to the Robert S Campbell Visiting Fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford in 2021 and has held visiting positions in Columbia Law School, Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law, and Tel Aviv University. He has advised financial institutions, companies and NGOs on corporate and securities law. Prior to joining academia, he was a capital markets attorney in the New York and Hong Kong offices of Davis Polk.

3CL runs the 3CL Travers Smith Lunchtime Seminar Series, featuring leading academics from the Faculty, and high-profile practitioners.

Enquiries to: 3cl@law.cam.ac.uk