3CL Seminar: 'Disclosureland: How Corporate Words Constrain Racial Progress'

Speaker: Professor Atinuke Adediran (Associate Professor of Law, Fordham University School of Law, USA)

Abstract: Corporate law commonly treats disclosure as a means of providing information to investors and shareholders. This seminar asks what disclosure does when corporations speak about racial inequality. Drawing on Disclosureland's original empirical study of statements, pledges, and regulatory filings from more than 2,000 companies, the book shows that corporate words operate as tools of governance, shaping what firms recognize, measure, fund as philanthropic endeavors, and ultimately choose to withdraw. Focusing on the proliferation of corporate racial-equity commitments after 2020 and their subsequent softening, narrowing, or disappearance, the seminar will identify three recurring practices: opportunistic commitment, disclosure as deflection, and strategic retraction as legal and political conditions change. The seminar will argue that voluntary disclosure can create an appearance of accountability while allowing corporations to define the meaning and boundaries of racial progress. Disclosureland raises questions about corporate power, the limits of disclosure, and the roles that law, investors, workers, consumers, and other stakeholders should play in holding corporations to their public commitments.

Speaker Bio: Professor Adediran is an interdisciplinary scholar and Professor of Law at Fordham University. Her research examines corporations as legal, political, and social institutions, with a focus on corporate governance, business regulation, and social accountability. Drawing on empirical social science methods, computational text analysis, Natural Language Processing, and Large Language Models, she studies how corporate policies, governance practices, and public commitments shape decision-making on contested social and environmental issues, with consequences for firms, law, markets, and society. Professor Adediran is the author of Disclosureland: How Corporate Words Constrain Racial Progress, published by Cambridge University Press in 2026.

3CL runs the 3CL Sullivan & Cromwell Lunchtime Seminar Series, featuring leading academics from the Faculty, and high-profile practitioners.

All seminars take place in B16 in person from 1pm to 2pm if not indicated otherwise. A sandwich lunch is available for all participants from 12:30pm just outside of B16.

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