The Past, Present and Future of Corporate Purpose

A talk by Brian Cheffins, S.J. Berwin Professor of Corporate Law, University of Cambridge

Professor Cheffins is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Fellow of the European Corporate Governance Institute. He began his academic career at the University of British Columbia. He has held visiting appointments at Columbia, Duke, Harvard, Oxford, Stanford, the University of British Columbia, the University of Western Ontario and Vanderbilt University. Professor Cheffins was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2002, was the Thomas K. McCraw Fellow in U.S. Business History at Harvard Business School in 2014, and held a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship in 2016-17 and 2017-18. He served as Chair of Cambridge’s Law Faculty in 2018-19. Professor Cheffins is the author of Company Law: Theory, Structure and Operation (1997), The Trajectory of (Corporate Law) Scholarship (2004), Corporate Ownership and Control: British Business Transformed (2008) and The Public Company Transformed (2018), and the editor of The Modern History of U.S. Corporate Governance (2011). He has also written numerous articles on corporate law and corporate governance, including “The Past, Present and Future of Corporate Purpose” (Delaware Journal of Corporate Law, 2023).