It is our great pleasure to announce that the 2022 conference of the Society of Corporate Law Academics will be hosted by the School of Law and Society, University of the Sunshine Coast. The conference will run in blended/hybrid mode, with the options for in-person or virtual participation for all sessions.

In the matter of the corporation

The global need for us to live sustainability into the future, keep pace with technological development and respond to social and economic inequalities (exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic) have given rise to multiple calls to re-think, re-theorise, re-construct, re-configure, re-define, re-conceptualise, re-purpose and re-invent the corporation. These calls accompany diverse proposals: imbuing existing legal frameworks with a new emphasis on corporate virtue, ethical standards, a social licence to operate or corporate purpose; minor or major reforms of national and global legal frameworks; moving beyond existing legal frameworks and emphasising non-legal forms of norm-creation; or progressing alternatives to the shareholder-dominant corporation (co-operatives, benefit corporations, digital platforms). The emphasis of the prefix ‘re’, in each of these calls, however, encapsulates a return, a do-over, a need to perform a task again, which extends at times to a process of literally re-forming the corporate form, imagining alternative possibilities and thinking it anew.

This conference, the first under the association’s new name emphasising its commitment to leading scholarship in corporate law across Australia, New Zealand and the region, asks for papers to critically, conceptually and pragmatically engage with these calls that re-think, re-form and re-imagine the corporation. It sees the processes of thinking and re-thinking, imagining and re-imagining, the corporation and its regulation as central to the task of both reform and the corporate law scholar.

Paper and panel proposals could include consideration of:

• Which Comes First – Reimagining the Corporation or Reimagining Capitalism?
• Past, Present and Future projects to re-think corporate governance and regulation
• Re-form-ing the Corporation: From Co-operatives to Benefit Corporations, Incorporated Associations to Digital Companies
• Reimagining Corporate Purpose: From Profit to Sustainability and Beyond
• Rethinking the Role of the Shareholder – Individual, Activist, Institutional, Defunct
• Corporate Law Reform, where to from here?
• State and Corporate Sovereignty in Pandemic Times
• (Re)imagining a Decolonised Corporation
• Digital Futures for the Corporate Form and Corporate Governance: Blockchain and AI as New Possibilities or More of the Same?
• Re-thinking Attribution and the Criminal Corporation
• Reforming Complexity: the ALRC and Simplifying the Corporations Act 2001 (Cth)
• Any other papers related to corporations, corporate law and regulation

Note: the Call for Papers is now closed.