Setting the Stage for the Emerging Law of Sustainable Corporations: Some Methodological Remarks and a Possible Research Agenda

This introductory essay outlines the reasons of the three-pronged ed-ucational project and its outcomes as documented in the three parts this volume consists of – that is, the three sets of the project's "chronicles" – in addition to the book's epilogue. It also delineates in some detail the main issues the rise of the law of sustainable companies – a develop-ing body of rules and principles intended to shift the traditional para-digm of for-profit companies – ought to confront with, including: the problems of corporate purpose and their possible connections with the shareholderism vs. stakeholderism debates, the existing tensions between convergence and divergence in corporate governance, the possible role of path dependency and regulatory competition in deterring concurrence of new sustainability rules, and the different attitudes of the EU and the US legislators vis-à-vis sustainable corporations regulation. In addition, this introduction offers a list of research questions that may be used for subsequent in-depth analyses of various interdisciplinary topics charac-terizing the emerging law of sustainable corporations, inter alia pointing out that the (often constitutionally protected) enterprise freedom may result heavily impacted in connection with the nature of the limits to be imposed to managerial discretion according to policy decisions (that is, as a consequence of legislative action), the choice being, in essence, between a regulatory approach operating from within, as opposed to the regula-tory approach operating from without the incorporated (for-profit) firm, by means of external limits to the free enterprise principle. A paragraph containing the book acknowledgments concludes.