Corporate Power and the Politics of Change
Corporate Power and the Politics of Change is an ECGI podcast series that examines how corporations have become influential political actors over the past decade. It features conversations with leading scholars on corporate involvement in debates over climate, civil rights, ESG, and stakeholder governance. The series accompanies Matteo Gatti's Cambridge University Press book and explores the growing role of corporations in politics, governance, and democratic life.
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Dissecting the Architecture of Corporate Power with Elizabeth Pollman
What is a corporation? Where is it? Whom does it serve? And who, in the end, governs it? These are not abstract philosophical puzzles — they are the questions on which the entire architecture of corporate rights and accountability rests. Elizabeth Pollman has spent two decades building frameworks that answer them, and each framework has become a term of art the field now depends on: the derivative
After the Retreat: Can Corporate Activism Return? with Tom Lin and Aneil Kovvali
Corporate America spent a decade becoming an activist. It took sides on guns, climate, race, and voting rights. Some of it produced real change — the partial repeal of North Carolina's bathroom bill, the congressional ban on mandatory arbitration for sexual harassment claims, a federal Juneteenth holiday. Then, after the 2024 election, it stopped fast.The reversal was not strategic; it appeare
Politics in Corporations: Systematic Corruption with Reilly Steel
Citigroup imposes gun purchase rules stricter than most state laws. Disney fights the Florida governor over legislation. Corporations, for a decade, decided they had something to say about politics. But something else has been happening in the opposite direction: Paramount's backers called the White House when competing for a merger approval. Palantir's CEO publicly embraced the current ad
Reforming the Law of Capitalism with Katharina Pistor
What if decades of debate about capitalism have been conducted at the wrong level? Most critiques of markets focus on outcomes, inequality, environmental damage, stagnant wages, and most reform proposals reach for public law to fix them. Katharina Pistor's argument, developed in The Code of Capital and now extended in The Law of Capitalism and How to Transform It, is that both the diagnosis an
The Limits of Private Sector-led Reform with Mark Roe
For a moment in the 2010s, the stars seemed aligned. BlackRock, managing over $14 trillion in assets, was telling every major CEO on the planet that climate was an existential risk and corporations had to act. The Business Roundtable declared that shareholder primacy was over. Hundreds of companies updated their purpose statements, hired sustainability officers, and made public commitments. Then,
Dissecting the DEI Reversal with Veronica Root Martinez
Companies that dismantled their DEI commitments after the 2024 election believed they were managing risk. Veronica Root Martinez argues they were doing the opposite. The rapid retreat from DEI — executive order compliance, scrubbed disclosures, reversed hiring pledges — reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of what kind of risk DEI actually is. It is not a political risk that disappears when the
Corporate Governing and the Role of Shareholder Primacy with Ann Lipton
Delaware courts have written that shareholders are the only corporate constituency whose interests are an endrather than merely an instrument of the corporate form. Taken literally, that sounds almost sociopathic — as if the law instructs boards to treat employees, communities, and the environment as tools. Ann Lipton argues that reading is wrong. What that language is actually doing, she says, is
Corporate Governing and Shareholder Voice with Jill Fisch and Tim Smith
For decades, the shareholder proposal has been the primary channel through which investors can signal their priorities tocorporate management. It doesn't force anyone to do anything — but it creates a public record, produces a vote, and in practice carries real weight. Now that mechanism, along with much of the broader shareholder engagement ecosystem, is under coordinated attack.In this episo
The Economics of Corporate Governing with Swarnodeep Homroy and Elisabeth Kempf
Most S&P 500 CEOs are Republican donors. Yet for the better part of a decade, the statements coming out of corporate America have leaned overwhelmingly Democratic. Is that hypocrisy, ideology, or something more calculated?In this episode, host Matteo Gatti (Professor of Law at Rutgers Law School and author of Corporate Power and the Politics of Change) brings together two economists who have b
The Law of Corporate Governing with Stephen Bainbridge and Roy Shapira Corporate Power and the Politics of Change with Matteo Gatti
When a company halts sales of assault-stylerifles, pulls advertising from a controversial platform, or whose CEO takes to social media with a political opinion — is any of it legal? And if it goes wrong, who's liable?In this episode, host Matteo Gatti (Professor of Law at Rutgers Law School and author of Corporate Power and thePolitics of Change) sits down with two leading corporate law schola
