By Ann W. Parks

Georgetown Law Professor Mitt Regan with Carlo Parravano, director of the Merck Institute for Science Education and Tania Shah, director of corporate social responsibility at Pillsbury Winthrop.

Participants at the symposium on “Corporate Social Responsibility: Law, Operations, and Strategy” held at Georgetown Law November 7.

According to the experts, the phrase “corporate social responsibility” is getting a steadily increasing number of hits on Google these days — and is the subject of more and more business school courses. Consumers, shareholders and concerned citizens want the companies they do business with to use environmentally friendly practices, to refrain from using child labor and to eliminate unsafe or unhealthy working conditions. But is the law always the best means of bringing about good practices? How can businesses devise socially responsible strategies that are also economically feasible? And how are businesses to know when they’re getting it right?

Those were some of the questions raised at a symposium on “Corporate Social Responsibility: Law, Operations, and Strategy” held in Gewirz Student Center on November 7. The symposium was sponsored by the Center for the Study of the Legal Profession at Georgetown Law and Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. The executive director of the Center is Carole Silver and the co-directors are Mitt Regan and Jeff Bauman.

The symposium attempted to spotlight the latest thinking on “CSR” — focusing on the legal environment companies must navigate, the operational demands they face, and their ability to devise socially responsible strategies.

“Every year, new issues come into play, such as … the responsibility of business to [refrain from] producing obese children,” said Oxford University Professor Doreen McBarnet, who presented a paper on the relationships between corporate social responsibility and the law.

The law, she noted, is playing an ever greater role in making CSR mandatory. Some companies voluntarily go above and beyond what is legally required of them; others, however, have used their resources to circumvent legal control — such as Enron’s complicated scheme to avoid paying $685 billion in taxes. CSR has also been driven by such things as nongovernment organizations, market pressures and socially responsible investors.

In a presentation on the roles of standardization, certification and assurance services in global commerce, Vanderbilt Law School’s Margaret Blair examined how standards, certification and third-party inspectors have affected the food and apparel industries. In an era where food travels around the globe to get to the table, consumers pay attention to food production, health and safety and are willing to pay more for specialty products, creating “a market niche that’s not trivial.” And in the 1990s, public outcries over sweatshop conditions in overseas clothing factories resulted in higher standards and auditing.

“The industry’s first response to this was to say, they’re not our factories, we just contracted these people,” she said. “The activists said, we’re not going to let you get away with that.”

Sea change

A luncheon roundtable moderated by Professor Mitt Regan discussed CSR with some of the people in charge of implementing it. Tania Shah, director of Corporate Social Responsibility at Pillsbury Winthrop, noted that some law firms (not hers) have been fired because they did not meet their business client’s diversity goals. “There has been a sea change in the amount of attention corporations are paying to these issues,” she said. “While I would love to say that law firms are leading the way, we are actually following the direction that the corporations are going.”

The event was the brainchild of Regan and George Brenkert of Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business.