Grunin Center Conference 2019

Earlier this month, I attended and presented at the 2019 Legal Issues in Social Entrepreneurship and Impact Investing–in the US and Beyond conference co-organized by the Impact Investing Legal Working Group and the Grunin Center for Law and Social Entrepreneurship at the NYU School of Law.  My friends Deb Burand and Helen Scott (also my Corporations and Securities Regulation professor when I was at NYU Law) co-direct the Grunin Center.  They organized a super conference this year.  Each year, the conference draws more folks--and with good reason.

I presented as part of a panel that compared and contrasted the use of different forms of entity for social enterprise businesses.  My role was (perhaps predictably, given that I wrote this piece) to defend the use of traditional for-profit corporations for this purpose.  I got some love from the panel and the audience, but so did others with different views . . . .

One of the nifty features of this conference is the use of lunchtime slots for "table talks" (roundtable discussions) and workshops.  I attended a table talk entitled "Gender Lens Investing: A Year in Review and A Look Ahead" and a workshop on "Re-Designing Legal Education for Lawyers, Social Entrepreneurs, and Impact Investors in the US and Beyond."  (The latter, which involved a design-thinking exercise to work on a course plan/syllabus, has spawned an ongoing informal working group that met again earlier today on Zoom.)  The conference attracts both lawyers and folks from industry.

For me, a wonderful part of this conference--and the scholar convening that followed on the day after the conference--was the inspiration of a new ideas for research and writing.  In my view, a good conference routinely does that, without fanfare. I hope to report out on the details of some of those ideas in the future.

During the week before the Grunin Center conference, I was at the Law and Society Association Annual Meeting.  I presented my ongoing insider trading research at that meeting.  I will again be presenting that work (with some updates) at the National Business Law Scholars Conference later this week.  I hope to see many of our readers there and share my insider trading research in later posts.