Transparency and Corporate Social Responsibility
Nearly every conversation about improving social responsibility, ethics, and human rights in the tech sector ultimately ends up calling for greater transparency, which is a key gatekeeping problem limiting progress elsewhere. In order to meaningfully engage in efforts to improve things, regulators, and the public at large, must first arrive at an accurate understanding of the way things are operating. But "transparency" is a fuzzy and flexible concept, which can mean vastly different things depending on the speaker and the context.
This panel, which is co-presented by the UCLA Institute for Technology, Law & Policy and the Lowell Milken Institute for Business Law and Policy explores the connection between transparency and corporate social responsibility, in order to provide avenues for meaningful improvement in the tech sector:
Greg Waters is the Associate Director of Research at SASB Standards. Greg Waters supervises technical staff on the research team and provides oversight on technical staff’s execution of standard-setting activities, sector coverage, and organizational projects. He also serves as the sector lead for the Technology & Communications sector of the SASB Standards. Prior to joining SASB in 2019, Mr. Waters spent seven years on the research team at proxy advisor Glass Lewis, where he led a team analyzing the corporate governance of North American companies. He holds an MBA in Finance from NYU’s Stern School of Business and a BA in Economics from Bates College.
Nathalie Maréchal is the Senior Policy and Partnerships Manager at Ranking Digital Rights.She leads the development of RDR’s policy positions, coordinates stakeholder engagement and partnerships, and publicly represents RDR with the media and at conferences around the world.
Lynn M. LoPucki is the Security Pacific Bank Distinguished Professor of Law at UCLA, where he teaches Business Associations, Secured Transactions, and Comparative Corporate Law. LoPucki has written extensively on law-related information systems. His Stakeholder Takeover Project is an effort to provide potential corporate stakeholders—customers, employees, suppliers, creditors, investors, managers, communities, and the public—the information flow they need to control corporations through markets. The first article in that project, Repurposing the Corporation Through Stakeholder Markets, will be published in the UC Davis Law Review in February 2022. The second, recently completed, is on Corporate Greenhouse Gas Disclosures.
The Institute for Technology, Law and Policy is a collaboration between the UCLA School of Law and the Samueli School of Engineering whose mission is to foster research and analysis to ensure that new technologies are developed, implemented and regulated in ways that are socially beneficial, equitable, and accountable.
The Lowell Milken Institute is an academic center at the UCLA School of Law that works with business law faculty to develop business law curriculum and co-curricular programs to train the next generation of business lawyers and leaders