Professor Joshua Macey Receives Award for Best ESG Paper
An article co-authored by Associate Professor of Law Joshua Macey ’17 has received a 2024 Berkeley Center for Law and Business Best Paper Award and a $10,000 prize from Berkeley Law School.
The paper “Private Profits and Public Business,” forthcoming in the Texas Law Review, was co-authored by Aneil Kovvali, Associate Professor of Law at Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law, and won in the Junior Category.
The competition seeks to highlight current legal research in Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) issues and bring together leading legal scholars, practitioners, and investors. Finalists present their research at the Berkeley Forum for Corporate Governance, held annually in the fall.
“Shareholder primacy is normally justified on the ground that shareholders’ financial interests give them an incentive to pursue projects that increase social welfare,” Macey and Kovvali write in the paper, before noting that government interventions can occasionally weaken shareholders’ financial incentives to pursue socially beneficial projects. The authors suggest possible reforms designed to reorient companies to better align their priorities with the public good and note implications for other business law fields.
The honor is the second awarded to Macey this fall. In September, he was selected as the 20th Annual Young Scholar at the S.J. Quinney College of Law’s Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources & the Environment at the University of Utah. Young Scholars are chosen based on their accomplishments, the quality of their academic work, and their promise in the field of environmental and natural resources law and policy.
Macey presented his Young Scholar lecture on the topic “Regulating Public Utilities” (forthcoming in the Utah Law Review) in November.
Macey teaches and writes about bankruptcy, environmental law, energy law, and the regulation of financial institutions at Yale Law School. His latest work focuses on the fragility of the nation’s electric grid and offers strategies to improve grid reliability and accelerate the transition to new sources of energy.
In 2023, the American Bankruptcy Institute named Macey to its list of 40 Under 40 Emerging Leaders in Insolvency Practice. Macey has also won the Morrison Prize — awarded to the “most impactful sustainability-related legal academic paper published in North America during the previous year” — for three consecutive years.
