As soon as details of our upcoming events are ready to be publicly announced, we will share relevant information on this webpage.

"ACLE-YSI Young Talents in Law & Finance Conference – New trends in business, corporate and financial law" held in October 2022

On Thursday and Friday, October 27^th and 28^th 2022, ACLE hosted the “Young Talents in Law & Finance Conference – New trends in business, corporate and financial law”.
Location: Roeterseiland campus (REC), M building.

About the Event
This conference covered a wide array of Law & Finance topics, such as business organisation, sustainable corporate governance, financial regulation, blockchain and fintech regulation, adopting different methodologies (empirical, theoretical, functional). The conference gathered the best early-career interdisciplinary scholars working on Law & Finance topics and aimed to create and strengthen the network of next generation interdisciplinary researchers.
Organisation:
Edoardo Martino (ACLE Research Member) with the support of the Young Scholar Initiative - Institute for New Economic Thinking and the Junior Corporate Law Scholars Network, a group of young scholars engaged in law&finance topics who are based, amongst others, at the University of Amsterdam, Bocconi University, Goethe University Frankfurt, Hamburg University, Leeds University, National University of Singapore, Oxford University, Tilburg University, Columbia Law School, Harvard law School and Yale Law School.

This conference included hybrid lectures by two world-class interdisciplinary keynote speakers:

• Martin Schmalz - Professor of Finance at Oxford University
  Title of the Keynote Lecture: “Common Ownership”
  Thursday 27^th, 14:00-15:15
• Madison Condon - Associate Professor of Law at Boston University
  Title of the Keynote Lecture: “Institutional Investor Industrial Policy”
  Friday 28^th, 14:00-15:15

We gratefully acknowledge the generous support by the Amsterdam University Fund for partially funding this event.

Conference on "Investor Sustainability Engagement" held in June 2022

On Thursday and Friday, June 23^rd and 24^th2022, ACLE hosted a Conference on Investor Sustainability Engagement.
Location: Hybrid - online and live on University of Amsterdam's Roeterseiland campus, A building, room A2.09.

Organisers
Anne Lafarre (Tilburg University & ACLE)
Suren Gomtsian (University of Leeds & ACLE)
Alessio M. Pacces (University of Amsterdam, ACLE & ECGI)

Supported by
European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI)
University of Amsterdam - Amsterdam Center for Law & Economics and Amsterdam Centre for Transformative Private Law (ACT)
University of Leeds - Centre for Business Law and Practice and Michael Beverley Innovation Fellowship Programme
Tilburg University - The Dutch Research Council (NWO)

About the Event
Recent years have witnessed a growing pressure on corporations to act more responsibly towards stakeholders other than shareholders. Demands for more responsible behaviour are coming from different sides, including from institutional investors who have become large shareholders in many corporations around the world. Powerful institutional shareholders are at the centre of private actor-led efforts to make businesses more sustainable.
Institutional shareholders, however, face many challenges in engaging with portfolio firms. Effective engagement requires a good understanding of target companies, their businesses and the relevant trade-offs, more clarity about the meaning of corporate sustainability, and the availability of credible information about business practices. Questions also remain about the incentives of institutional shareholders to drive changes in corporate behaviours and about the overall impact of investor sustainability engagement.
The Conference on Investor Sustainability Engagement aims to answer these questions by bringing together world-class scholars from law, corporate finance and economics, and leading practitioners from different sectors. This hybrid conference will take place at the University of Amsterdam, in person, and virtually over Zoom on June 23-24, 2022. There will be sessions with presentations of academic papers and a roundtable discussion on investor sustainability engagement by experts from the investor community, consultants, and charities.

See the list of Speakers
See all Panel discussion details

We gratefully acknowledge the generous support by the Amsterdam University Fund for partially funding this event.

Workshop on "Central banks beyond price stability" held in January 2022

13 January 2022, 13.00-17.00 CET

On Thursday, January 13^th, the Amsterdam Centre for European Studies (ACES) online workshop on Central banks beyond price stability was held, with Will Bateman (ANU College of Law), Eric Monnet (EHESS & Paris School of Economics), Jens van 't Klooster (KU Leuven), Agnieszka Smoleńska (ILS PAS & European Banking Institute) and ACES affiliate and ACLE associate Nik de Boer, hosted by our ACLE together with The Sustainable Global Economic Law (SGEL) research project.

Location: online  

About the event
In the 1980s economic thinking converged on the idea that central banks should safeguard price stability as an overriding objective. Yet, since the 2008 global financial crisis this orthodoxy is increasingly criticized and more difficult to square with new, unconventional monetary policies. Many voices now contend that central banks should better take account of goals beyond price stability. Central banks are increasingly called upon to do their share in addressing harmful climate change; to better take account of the negative effects of quantitative easing on inequality; and to be more open about how their massive interventions in government bond markets supports governments’ economic policy.
Yet, how should central banks take account of goals beyond price stability? And does a broader role for central banks require rethinking their independence from democratic politics?

About the speakers
Nik de Boer is Assistant Professor in constitutional law at the University of Amsterdam and Coordinator of the ACES Theme Group Governing Europe. His research focuses on constitutional courts in the EU and the legal architecture of money. He is currently working on a forthcoming book with Oxford University Press called Judging European Democracy: The Role and Legitimacy of National Constitutional Courts in the EU.
Will Bateman is Associate Professor and Associate Dean (Research) at the ANU College of Law. He leads multi-jurisdictional projects on the legal regulation of public and private finance, with a special focus on central banking, sovereign debt markets, national budget formulation and sustainable investing. Bateman also leads research projects on the regulation of artificial intelligence, and is currently spearheading a major project on the formulation of model legal frameworks to govern artificial intelligence in the public sector. He also collaborates with computer science experts in designing ethical and lawful algorithmic decision systems. Recent publications include Public Finance and Parliamentary Constitutionalism (Cambridge University Press, UK, 2020) and 'The Law of Central Bank Reserve Creation', (2021) Modern Law Review (advance release, with J Allen).
Eric Monnet is Directeur d'études (Full Professor) at EHESS & Paris School of Economics. His works seeks to better understand how the evolution of finance, state intervention in credit markets, central banking and the international monetary system has shaped European economies since the 19th century. Recent publications include La Banque Providence Démocratiser les banques centrales et la monnaie and Controlling Credit: Central Banking and the Planned Economy in Postwar France, 1948–1973.
Jens van ‘t Klooster is an FWO Postdoctoral Fellow at the Hoger Instituut voor Wijsbegeerte of the KU Leuven and a member of the research group A New Normative Framework for Financial Debt at the University of Amsterdam. His research combines normative political philosophy and political economy. Recent publications include ‘The ECB, the Courts, and the Issue of Democratic Legitimacy after Weiss’ (with Nik de Boer) and ‘The Myth of Market Neutrality: A Comparative Study of the European Central Bank’s and the Swiss National Bank’s Corporate Security Purchases’ (with Clément Fontan).
Agnieszka Smoleńska is assistant professor at the Institute of Law Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences (ILS PAS) and the principal investigator of The EU’s sustainability capitalism: identifying the varieties of financial markets transition – a law of political economy approach, a three-year NCN-funfed project. She's an associate researcher with the European Banking Institute (EBI). She holds a PhD in Law from the European University Institute. In addition to academic and research work, she worked as a journalist and in the EU institutions. Her research interests include sustainable finance, EMU and interdisciplinarity in legal methodology.

Conference "Should Wealth and Income Inequality Be a Competition Law Concern?" held in May 2021

On May 20^th and 21^st 2021, together with the Amsterdam Centre for European Law and Governance (ACELG), we convened a conference discussing whether differences in how much people own and earn should be a concern for competition law.

Read more about this conference and watch conference recordings

"Economic inequality is on the rise around the world. The gap between rich and poor has been widening steadily, with the covid-19 pandemic further reinforcing the trend. Differences in how much people own and earn have become so pronounced that they are causing serious economic, political and moral concern. As a result, academics, policy makers and politicians have been asking what generates these differences and how they could be curbed.

A major source of wealth and income inequality appears to be the immense economic power enjoyed by large multinational corporations. Against this backdrop, prominent scholars have argued that a more equal society could be ensured through enforcement of competition rules, not least in labour markets. Yet, the precise extent to which competition law can and should be concerned with distributive issues remains unclear." 

Speakers in this conference included:
- Eleanor Fox (NYU, United States)
- Ioannis Lianos (Hellenic Competition Commission, Greece)
- Martijn Snoep (Authority for Consumers and Markets, Netherlands)

"Virtual Visions of Europe" series by ACES held in April/May 2020

In April and May 2020, the Amsterdam Centre for European Studies (ACES) organised an online "Virtual Visions of Europe series". 

On 29 April 2020, Prof. Alessio M. Pacces, Director of the ACLE, was a speaker in the first session of this Virtual Visions of Europe series, entitled "Public health: Diversity and (non-)coordination".  

Read about & watch this session.

On 6 May 2020, Prof. Arnoud Boot, ACLE co-founder and Research Member, was a speaker in the second session of the Virtual Visions of Europe series, entitled: "Socio-economic policy and crisis response".  

Read about & watch this session. 
 

Conference "Deviating from Absolute Priority" held on 24 February 2020 

Conference held on 24 February 2020

Organisers:
Prof. Rolef de Weijs, Prof. Enrico Perotti and ACLE PhD candidate Maryam Malakotipour.

This conference was a joint initiative of the ACLE, the Amsterdam Centre for Transformative Private Law (ACT) and the Amsterdam Center in Risk and Macro Finance (ACRM).

The main purpose of this conference was to better understand the major revision of the insolvency procedures by the EU Preventive Restructuring Directive: The shift towards reorganisation procedures away from liquidation procedures and the issue of how to deal with priority issues. By June 2021 (with a possible delay), EU member states must have implemented the Directive, which requires the national legislators to make a choice between the Absolute Priority Rule (APR) or adopting a new European Relative Priority Rule (EU RPR).

The conference brought together nearly 60 eminent law and economics scholars, practitioners and policy makers from around the world to discuss possible implications of deviating from the benchmark APR from legal and financial stability perspectives. The event started by a lead introduction by Prof. D.G. Baird. This was followed by short presentations upon which debates were held. Speakers included amongst others Prof. Douglas G. Baird (Chicago Law School) and Jonathan M. Seymour, JD (Duke University School of Law).

Below you will find the Conference Report which was made after the conference and is an approximation of what was said during the APR conference:

Below you will find presentations of the APR conference speakers: