I am delighted to bring my experiences in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to a discussion of comparative corporate governance. My first job after I graduated from law school was at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Although I soon left that job, I never lost interest in the relationship between corporations and the larger culture. After living in the Congo for two years, I have developed a richer appreciation of the relationships between corporate governance and development based on observations of the policies and practices of businesses in sub-Saharan central Africa.
In this Article, I seek to cross disciplines, to bring the richness of political-science critiques of multinational corporations to legal analyses of corporate responsibility, focusing on sub-Saharan Africa. Teemu Ruskola, another participant at this conference, pointed out in an earlier article that recent work in comparative law has begun to break its isolation from other disciplines. This Article uses scholarship from both inside and outside the law to provide additional perspectives on comparative corporate governance.