SUMMARY Projections for climate change extend decades into the future, and usually to the end of this century due to the long-lived nature of greenhouse gases (GHGs). Predominant normative frameworks for corporate governance are primarily short-term in nature, creating a temporal dissonance within the context of corporate governance and climate change. Adding to this complexity, the energy transition itself has temporal paradoxes and implications for the global economy – the transition away from fossil fuels cannot be too sudden and sharp, but an urgent yet stable, phased transition is required. Statutory interventions in the UK have imposed on directors the requirement to consider the long-term profitability of companies. New initiatives, such as the task force on climate related disclosures (TCFD), the Enterprise Principles, and the Oxford-Martin Principles, also advocate for directors to consider the risks from climate change, including emissions scenarios which take into account short-, medium- and long-term scenarios. It is by using a phased approach to climate risk that a smoothing of this temporal dissonance between corporate governance and climate change can be initiated by businesses. While many of these new governance initiatives do not yet provide the requisite level of specificity to demonstrate how a phased approach could be adopted by particular companies, the TCFD guidance does provide some tools which would allow companies to adopt a phased approach, however the types and levels of detail of these tools should be increased for a variety of types of industry.
Following recent judgement of the Supreme Court of US (June 2014), several commentators had declared that "Securities class actions are here to stay" (insidecounsel.com-September 2014, 11). This paper provides a critical perspective on this judgement, which "implicates substantive issues at the intersection of economic theory, financial markets, and securities regulation" (128 Harv. L. Rev. 291 2014-2015, 291), and shows that we must be much more careful. This recent judgement is based on the Fraud on the Market Doctrine, which was introduced in 1973 in order to preserve the class action procedure in securities fraud litigation. The characteristic of the Fraud on the Market Doctrine is to have been structured from one of the most popular financial theory: Efficient Market Hypothesis. In this paper, by analysing the implementation of the Efficient Market Hypothesis in Fraud on the Market Theory, we argue that if the Supreme Court had to take position for a second time about the Fraud on the Market Doctrine it is due to the practical difficulties inherited from Efficient Market Hypothesis and that have raised several problems to the US courts, including the Supreme Court. This issue is illustrated by the definition of Efficient Market Hypothesis lawyers used ("most" vs "all"/"fully"). As this paper shows, if "Securities class actions are here to stay", the opportunity to open such a class action is strongly reduced in the facts.
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