Representing Social Enterprise, Teaching (Sustainable) Corporate Governance

Abstract:     
Careful consideration and selection of clients facilitate the pedagogical objectives of a clinical law program or other experiential learning course. This article explores the selection of social enterprises - i.e., nonprofit and for-profit organizations whose managers strategically and purposefully work to create social, environmental, and economic value or achieve a social good through the use of business techniques - as clients of two experiential learning courses at Georgetown University Law Center. Representation of social enterprises helps create a dynamic curriculum through which law students learn to merge legal theory and practice. Through service to social enterprises, law students learn about corporate governance and corporate legal theory as well as business models and mechanisms that support social and environmental value creation at a time when the corporate sector is increasingly concerned with sustainability issues; and engage in solving novel and unstructured problems, advocacy work, knowledge creation, and information facilitation to assist the developing social enterprise sector. Legal issues unique to social enterprises compel students to learn corporate governance and corporate practice methods in a manner not typically available to the non-experiential classroom.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 57

Keywords: social enterprise, sustainability, corporate sustainability, clinical legal education, transactional law clinic, clinical pedagogy

Accepted Paper Series