Beate Sjåfjell

Beate Sjåfjell is Professor Dr. Juris at our Department (since 2011), and holds a fractional appointment as Adjunct Professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Department of Industrial Economics and Technology Management (since 2016). Beate is founder and head of the Oslo Faculty’s Research Group Companies, Markets and Sustainability (the Company Law Group), which is now in its second period (2017-2021), as well as several international networks and projects.

Beate’s publications include the edited volumes Cambridge Handbook of Corporate Law, Corporate Governance and Sustainability (Cambridge University Press, 2019, co-editor Christopher M. Bruner); Creating Corporate Sustainability: Gender as an Agent for Change (Cambridge University Press, 2018, co-editor: Irene Lynch Fannon), and Company Law and Sustainability: Legal Barriers and Opportunities (Cambridge University Press, 2015, co-editor: Benjamin Richardson), translated into Korean, as well as the monograph Towards a Sustainable European Company Law (Kluwer Law International, 2009). Beate has published extensively, notably on EU law, company law and corporate governance, and the integration of sustainability. Many of her papers are available at SSRN, where she is among the top 0.4 per cent of authors based on total downloads across fields.

Through active and innovative dissemination and communication Beate contributes to corporate law debates and sustainability discussions both in the public debate and in academia in Norway and internationally.

Fields of interests

Beate Sjåfjell’s main field is company law and corporate governance, with much of her research concentrating on the regulation of business in the broader context of sustainability. Already in her doctoral thesis, successfully defended in May 2008, Beate broke new ground, identifying and integrating sustainability as an overarching objective into EU company law and securities law. This was followed up in the Sustainable Companies Project (2010-2014), which focused on environmental sustainability in its multi-jurisdictional comparative analysis of company and accounting law. An increasing interdisciplinary focus is reflected in the H2020-funded project Sustainable Market Actors for Responsible Trade (SMART, 2016-2020), which was successfully completed in the spring of 2020. SMART Legacy initiatives include the Futuring Nordics project, and continued industry engagement through the Business and Finance Forums.

Beate collaborates extensively with scholars in Norway and abroad. The international nature of Beate’s work is reflected in the international membership in the Company Law Group as well as the two international research networks she has founded and coordinates: the Sustainable Market Actors Research Network (the SMART Network) and Daughters of Themis: International Network of Female Business Scholars.

At the Faculty, Beate is responsible for coordinating company law research at our Department and for the advanced company law elective for master students, and she supervises master students and PhD candidates on a variety of issues. Successfully supervised PhD candidates include:

• Hanna Ahlström, Achieving Sustainability in EU Business and Financial Market Law – A Systems Thinking Approach (2020), currently postdoctoral scholar at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
  
• Basang Wangdui, The Supervisory Role of the Board in China: A Comparative Study of Legal Evolution, Transplantation and Influence from Germany and the United States (2019), currently Associate Professor at Faculty of Law and Political Science, Tibet University
  
• Linn Anker-Sørensen, The Multifaceted Corporate Group. Testing EU’s response to hidden control structures (2019), currently senior manager at EY

Memberships/networks (selected)

• Founder and head of the Research Group Companies, Markets and Sustainability (sabbatical 2018-2019)
• Editor of the University of Oslo Faculty of Law Legal Studies Research Paper Series on SSRN (contact: ssrn-editors@jus.uio.no)
• Editor of the International and Comparative Corporate Law Journal (contact: icclj-editors@jus.uio.no)
• Founder and coordinator of Daughters of Themis: International Network of Female Business Scholars
• Founder and coordinator of Sustainable Market Actors Research Network (the SMART Network)
• Founder and chair of the board of Concerned Scientists Norway (2008-2018); deputy chair of the board from 2018
• Contact person, member of the steering group and of the group for PhD activities of the Nordic network in company Law
• Member of the European Corporate Governance Institute
• Member of the European Commission’s Informal Group of Company Law Experts (2020-2024)
• Member of Advisory Board for ERC Starting Grant, Law as a Vehicle for Social Change: Mainstreaming Non-Extractive Economic Practices, University of Amsterdam (2020-2025)
• Member of the University of Oslo’s Committee for North-South Collaboration (2020-2021)
• Member of National Reference Group for Horizon Europe (appointed by the Research Council of Norway) (2020-2022)
• Member of working group for new climate and environmental strategy at the University of Oslo (from 2020)