Berkeley Program in Law and Economics

The moral and legal obligations of those involved in business have been studied from very early ages. The late scholastics (13 through 16 centuries) wrote volumes about the duties of the businessperson. Their analyses of business practice differed little from analyses of other interactions between human beings. The emergence of the notion of the modern corporation created new questions. In this paper, we work with traditional concepts of the corporation, the social realm and the meaning of responsibility. This paper brings the three concepts together, using them to build a model to develop meaningful indicators. This paper cautions against certain abuses of the concept of corporate social responsibility.