Biography
Beate Sjåfjell, Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Oslo in Norway, Visiting Professor at College of Europe, European Legal Studies Department (since 2021), and Academic Chair for the Knowledge Hub on Climate in the European University Alliance Circle U (since 2022). Professor Sjåfjell is founder and head of the Oslo Faculty’s Research Group Companies, Markets and Sustainability (the Company Law Group, 2012-2022), and for the new Research Group Sustainability Law, starting up in August 2022.
Professor Sjåfjell’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. Her monograph Towards a Sustainable European Company Law (Kluwer Law International, 2009), is now freely available in full-text on SSRN. Professor Sjåfjell publishes 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 0.14 per cent of authors based on total downloads across fields (per July 2022).
Professor Sjåfjell’s main field is company law and corporate governance, with much of her research concentrating on the integration of sustainability into the role of the corporate board. Already in her doctoral thesis, successfully defended in May 2008, she 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. Her 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
