Background
Beate Sjåfjell is Professor Dr Juris at the Faculty of Law, Department of Private Law (since 2011); 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 Sustainability Law (2022-2027), building on a decade of work in the Research Group Companies, Markets and Sustainability (2012-2022).
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 0.06 per cent of authors based on total downloads across fields (per April 2024). Her publications include the edited volumes Nordic Company Law: Broadening the Horizon (Scandinavian University Press, 2023, co-editor Jukka Mähönen), Sustainable Value Creation in the European Union (Cambridge University Press, 2023, co-editors Georgina Tsagas and Charlotte Villiers), Interdisciplinary Research for Sustainable Business (Springer Nature, 2023, co-editors Roseanne Russell and Charlotte Villiers), Innovating Business for Sustainability: Regulatory Approaches in the Anthropocene (Edward Elgar, 2022, co-editors Carol Liao and Aikaterini Argyrou), and the Cambridge Handbook of Corporate Law, Corporate Governance and Sustainability (Cambridge University Press, 2019, co-editor Christopher M. Bruner). Her monograph Towards a Sustainable European Company Law (Kluwer Law International, 2009), is now freely available in full-text on SSRN.
Through active and innovative dissemination and communication Professor Sjåfjell contributes to corporate law debates and sustainability discussions both in the public debate and in academia.
Fields of interests
Professor Sjåfjell’s main field is company law and corporate governance, with much of her increasingly interdisciplinary 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 the Horizon Europe project ToNoWaste.
Professor Sjåfjell collaborates extensively with scholars across jurisdictional and disciplinary boundaries. The international nature of her work is reflected in the membership in Sustainability Law as well as the two international research networks she has founded: Daughters of Themis: International Network of Women Business Scholars and the Sustainable Market Actors Research Network (the SMART Network).
At the Faculty in Oslo, Professor Sjåfjell is responsible for two Sustainability Law electives, and she supervises master students and PhD candidates on a variety of topics. At College of Europe, Professor Sjåfjell teaches the LLM course ‘Ensuring Sustainability through EU Law’. Students from both universities are encouraged to share their insights on Blogging for Sustainability.
Current PhD candidates include:
- Andreas Hösli, The Directors’ Duty of Care and Climate Change – Corporate Board Responsibility in the Anthropocene (working title)
- Chiara Morfea, Sustainability Law for the Anthropocene: Evaluation of the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive and Taxonomy Regulation (working title)
- Victoria Skeie
Successfully supervised PhD candidates include:
- Hanna Ahlström, Achieving Sustainability in EU Business and Financial Market Law – A Systems Thinking Approach (2020)
- 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)
- Linn Anker-Sørensen, The Multifaceted Corporate Group. Testing EU’s response to hidden control structures (2019)
Memberships/networks (selected)
- Founder and head of the Research Group Sustainability Law (2022-2027)
- Founder and coordinator of Daughters of Themis: International Network of Women Business Scholars
- Member of the European Commission’s Informal Group of Company Law Experts (2020-2024)
- Academic Chair for the Knowledge Hub on Climate in the European University Alliance Circle U (2022-)
- Steering Committee Member and Academic Fellow of the Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence on Sustainable Finance and Law (EUSFiL)
- Member of the Advisory Board for the ERC Starting Grant project, N-EXTLAW: Law as a Vehicle for Social Change: Mainstreaming Non-Extractive Economic Practices, University of Amsterdam (2020-2025)
- Editor of Blogging for Sustainability
- Editor of the University of Oslo Faculty of Law Legal Studies Research Paper Series on SSRN (contact: ssrn-editors@jus.uio.no)
- Member of the European Corporate Governance Institute
- Member of the European Law Institute
- Member of the Global Network for Human Rights and the Environment