Corporate National Identity
Monday, November 16, 2026
12:00 p.m. - 1:15 p.m. (Eastern)
Wilf 3/F conference room and on zoom
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About the event
What determines a corporation’s nationality, and who decides? Corporate national identity used to be determined by relatively fixed and tangible factors such as where a corporation was incorporated, where its headquarters were located, or the nationality of its controlling shareholder. But as corporate identity increasingly intersects with national security concerns and geopolitical rivalries, it has become a subject of contestation and reassignment by unilateral government action, especially during cross-border mergers and acquisitions. Curtis Milhaupt, an expert on comparative corporate governance, will explore the ways in which corporations today are trying to control perceptions of their identity, while governments are intervening to reduce the perceived influence of rival states.
Professor Milhaupt will join us live via Zoom and will answer questions from both the online audience and those in the room.
His working paper, Corporation National Identity, co-authored with Mariana Pargendler and Dan W. Puchniak, can be accessed here.
About the speaker
Curtis J. Milhaupt is the William F. Baxter-Visa International Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He also is a fellow of the European Corporate Governance Institute and an elected member of the American Law Institute. His research focuses on comparative corporate governance, the legal systems of East Asia (particularly Japan), and state capitalism. In addition to numerous scholarly articles, he has co-authored or edited seven books, including Regulating the Visible Hand? The Institutional Implications of Chinese State Capitalism (Oxford, 2016), Law and Capitalism: What Corporate Crises Reveal about Legal Systems and Economic Development Around the World (Chicago, 2008) and Transforming Corporate Governance in East Asia (Routledge, 2008). His research has been profiled in The Economist, the Financial Times, and the Wall Street Journal and has been widely translated. He is the 2024 recipient of the Cleary Gottlieb Prize for his ECGI working paper, “The (Geo)Politics of Controlling Shareholders.” Prior to his Stanford appointment in 2018, he served on the faculty of Columbia Law School for nearly two decades.