Bruner is the Stembler Family Distinguished Professor in Business Law at the University of Georgia School of Law and serves as a faculty co-director of the Dean Rusk International Law Center.
University of Georgia School of Law Professor Laura Phillips-Sawyer participated in the Business History Conference in Atlanta, Georgia earlier this year. She was one of several speakers in the Harvard Business School Workshop entitled “Globalization, Multinationals, and Institutions.” Additionally, she chaired the panel “Trust and Antitrust: Standard Oil and the Creation of the Global Economy.”
Phillips-Sawyer is an expert in U.S. antitrust law and policy. Broadly, she is interested in questions of economic regulation, which intersect with legal history, economic thought, business strategy and structure, and political organization. She currently holds the Jane W. Wilson Associate Professorship in Business Law at the University of Georgia School of Law.
Foohey joined Georgia Law faculty as a full professor in 2024. She currently holds the Allen Post Professorship and teaches Bankruptcy, Secured Transactions and a Bankruptcy Practice Seminar. Specializing in bankruptcy, commercial law, consumer finance and business law, Foohey’s scholarship primarily involves empirical studies of bankruptcy and related parts of the legal system. She presently is a co-investigator on the Consumer Bankruptcy Project, a long-term research project studying persons who file bankruptcy. Data from this project serve as the basis of her co-authored book Debt’s Grip: Risk and Consumer Bankruptcy, University of California Press (Aug. 5, 2025). Her work in business bankruptcy focuses on nonprofit entities, with a particular emphasis on how religious organizations use bankruptcy. Data from this project are included in her in-progress book Forgive Us Our Debts: How Black Churches Use Bankruptcy to Survive, forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press.
Bruner’s chapter builds on ideas he presented in 2023 at a conference hosted by the University of Macerata in Italy.
Bruner is the Stembler Family Distinguished Professor in Business Law at the University of Georgia School of Law and serves as a faculty co-director of the Dean Rusk International Law Center.
Christopher M. Bruner is the Stembler Family Distinguished Professor in Business Law at the University of Georgia School of Law and serves as a faculty co-director of the Dean Rusk International Law Center.
The University of Georgia School of Law’s spring 2025 International Law Colloquium welcomed Sarah Dadush, Professor of Law at Rutgers Law School, who presented her working paper, “Shared Responsibility in Contract Law.” Professor Christopher Bruner, Stembler Family Distinguished Professor in Business Law and Faculty Co-Director of the Dean Rusk International Law Center at Georgia Law, served as her faculty discussant. Dadush’s presentation marks the conclusion of the 2025 International Law Colloquium.
Dadush’s scholarly focus lies in business and human rights, consumer law, and social enterprise law. She also serves as the Director of the Responsible Contracting Project (RCP), a project designed to advocate for human rights and environmental due diligence in contract drafting. The RCP is located within the Rutgers Law School’s Center for Corporate Law and Governance.
Below is an abstract of Dadush’s working paper:
At first, the notion that there is such a thing as shared responsibility in American contract law may sound fanciful, if not absurd. A key reason why parties contract in the first place is to allocate risks and responsibilities between them and to clarify who must do what to move the collaboration forward. As such, contractual obligations are understood to be binary, belonging either to one party or the other, not both. In practice, this means that, if there is a breach, only the obligated party will be held responsible, not both. And, if remedies are awarded, they will flow only from the breaching to the non-breaching party, not between them. Thus, the notion that the parties might be contractually responsible not just for their own obligations, but also for those of their counterparty, seems incoherent.
And yet, as this Article shows, it is not uncommon for courts to go beyond the express terms of the contract to make the parties share responsibility for the performance of one another’s obligations. Thus shared responsibility: Each party is held responsible for the other’s contractual (non)performance, even in the absence of an express commitment to share responsibility for performance.
This Article “goes fishing” for shared responsibility in three key areas of contract law: The contents of the contract, breach, and remedies. It demonstrates that shared responsibility is brought to bear to resolve contract disputes more often and with greater legal effect than the simple, binary understanding of contract might predict. When it enters the judicial analysis, shared responsibility can drastically change the answers to the questions: Who had the obligation to perform? Who breached? And, finally, whose harm should be remedied and how?
Having shown that shared responsibility is already a prominent, if overlooked, feature of American contract law, this Article argues that, in certain situations, courts should employ shared responsibility as a default rule. Specifically, courts should employ a shared responsibility default (SRD) when the contract was breached, or otherwise failed, and (1) both parties contributed to the failure, and (2) the failure could, or has already, generated high social costs (e.g., public endangerment, human rights violations in supply chains, consumer deception). In such situations, the SRD would activate the tort law principles of comparative negligence and proximate cause in contract, holding both parties accountable for their respective contributions to the contract’s failure and related social costs. In doing so, the SRD would equip courts to resolve contract disputes in a manner that attends to both contract policy and public policy objectives.
This year, Professor Desirée LeClercq led the colloquium, which was designed to introduce students to features of international economic law through engagement with scholars in the international legal field. To view the full list of International Law Colloquium speakers, visit our website.
This program w made possible through the Kirbo Trust Endowed Faculty Enhancement Fund and the Talmadge Law Faculty Fund.
University of Georgia School of Law Professor Christopher M. Bruner presented on a panel titled “Sustainability and Emerging Markets” at the “Corporate Governance in the Global South” roundtable hosted by George Washington University Law School in Washington, D.C. The panel was moderated by Rosa Celorio, Associate Dean for International and Comparative Legal Studies and Burnett Family Distinguished Professorial Lecturer in International and Comparative Law and Policy at George Washington University Law School.
Christopher M. Bruner is the Stembler Family Distinguished Professor in Business Law at the University of Georgia School of Law and serves as a faculty co-director of the Dean Rusk International Law Center.
There are a variety of acts known as “dark patterns,” such as forcing consumers to register as members when browsing or purchasing products, or obscuring important information for consumers. These acts of dark patterns not only disadvantage consumers and other users, but there are also concerns that they may harm fair and free competition between businesses that use dark patterns and those that do not use such means. It is necessary to consider how to address the issue of dark patterns from the perspective of Antimonopoly Act and competition policy.
This symposium will include speeches and a panel discussion regarding current situation of dark patterns, their regulatory trends and future issues in Japan and abroad, and the way competition policy should approach dark patterns.
Day is an Associate Professor of Legal Studies at the Terry College of Business and holds a courtesy appointment in the School of Law. He is also an Affiliated Fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project as well as the University of North Carolina’s Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life. His research has primarily focused on the intersection of competition, technology, innovation, and privacy as well as the disparate impact of anticompetitive conduct.
Hopenhaym and Bruner discussed the connection between environmental sustainability and human rights, exploring key dynamics, including how communities can suffer when their rights to food, clean water, and fair working conditions are compromised and how corporations are voluntarily improving their practices, but the complexity of their structures—spanning subsidiaries and global supply chains—makes full due diligence difficult. They also talked about where the U.S. stands on corporate compliance and the challenges in providing remedies for affected communities. They concluded the event by discussing the future of corporate accountability, particularly in the context of the ongoing UN Treaty on Business and Human Rights (BHR) process.
Hopenhaym is Co-Executive Director at Project on Organizing, Development, Education and Research (PODER), an organization in Latin America dedicated to corporate accountability. For twenty years, Ms. Hopenhaym has worked on economic, social and gender justice. Since 2006 Ms. Hopenhaym has been working on issues related to human rights and financial institutions and in the last ten years, she has focused specifically on business and human rights, working to advance corporate accountability and strengthen respect for human rights vis-a-vis private and public investments or development projects, and private sector operations. She has been involved in processes related to the implementation of the UN Guiding Principles, as well as in other processes regarding relevant instruments, such as the Binding Treaty negotiations and due diligence laws. She has conducted research on cases related to corporate impact on human rights and the environment and worked with and accompanied local communities affected by public/private projects in their pursuit of justice and remedy. She has conducted advocacy in the LAC region and globally to advance corporate accountability and human rights as well as leading training and capacity building on business and human rights related issues. From January 2019 to December 2021, Ms. Hopenhaym was Chair of the Board of ESCRNet, the international network for economic, social and cultural rights; she has been a board member of EarthRights International since early 2021 and an adviser to the Business and Human Rights Award Foundation since early 2020.
Georgia Law’s Environmental Law Association “seek[s] to further the development and advancement of environmental law through activities designed to increase environmental awareness among members of the community at large and the student bodies of the University of Georgia and the Georgia School of Law.” This year’s ELA President, Kellianne Elliott (J.D. ’26), and Carolina Ruiz (LL.M. ’26) organized this event.
University of Georgia School of Law professor Christopher M. Bruner delivered his presentation “A Political Economy of Corporate Sustainability Reform in the United States” at the Sustainability in Corporate Law Conference at Bucerius Law School in Hamburg, Germany.
Bruner is the Stembler Family Distinguished Professor in Business Law at the University of Georgia School of Law and serves as a faculty co-director of the Dean Rusk International Law Center. He holds a courtesy appointment at the UGA Terry College of Business. Bruner teaches a range of corporate and transactional subjects, and he has received the School of Law’s C. Ronald Ellington Award for Excellence in Teaching.
exchange of notes 