Promoting corporate citizenship through clinical legal education

With the conversation regarding corporations and their role in society becoming mainstay in the public discourse, the broad consensus appears to be that the corporation does in fact owe a duty to more than its investor constituency, even though there remains to be a similar agreement regarding the extent of the aforementioned duty. Corporate citizenship had been devised as a prism by which one might evaluate the role of business in society. However, the perceived voluntarism that often underpins pervasive notions of corporate citizenship and its interchangeability with the parallel concept of corporate social responsibility meant that it had been widely considered to be merely an extension of the latter in its base state. In this article, I argue for an expansion of the concept of corporate citizenship, a paradigm of consideration of the rights and obligations of corporations similar to those of natural citizens. Furthermore, the article considers what role clinical legal education, particularly business law clinics who work with start-ups, might play in ushering corporations along the path to true citizenship.