How Far could Corporate Social Responsibility in Corporate Law Go

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) refers to the fact that corporation is responsible for the society while original stakeholder theory requires corporation to take responsibilities for all stakeholders. Although there is suggestion that it is a trend of combining these two theses,they are different from each other in nature after all. Since the end of last century,many scholars had tried to promote CSR by the reform of company law. However,the outcome failed the expectation. One of the reasons is that jurisprudence academy failed to distinguish CSR from the stakeholder theory. As laws are reactive and always lag behind,and company law is oriented to stockholders in nature,company law is merely able to avoid stockholders misusing their rights to infringe upon the interests of non-shareholder stakeholders,but cannot effectively foster corporation to actively take the responsibilities for non-shareholder stakeholders,not to mention for the society. Therefore,it is recommended to promote CSR by the reform of the external corporate mechanisms.