Dr Alperen Gozlugol

This course is available on the LLM (extended part-time), LLM (full-time) and University of Pennsylvania Law School LLM Visiting Students. This course is freely available as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit. It does not require permission. This course uses controlled access as part of the course selection process. For information on controlled access courses, including eligibility, application processes, deadlines, and departmental contact details, please refer to the Controlled Access Courses webpage.

How to apply: Priority will be given initially to LLM, MSc Regulation and MSc Law and Finance students on a first-come-first-served allocation.

Spaces permitting, requests from all other students will be processed on the same first-come-first-served allocation from 10am on Thursday 1 October 2026

By submitting an application, students are confirming that they meet any pre-requisites specified. Providing an additional written statement will not aid a student's chances of being accepted onto a course, and statements are not read.

Deadline for application: Not applicable

For queries contact: Law.llm@lse.ac.uk

Course content

This course examines regulatory and non-regulatory developments in sustainable finance, focusing primarily on the EU and the UK as international pace-setters, with comparative reference to the US as home to many of the world's largest financial players. While the legislative material is jurisdiction-specific, the course is designed to remain relevant to students from other jurisdictions: theoretical frameworks and regulatory approaches are discussed at a general level alongside the specific instruments under examination.

The central question animating the course is what contribution finance can realistically make towards sustainability, and whether the hopes that policymakers and the wider public have placed on sustainable finance are well-founded. Building on this, we interrogate the policy rationales behind specific measures and assess whether they are likely to achieve their intended effects, or whether they risk becoming a regulatory distraction from more direct interventions.

Several themes run through the course. The first is the turn to disclosure as the dominant regulatory technique in this field: we consider what sustainability reporting regimes are for, whom they serve, and the conditions under which mandatory disclosure can drive substantive change as opposed to generating compliance costs without behavioural impact. The second is the role of financial market participants — institutional investors, asset managers and banks — and the incentives and constraints that shape their engagement with portfolio and investee companies on sustainability. Here we examine fiduciary duties, the mechanisms of investor influence (voice and exit), the use of ESG-tied executive remuneration as an engagement tool, and the regulatory and non-regulatory limits on financial actors pursuing pro-social goals untethered from financial returns. The third is risk: sustainability-related risk is both an object of regulatory concern in its own right and, where risky activities are curtailed or phased out in response, a channel through which financial regulation can produce real-world sustainability impact.

The course also situates sustainable finance within the broader landscape of policy tools available to address corporate harm and externalities. We close by considering the comparative advantages of alternatives such as carbon taxation, statutory duties and liability regimes, asking what sustainable finance can and cannot deliver relative to these more direct instruments.

Topics covered

Topics covered in the course include:

• Introduction to sustainable finance and ESG
• Sustainability reporting: legal regimes and the purposes of sustainability disclosure
• Mechanisms of sustainable finance: theory and practice
• Financial market participants: fiduciary duties and sustainability reporting
• Investor engagement in sustainability: mechanisms (voice and exit), incentives and constraints, including ESG-tied executive remuneration
• Sustainable banking and financial stability
• Alternatives to sustainable finance: carbon tax, duties and liabilities

20 hours of seminars in the Autumn Term.
2 hours of seminars in the Spring Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Autumn Term.

Students will be expected to produce 1 essay in the AT.

• Sebastian Steuer & Tobias H. Tröger, The Role of Disclosure in Green Finance, (2022) 8 Journal of Financial Regulation 1.
• Veerle Colaert, The Changing Nature of Financial Regulation: Sustainable Finance as a New Policy Objective, (2022) International & Comparative Law Quarterly 1685.
• Lucian A. Bebchuk & Roberto Tallarita, The Perils and Questionable Promise of ESG-Based Compensation, (2022) 48 Journal of Corporation Law 37.
• Wolf-Georg Ringe, Investor-led Sustainability in Corporate Governance, (2022) 7 Annals of Corporate Governance 93.
• Madison Condon, Externalities and the Common Owner, (2020) 95 Washington Law Review 1.
• Anna Christie, The Agency Costs of Sustainable Capitalism, (2021) 55 UC Davis Law Review 875.
• Roberto Tallarita, The Limits of Portfolio Primacy, (2023) Vanderbilt Law Review 511.
• Tom Gosling & Iain MacNeil, Can Investors Save the Planet? NZAMI and fiduciary duty, (2023) 18 Capital Markets Law Journal 172.

Exam (100%), duration: 150 Minutes in the Spring exam period.