Dec. 8 -- “Right Now It’s Only a Notion: Giving Form to 'Social Enterprise'”

“Social enterprise”— the notion that businesses can be configured to “do well by doing good”—has received a lot of attention, such as Muhammad Yunus' Nobel Peace Prize, speeches by Bill Gates, a recent Papal Encyclical, and Business Week's and Fast Company Magazine's top 25 lists. This presentation identifies essential characteristics of a social enterprise and explains why conventional for-profit and nonprofit organizational law and forms fail to adequately address the distinct challenges confronting the archetypal social enterprise. It also evaluates new and proposed forms and regimes designed to promote social enterprise-like entities.

When: Tuesday December 8, noon to 1:30pm
Where: IUPUI workshops are run concurrently in the Walker II Building conference room 201-B in Indianapolis and SPEA 300 (the Dean's conference room)



Robert Katz joined the law school faculty in the fall of 2001. He holds a joint appointment with the law school and the Indiana University Center on Philanthropy at IUPUI, and is on the Affiliate Faculty of the Indiana University Center for Bioethics. Prior to his appointment, he served as a Bigelow Teaching Fellow and Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago Law School. From 1993 to 1997, he was a trial attorney with the Civil Division, Federal Programs Branch of the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. He also served as executive director of a charitable foundation in Massachusetts.

Professor Katz’s research interests include legal issues relating to nonprofit and tax-exempt organizations, charitable giving, healthcare organizations, and the recovery and processing of donated human tissue for use in transplantation. He received his bachelor’s degree from Harvard College and his Juris Doctor from the University of Chicago Law School, where he served as comment editor for the University of Chicago Law Review. He clerked for the Honorable Stephen G. Breyer, formerly Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.