Recent research in environmental law and psychology has revealed a pernicious problem: psychological phenomena often lead people to underperceive and undervalue environmental harms. These insights have yet to be applied to the transnational realm. This article employs a psychological approach to explore the evaluation of environmental concerns in the context of the World Trade Organization’s Environmental Goods Agreement (“EGA”). Although the EGA purports to be a “win-win” agreement that simultaneously promotes economic development and environmental protection, it has failed to reach meaningful agreement. The present research argues that a psychological perspective on environmental law may supplementally explain the failure in EGA negotiation by demonstrating how states inadvertently undervalue the transboundary environmental impacts of environmental goods. This insight also fills the void left by rational choice theory in regard to the valuation process.
The purpose of this paper is to explore the characteristics and use of corporate liability lawsuits against officers, directors and controlling shareholders (arts. 159 and 246 of the Brazilian Law of Corporations), between 1987 and 2023, within the scope of the state Courts of São Paulo (“TJ/SP”), Rio de Janeiro (“TJ/RJ”) and Minas Gerais (“TJ/MG”), with the following objectives: (i) to identify the number of suits related to the application of arts. 159 and 246 of the Brazilian Law of Corporations; (ii) to ascertain which players are responsible for filing them, contrasting the participation of corporations (direct lawsuits) with that of shareholders (derivative lawsuits); (iii) to identify the distribution of lawsuits over the years, trying, if possible, to observe any pattern of growth in the filing of lawsuits; and (iv) to explore the outcomes and results of the lawsuits before the Courts of the TJ/SP, TJ/RJ and TJ/MG, in order to understand how corporate liability suits have been addressed and dealt with. To this end, judgments were collected from an independent, comprehensive survey conducted by the author in the search platforms of each of the Courts, which were then separated and grouped into a database responsible for guiding the analysis.
