Law School

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Dr Malcolm Rogge

Lecturer

M.J.Rogge@exeter.ac.uk

Amory 108

Overview

Dr Malcolm Rogge is an expert in the field of Business and Human Rights and an international award winning documentary filmmaker. He came to the University of Exeter in January 2021 from Harvard University where he was a Research Fellow of the Corporate Responsibility Initiative of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School. Rogge's research on the interplay of corporate law, economic thought, human rights, and ethics in global comparative perspective is at the leading edge of a powerful new wave of pro-social and pro-environmental corporate law scholarship and practice. He plays a valuable and timely interdisciplinary ‘translator’ role between the new wave of business law scholarship, traditional approaches, and critical perspectives. He welcomes research proposals from graduate and undergraduate students in diverse fields, including business and human rights law; corporate law and governance; law and economic thought; international economic law; law and film; law and philosophy, human rights and visual culture, and law and the humanities.

From 2015 to 2019, Dr Rogge served as Teaching Fellow at Harvard University for graduate level courses in Global Governance (with John G. Ruggie), Business & Human Rights (with John G. Ruggie), and Corporate Responsibility (with Jane Nelson and John G. Ruggie). As a Clark Byse Fellow at Harvard Law School, Dr Rogge designed and led a research-based workshop series in 2018 on Business & Human Rights: Bridging the Gap. He is a member of the Global Business and Human Rights Scholars Association and the Business and Human Rights Teaching Network. For six years, Dr Rogge served as Academic Delegate at the United Nations Forum on Business and Human Rights for the Harvard Human Rights Program. From 2016-2019, Dr Rogge taught Business & Human Rights at the Jindal Global University & Harvard School of Public Health Summer School on Human Rights and Development.

Media Arts Practice

Dr Rogge's media arts practice is largely devoted to research-based documentary filmmaking. His international award-winning feature documentary film about a mining conflict in Ecuador, Under Rich Earth (2008), is regarded as a “classic example for companies on how not to handle community relations.” Under Rich Earth is held by over 50 University libraries worldwide and has been used in a wide range of law school and business school courses, including property law (University of Arizona), investment law (National University of Singapore), and Managing Responsibly (Ryerson University). In 2016, Under Rich Earth was adopted as evidence and cited extensively by an international investment tribunal in the Copper Mesa Mining Corp. v Republic of Ecuador decision (P.C.A. 2012-2). Recently, Under Rich Earth was cited in National University of Singapore Professor Jean Ho’s treatise on “State Responsibility for Breaches of Investment Contracts” (2018 Cambridge University Press). His new research-based feature film, A Garland of Ruins / Kriegszeit und Blumenkunst, combines oral history with moving images of Berlin's contemporary landscape to critically examine the collective memorialization of wartime atrocity. Based primarily on first person testimony that Dr Rogge collected over several years, the documentary is supported by extensive bibliographic and archival research about life in pre-war and WWII era Berlin. Currently in post-production, A Garland of Ruins / Kriegszeit und Blumenkunst will be released in 2021. Rogge’s previous films have been supported by major awards from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council as well as the Toronto Arts Council and the National Film Board of Canada. 

Professional Activities

Dr Rogge has acted as a consultant on pro-social corporate law reform, corporate purpose, and sustainability for the UNDP, Organization of American States, and the Secretaría General Iberoamericano (Ibero-American General Secretariat). Over the last twenty-five years, Dr Rogge has worked for, advised, and collaborated with a wide range of legal-professional organizations and community organizations, including indigenous First Nations communities in Manitoba; the First Nations Chiefs of Ontario; a leading labour law firm in Toronto; a Geneva-based international dispute resolution law firm, a Toronto-based public interest litigation law firm; an agro-ecotourism worker-owned cooperative in Costa Rica (Coopeunioro R.L.); several indigenous organizations in Ecuador (Organización de Nacionalidades Huaoranis de la Amazonia Ecuatoriana, Organización Indígena Secoya del Ecuador, Organizacion de La Nacionalidad Indigena Siona del Ecuador); the Center for Economic and Social Rights - Centro de Derechos Económicos y Sociales (Quito); Acción Ecológica (Quito); Sociedad Peruana de Derecho Ambiental - Peruvian Society for Environmental Law (Lima); Harvard Human Rights Program; the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy; the Canadian Institute for Environmental Law & Policy; the Canadian Lawyers' Association for International Human Rights; the International Freedom of Expression Exchange (IFEX), and the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (LIFT).  

Dr Rogge is a Barrister and Solicitor of the Bar of Ontario, Canada.

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Research

Dr Rogge’s scholarly research is aimed at clarifying and advancing the philosophical foundations of the emerging field of Business and Human Rights. His research has practical significance for legislative, doctrinal, jurisprudential and policy interventions in business and human rights. His current research and writing critically examines the conceptual underpinnings of corporate human rights due diligence, corporate human rights impact assessment, and the evolution of corporate purpose in comparative perspective. His most recently published scholarly article, Humanity Constrains Loyalty: Fiduciary Duty, Human Rights and the Corporate Decision Maker is now available from the Fordham Journal of Corporate and Financial Law. In 2019, Harvard’s Corporate Responsibility Initiative selected two of Dr Rogge’s research papers for the CRI Working Paper Series: one paper, a philosophical foray into the shareholder-stakeholder debate, is forthcoming in the Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics and Public Policy (Volume 35, 2021); the other, a commentary on the long-term implications of the Supreme Court of Canada’s Nevsun decision, was published online in a series edited by the UK-based Business and Human Rights Resource Centre. In 2020, Dr Rogge’s essay on legal ethics entitled Vesting Transnational Corporate Responsibility in Natural Persons v. Legal Persons: What Matters Today? was published in Corporate Citizen, a McGill-Queen’s University Press book edited by Dr Oonagh Fitzgerald. Rogge’s interdisciplinary scholarship has been published in diverse forums, including the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre, Texas International Law Journal, Third World Legal Studies, Refuge: Canada’s Periodical on Refugees, the Canadian Journal of Development Studies, and Canadian Dimension Magazine.

For an up to date list of publications, see: 

SSRN

Google Scholar

Twitter

Research group links

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Supervision

Dr Rogge welcomes research proposals in diverse fields, including:

  • Business & Human Rights Law
  • International Economic Law
  • Corporate Law
  • Corporate Governance
  • Law and Economic Theory
  • Law and Development
  • Legal History of the Corporation
  • Legal Theory and Methodology
  • Human Rights and Documentary Cinema
  • Law and Film
  • Law and Philosophy

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Teaching

Modules taught

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Biography

Dr Rogge completed his Doctorate of Juridical Science (SJD) at Harvard Law School under the supervision of University Professor Amartya Sen, Professor Robert C. Clark, Professor John Coates and Professor John G. Ruggie. Previously, he completed the joint J.D. and Master of Environmental Studies program at Osgoode Hall / York University in Toronto, concentrating on human rights and the environment. He holds a Graduate Diploma in Latin American and Caribbean Studies from the Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean (CERLAC) and a B.A. First Class Double Honours in Philosophy and English Literature from the University of Manitoba.

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