Date & time
Venue
Phillipa Weeks Library, Level 4, Building 7, ANU Law School
Register for the event
Event description
Should organizations live forever—or is there wisdom in building them to end? This seminar introduces “temporal governance,” the idea that an organization’s lifespan (finite vs. perpetual) is an underappreciated governance mechanism with consequences across corporate law, nonprofit law, and science policy. The seminar argues that perpetual life is often a default rather than a deliberate choice—and that limited-life structures can outperform perpetual ones on accountability, focus, and mission fidelity. The featured case study is Australia’s ARC Centres of Excellence—government-funded research hubs that pool researchers from multiple Australian universities around a defined scientific mission, with funding capped at seven years. Time-limited by design, CoEs offer a compelling window into what finite life does (and doesn’t) accomplish in science governance, and what lessons they hold for law and policy more broadly.
Speakers
Professor Andrew Schwartz
Andrew A. Schwartz joined the Colorado Law faculty in 2008 and was named the Laurence W. DeMuth Chair of Business Law in 2024. He teaches and publishes on corporate, securities and contract law, and has become an internationally recognized expert on investment crowdfunding. In 2017, Professor Schwartz served as a Fulbright Research Scholar at the University of Auckland Law School in New Zealand, where he has regularly returned as a visiting professor.
Professor Schwartz earned an Sc.B. in Civil Engineering from Brown University and a J.D. from Columbia University, where he served on the Columbia Law Review and was named a James Kent Scholar (top honors) all three years. Before entering academia, he clerked for Judge William A. Fletcher of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Following his clerkships, Professor Schwartz practiced corporate law in New York at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz.
Professor Schwartz is the author of one book, Investment Crowdfunding, published by Oxford University Press, as well as more than forty scholarly publications. His major articles have appeared in leading flagship law reviews including the UCLA Law Review, Minnesota Law Review, and Notre Dame Law Review, top specialty journals such as the Yale Journal on Regulation and Harvard Business Law Review, and peer-reviewed journals like the New Zealand Law Review.
A member of the American Law Institute, Professor Schwartz has won numerous national awards for his scholarship, including the AALS Scholarly Paper Competition and the Federalist Society Young Legal Scholars Paper Competition. At Colorado Law, Professor Schwartz has received the Provost's Award for Faculty Achievement, the Gilbert Goldstein Faculty Fellowship, the Sandgrund Award, and the Outstanding New Faculty Award. His research is frequently cited and relied upon by courts and commentators across the country and around the world, including numerous citations by the Delaware Court of Chancery, the nation's leading venue for corporate law.