Author: Wallace R. Baker

Wallace R. Baker (1927-2018) practiced law and was a proud partner of Baker and McKenzie. A member of the Paris and Illinois Bars, he earned degrees from Harvard, the University of Brussels and the Sorbonne. His conviction that ethical behavior was key to a better world led him to work on the emerging concepts of corporate environmental and social responsibility. This led him to Professor Nazli Choucri at MIT, with whom he created a global system for sustainable development, and to UNESCO, where he served as an expert on corporate responsibility and ethics. He was recognized as a Branigin Distinguished Citizen Fellow at the University of Indiana for his work with Professor Aman on business ethics. He also spent time at the Santa Fe Institute, where his physicist friends, Murray Gell-Mann and David Pines, inspired him to think about, and write on, emergence, complex adaptive systems and the law.