Professor Larry Backer focuses his research on governance-related issues of globalization and the constitutional theories of public and private governance, with an emphasis on institutional frameworks for public-private law governance systems. He has an interest in the transformations of university governance and its relation to wider changes in societal ordering in the 21st century. He currently teaches courses on corporate social responsibility, corporations, multinational enterprises, and the constitutional law. He teaches courses on policy aspects of these areas at the Penn State School of International Affairs, along with the SIA core course, Actors, Institutions, and Legal Frameworks in International Affairs. He has lectured on issues of transnational, corporate and constitutional law in Asia, Latin America, Europe and Australia.
Professor Backer serves on the board of a number of journals and is a member of the American Law Institute and the European Corporate Governance Institute. He served as an elected member of the Penn State University Faculty Senate, and as chair of the Penn State University Faculty Senate.