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Full-Text Articles in Business
Duty And Diversity, Chris Brummer, Leo E. Strine Jr.
Duty And Diversity, Chris Brummer, Leo E. Strine Jr.
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In the wake of the brutal deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, a slew of reforms from Wall Street to the West Coast have been introduced, all aimed at increasing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (“DEI”) in corporations. Yet the reforms face difficulties ranging from possible constitutional challenges to critical limitations in their scale, scope and degree of legal obligation and practical effects. In this Article, we provide an old answer to the new questions facing DEI policy, and offer the first close examination of how corporate law duties impel and facilitate corporate attention to diversity. Specifically, we show that …
Reconsidering The Evolutionary Erosion Account Of Corporate Fiduciary Law, William W. Bratton
Reconsidering The Evolutionary Erosion Account Of Corporate Fiduciary Law, William W. Bratton
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This Article reconsiders the dominant account of corporate law’s duty of loyalty, which asserts that the courts have steadily relaxed standards of fiduciary scrutiny applied to self-dealing by corporate managers across more than a century of history—to the great detriment of the shareholder interest. The account originated in Harold Marsh, Jr.’s foundational article, Are Directors Trustees? Conflicts of Interest and Corporate Morality, published in The Business Lawyer in 1966. Marsh’s showing of historical lassitude has been successfully challenged in a recent book by Professor David Kershaw. This Article takes Professor Kershaw’s critique a step further, asking whether the evolutionary …
Commercial Law Intersections, Giuliano Castellano, Andrea Tosato
Commercial Law Intersections, Giuliano Castellano, Andrea Tosato
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Commercial law is not a single, monolithic entity. It has grown into a dense thicket of subject-specific branches that govern a broad range of transactions and corporate actions. When one of these events falls concurrently within the purview of two or more of these commercial law branches - such as corporate law, intellectual property law, secured transactions law, conduct and prudential regulation - an overlap materializes. We refer to this legal phenomenon as a commercial law intersection (CLI). Some notable examples of transactions that feature CLIs include bank loans secured by shares, supply chain financing arrangements, patent cross-licensing, and blockchain-based …
Corporate Disobedience, Elizabeth Pollman
Corporate Disobedience, Elizabeth Pollman
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Corporate law has long taken a dim view of corporate lawbreaking. Corporations can be chartered only for lawful activity. Contemporary case law characterizes intentional violations of law as a breach of the fiduciary duties of good faith and loyalty. While recognizing that rule breaking raises significant social and moral concerns, this Article suggests that corporate law and academic debate have overlooked important aspects of corporate disobedience. This Article provides an overview of corporate disobedience and illuminates the role that it has played in entrepreneurship and legal change. Corporations violate laws for a variety of reasons, including as part of efforts …
“Impact” In 3d—Maximizing Impact Through Transactional Clinics, Praveen Kosuri
“Impact” In 3d—Maximizing Impact Through Transactional Clinics, Praveen Kosuri
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In speaking about “impact” clinical legal education, it is almost always exclusively as litigation—innocence projects, representing Guantanamo detainees, human rights concerns, environmental issues. Though these clinical efforts target different societal ills, all try to use the legal system as a catalyst for change. Rarely do clinicians invoke the word “impact” in the same manner in discussing transactional legal work much less transactional clinics. Yet transactional clinics can and do perform impact work. This article describes the current landscape of transactional clinics, the distinct evolution of community economic development clinics from small business and organizations clinics and argues that both can …
The Model Business Corporation Act At Sixty: Shareholders And Their Influence, Lisa Fairfax
The Model Business Corporation Act At Sixty: Shareholders And Their Influence, Lisa Fairfax
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In the sixty years since the Committee on Corporate Laws (Committee) promulgated the Model Business Corporation Act (MBCA), there have been significant changes in corporate law and corporate governance. One such change has been an increase in shareholder activism aimed at enhancing shareholders’ voting power and influence over corporate affairs. Such increased shareholder activism (along with its potential for increase in shareholder power) has sparked considerable debate. Advocates of increasing shareholder power insist that augmenting shareholders’ voting rights and influence over corporate affairs is vital not only for ensuring board and managerial accountability, but also for curbing fraud and other …