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A Contractual Approach To Shareholder Oppression Law, Benjamin Means
A Contractual Approach To Shareholder Oppression Law, Benjamin Means
Faculty Publications
According to standard law and economics, minority shareholders in closely held corporations must bargain against opportunism by controlling shareholders before investing. Put simply, you made your bed, now you must lie in it. Yet most courts offer a remedy for shareholder oppression, often premised on the notion that controlling shareholders owe fiduciary duties to the minority or must honor the minority's reasonable expectations. Thus, law and economics, the dominant mode of corporate law scholarship, appears irreconcilably opposed to minority shareholder protection, a defining feature of the existing law of close corporations.
This Article contends that a more nuanced theory of …