Law Commons^™

Veil-Piercing, Peter B. Oh

Peter B. Oh

From its inception veil-piercing has been a scourge on corporate law. Exactly when the veil of limited liability can and will be circumvented to reach into a shareholder’s own assets has befuddled courts, litigants, and scholars alike. And the doctrine has been bedeviled by empirical evidence of a chasm between the theory and practice of veil-piercing; notably, veil-piercing claims inexplicably seem to prevail more often in Contract than Tort, a finding that flouts the engrained distinction between voluntary and involuntary creditors. With a dataset of 2,908 cases from 1658 to 2006, this study presents the most comprehensive portrait of veil-piercing …