Law Commons^™

Standing After Snowden: Lessons On Privacy Harm From National Security Surveillance Litigation, Margot E. Kaminski

Publications

Article III standing is difficult to achieve in the context of data security and data privacy claims. Injury in fact must be "concrete," "particularized," and "actual or imminent"--all characteristics that are challenging to meet with information harms. This Article suggests looking to an unusual source for clarification on privacy and standing: recent national security surveillance litigation. There we can find significant discussions of what rises to the level of Article III injury in fact. The answers may be surprising: the interception of sensitive information; the seizure of less sensitive information and housing of it in a database for analysis; and …

Introductory Remarks, James Anaya

Publications

These remarks were delivered at a Corporate Responsibility and Human Rights panel held on Wednesday, April 9, 2014.

Is The Quest For Corporate Responsibility A Wild Goose Chase? The Story Of Lovenheim V. Iroquois Brands, Ltd., D. A. Jeremy Telman

Law Faculty Publications

Peter Lovenheim owned a small stake in Iroquois Brands, Ltd (Iroquois). He proposed that the corporation discontinue its distribution of one product, pâté de foie gras, because he objected to the treatment of the geese necessary to the production of the product. Under federal regulations, Iroquois was required to include such proposals in the proxy materials it sent out in advance of its annual shareholder meeting unless an exception applied. Iroquois Brands thought it could exclude the proposal because the product in question constituted a trivial part of its business. Lovenheim went to the District Court seeking an order requiring …

Law And Legal Theory In The History Of Corporate Responsibility: Corporate Personhood, Lyman P.Q. Johnson

Scholarly Articles

This paper, part of a larger scholarly project, addresses one of four areas – i.e., the emergence of corporate personhood – where, historically, law has both influenced and mirrored cultural expectations concerning corporate responsibility. The other areas (treated elsewhere) are corporate purpose, corporate regulation, and corporate governance. Corporate personhood is a subject of longstanding and recurring interest that, notwithstanding it has been a settled concept since the 19th century, continues to vex and excite, as seen in the U. S. Supreme Court’s splintered 5-4 decision in the 2010 case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. The decades-long debates about …

Two Models Of Corporate Social Responsibility, David K. Millon

Scholarly Articles

The article discusses the two perspectives of corporate social responsibility (CSR). It states that the constituency model of CSR focus on the constituent elements of the company including shareholders, senior management, and employees. It mentions that the sustainability approach to CSR focus on the external relationships as well as the long-run sustainability of the company.

Enron And The Corporate Lawyer: A Primer On Legal And Ethical Issues, Roger C. Cramton

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The stunning collapse of Enron, coupled with the large number of accounting irregularities and apparent corporate fraud, have created a climate in which reform and improvement of the law governing corporate lawyers is underway. The ABA Task Force on Corporate Responsibility has issued a preliminary report that recommends promising changes in the rules of professional conduct. And, the Corporate Reform Act of 2002 has changed the landscape by authorizing the SEC to promulgate rules of professional conduct for securities lawyers and directing the SEC to issue a rule requiring securities lawyers to climb the corporate ladder to prevent or rectify …

Judges, Prosecutors, Jurors, And Organized Labor: Four Perspectives Of Corporate Citizenship, Noel Beasley, Janine P. Geske, Valerie P. Hans, E. Michael Mccann, Frank Daily

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Some people argue that the civil jury is in decline. They argue that it's not really so important to be focusing on jurors and jurors' views about corporate responsibility as it might have been in prior times. I want to raise some arguments in favor of the continuing importance of the civil jury. First of all, the cases that juries try may be very important cases in terms of the company and in terms of the role of the company vis-a-vis government regulation. Jurors are symbolic representatives of the public in the courtroom. Finding out what juries do when they …

Corporate Governance Reform And The 'New' Corporate Social Responsibility, Douglas M. Branson

Articles

The history of corporate governance "reform" begins with Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means's "The Modern Corporation and Private Property," first published in 1932. That book posited the "separation of ownership from control," discussed in the first section of this essay.

The subsequent history of corporate governance reform has been the postulation, by academics and others, of solutions to problems posed by the separation of ownership from control.

One subset of proposed reforms, those of the 1970s, formed the "corporate social responsibility movement." During that era, reformers urged governmental intervention which, as a matter of general corporate law, would expand corporate …

Is Unlimited Liability Really Unattainable: Of Long Arms And Short Sales, Mark R. Patterson

Faculty Scholarship

Unlimited shareholder liability would radically change the way we look at corporations. In an unlimited-liability world, one part at least of the veil between corporation and shareholder would no longer exist. As a result, the relationship between corporation and shareholder would be, both in law and in fact,much closer than it is currently. The two parts of this change-the legal and the factual-would reinforce each other. The legal change would be reflected in court decisions enforcing unlimited liability Regardless of the exact contours that decisions in this area took initially, there would be at least some shareholders-mutual funds, for example--whom …

Attitudes Toward Corporate Responsibility: A Psycholegal Perspective, Valerie P. Hans

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

One of the most striking phenomena in the contemporary legal world is the shift toward holding businesses and corporations responsible for harm. Legal theorists and historians maintain that today business corporations are expected to provide compensation for injuries that in earlier times would have been attributed to individuals or to fate. Furthermore, criminal charges against businesses and business executives are becoming commonplace.

Despite a good deal of legal scholarship on the shift toward holding businesses culpable for harms, psychologists have conducted little systematic research on public views of corporate responsibility. How do people conceptualize the civil liability or criminal responsibility …

The Jury's Response To Business And Corporate Wrongdoing, Valerie P. Hans

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Some of the most vociferous criticisms of the jury relate to its performance in cases involving business and corporate wrongdoing. The jury's competence in such cases is assaulted on a variety of fronts. Critics question the jury's factfinding ability in cases with business and corporate parties, and doubt whether lay jurors can understand the often complex and esoteric evidence of business wrongdoing. Others claim that bias and prejudice, rather than evidence, determine jury decisions about businesses and corporations. The presumed biases cut both ways. The generally positive regard in which the public holds business is credited with creating leniency toward …

Responses To Corporate Versus Individual Wrongdoing, Valerie P. Hans, M. David Ermann

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

For many years, researchers assumed that the public was indifferent to corporate wrongdoing, but recent surveys have discovered evidence to the contrary. Taking insights from these data a step further, this study employed an experimental design to examine whether people responded differently to corporate versus individual wrongdoers. We varied the identity of the central actor in a scenario involving harm to workers. Half the respondents were informed that a corporation caused the harm; the remainder were told that an individual did so. Respondents applied a higher standard of responsibility to the corporate actor. For identical actions, the corporation was judged …

Technology Assessment And Social Control, Michael S. Baram

Faculty Scholarship

The emerging concepts of corporate responsibility and technology assessment are, to a considerable extent, responses to problems arising from technological developments and their applications by industry and government. These problems appear in the relatively discrete sectors of consumer protection and occupational safety and in the diffuse sectors of community quality of life and the national and international environments.

Book Review. The Corporation In Modern Society. Edited By Edward S. Mason, Thomas Ehrlich

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.