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Full-Text Articles in Law
Multinational Activity In The Modern World, James R. Hines Jr., Fritz C. Foley, Raymond J. Malatoni Jr., David Wessel
Multinational Activity In The Modern World, James R. Hines Jr., Fritz C. Foley, Raymond J. Malatoni Jr., David Wessel
Book Chapters
Multinational corporations are the global goliaths of modern times. These entities collectively are responsible for large portions of world production, employment, investment, international trade, research, and innovation. Although their economic impact is most pronounced in high-income countries, where their activities have been concentrated historically, their reach increasingly extends to every corner of the world. Decisions made by these firms affect not only those who work for them, buy from them, do business with them, and compete with them, but also communities and countries in which they are located. As a result, their operations and activities are subjects of considerable interest …
Compensation, Commodification, And Disablement: How Law Has Dehumanized Laboring Bodies And Excluded Nonlaboring Humans, Karen M. Tani
Compensation, Commodification, And Disablement: How Law Has Dehumanized Laboring Bodies And Excluded Nonlaboring Humans, Karen M. Tani
All Faculty Scholarship
This essay reviews Nate Holdren's Injury Impoverished: Workplace Accidents, Capitalism, and Law in the Progressive Era (Cambridge University Press, 2020), which explores the changes in legal imagination that accompanied the rise of workers' compensation programs. The essay foregrounds Holdren’s insights about disability. Injury Impoverished illustrates the meaning and material consequences that the law has given to work-related impairments over time and documents the naturalization of disability-based exclusion from the formal labor market. In the present day, with so many social benefits tied to employment, this exclusion is particularly troubling.
Principles For Policymakers, James R. Hines Jr.
Principles For Policymakers, James R. Hines Jr.
Book Chapters
Multinational corporations are global goliaths, but they have not conquered the world, nor are they responsible for every economic ill, as is sometimes alleged. These firms contribute to global prosperity by improving productivity and efficiency, innovating, and creating jobs-mostly good jobs-in both home and host countries. Governments lavish attention on multinational corporations, seeking the good that accompanies their investments even as policymakers worry about the influence multinational firms have on the local environment, social conditions, and politics. In this regard, governments face the tradeoffs that commonly afflict economic policymaking. Efforts to control the actions of multinational firms typically come at …
Theorizing Beyond "The Code Of Capital": A Reply, Katharina Pistor
Theorizing Beyond "The Code Of Capital": A Reply, Katharina Pistor
Faculty Scholarship
In this reply, I respond to and elaborate on the critique of my book “The Code of Capital” published in this special issue. The common thread of the critiques is the call for more theorizing of the themes the book addresses, especially the conception of state power, of resources, social relations and questions of knowledge and access to knowledge about the law, or epistemology. This reply is only a first response to issues that do require further analysis and I am hoping to follow suit on at least some of them in the near future.
For Coöperation And The Abolition Of Capital, Or, How To Get Beyond Our Extractive Punitive Society And Achieve A Just Society, Bernard E. Harcourt
For Coöperation And The Abolition Of Capital, Or, How To Get Beyond Our Extractive Punitive Society And Achieve A Just Society, Bernard E. Harcourt
Faculty Scholarship
In hindsight, the term "capitalism" was always a misnomer, coined paradoxically by its critics in the nineteenth century. The term misleadingly suggests that the existence of capital produces a unique economic system or that capital itself is governed by economic laws. But that's an illusion. In truth, we do not live today in a system in which capital dictates our economic circumstances. Instead, we live under the tyranny of what I would call "tournament dirigisme": a type of state-directed gladiator sport where our political leaders bestow spoils on the wealthy, privileged elite.
We need to displace this tournament dirigisme with …
Corporate Governance As Privately-Ordered Public Policy: A Proposal, Lynn A. Stout, Sergio Alberto Gramitto Ricci
Corporate Governance As Privately-Ordered Public Policy: A Proposal, Lynn A. Stout, Sergio Alberto Gramitto Ricci
Faculty Works
In this Article, we show how our society can use corporate governance shifts to address, if not entirely resolve, a number of currently pressing social and economic problems. These problems include: rising income inequality; demographic disparities in wealth and equity ownership; increasing poverty and income insecurity; a need for greater innovation and investment in solving problems like disease and climate change; the “externalization” of many costs of corporate activity onto third parties such as customers, employees, creditors, and the broader society; the corrosive influence of corporate money in politics; and discontent and loss of trust in the capitalist system among …
Inequality Rediscovered, David Singh Grewal, Jedediah S. Purdy
Inequality Rediscovered, David Singh Grewal, Jedediah S. Purdy
Faculty Scholarship
Widespread recognition that economic inequality has been growing for forty years in most of the developed world, and in fact has tended to grow across most of the history of modern economies, shows that the period 1945-1973, when inequality of wealth and income shrank, was a marked anomaly in historical experience. At the time, however, the anomalous period of equality seemed to vindicate a long history of optimism about economic life: that growth would overcome meaningful scarcity and usher in an egalitarian and humanistic period that could almost qualify as post-economic. This has not been the experience of the last …
Capitalism And Risk: Concepts, Consequences, And Ideologies, Edward A. Purcell
Capitalism And Risk: Concepts, Consequences, And Ideologies, Edward A. Purcell
Articles & Chapters
Politically charged claims about both "capitalism" and "risk" became increasingly insistent in the late twentieth century. The end of the post-World War II boom in the 1970s and the subsequent breakup of the Soviet Union inspired fervent new commitments to capitalist ideas and institutions. At the same time structural changes in the American economy and expanded industrial development across the globe generated sharpening anxieties about the risks that those changes entailed. One result was an outpouring of roseate claims about capitalism and its ability to control those risks, including the use of new techniques of "risk management" to tame financial …
Legal Institutionalism: Capitalism And The Constitutive Role Of Law, Simon Deakin, David Gindis, Geoffrey M. Hodgson, Kainan Huang, Katharina Pistor
Legal Institutionalism: Capitalism And The Constitutive Role Of Law, Simon Deakin, David Gindis, Geoffrey M. Hodgson, Kainan Huang, Katharina Pistor
Faculty Scholarship
Social scientists have paid insufficient attention to the role of law in constituting the economic institutions of capitalism. Part of this neglect emanates from inadequate conceptions of the nature of law itself. Spontaneous conceptions of law and property rights that downplay the role of the state are criticized here, because they typically assume relatively small numbers of agents and underplay the complexity and uncertainty in developed capitalist systems. In developed capitalist economies, law is sustained through interaction between private agents, courts and the legislative apparatus. Law is also a key institution for overcoming contracting uncertainties. It is furthermore a part …
Symbolic Corporate Governance Politics, Marcel Kahan, Edward B. Rock
Symbolic Corporate Governance Politics, Marcel Kahan, Edward B. Rock
All Faculty Scholarship
How are we to understand the persistent gap between rhetoric and reality that characterizes so much of corporate governance politics? In this Article, we show that the rhetoric around a variety of high profile corporate governance controversies (including shareholder proposals asking boards to redeem poison pills, proxy access, majority voting in director elections, and shareholder proposals to remove supermajority voting requirements) cannot be justified by the material interests at stake. At the same time, shareholder activists are oddly reluctant to pursue issues that may have a more material impact, such as anti-pill charter provisions or mandatory bylaw amendments. We consider …
Securities Intermediaries And The Separation Of Ownership From Control, Jill E. Fisch
Securities Intermediaries And The Separation Of Ownership From Control, Jill E. Fisch
All Faculty Scholarship
The Modern Corporation and Private Property highlighted the evolving separation of ownership and control in the public corporation and the effects of that separation on the allocation of power within the corporation. This essay explores the implications of intermediation for those themes. The article observes that intermediation, by decoupling economic ownership and decision-making authority within the shareholder, creates a second layer of agency issues beyond those identified by Berle and Means. These agency issues are an important consideration in the current debate over shareholder empowerment. The article concludes by considering the hypothetical shareholder construct implicit in the Berle and Means …
Law And The Social Control Of American Capitalism, William J. Novak
Law And The Social Control Of American Capitalism, William J. Novak
Articles
This Essay is part of a larger, ongoing investigation of the role of law in the creation of a modern American state from 1877 to 1932. That project charts the decline of an early nineteenth-century world of local, common law self government (what I called in a previous work a “well-regulated society”) and the rise of a distinctly modern administrative regulatory state in the United States. This new legal-political regime was rooted in three interlinked developments: the centralization of public power; the individualization of private right; and the constitutionalization of the rule of law. Beginning soon after the Civil War, …
Capitalism, Social Marginality, And The Rule Of Law's Uncertain Fate In Modern Society, Ahmed A. White
Capitalism, Social Marginality, And The Rule Of Law's Uncertain Fate In Modern Society, Ahmed A. White
Publications
The rule of law is liberalism's key juridical aspiration. Yet its norms, centered on the principles of legality and legal generality, are being compromised all over the political and legal landscape. For decades, the dominant explanation of this worrying condition has focused mainly on the rise of the welfare state and its apparent incompatibility with the rule of law. But this approach, though shared by a politically diverse range of scholars, is outdated and misconceives the problem. A central function of the modem state has always been to prevent capitalism's inherent tendencies toward social marginalization from devolving into general social …
Capitalism, The United States Constitution And The Supreme Court, Hugh Evander Willis
Capitalism, The United States Constitution And The Supreme Court, Hugh Evander Willis
Articles by Maurer Faculty
No abstract provided.
Our Economic Problem: The Concentration Of Wealth, Hugh Evander Willis
Our Economic Problem: The Concentration Of Wealth, Hugh Evander Willis
Articles by Maurer Faculty
No abstract provided.