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Organizational Law As Commitment Device, Morgan Ricks

Vanderbilt Law Review

What is the essential role of the law of enterprise organization? The dominant view among business law scholars today is that organizational lawthe law of partnerships, corporations, private trusts, and their variants-serves primarily to structure relations between business owners, on the one hand, and business creditors, on the other. Under this "asset partitioning" theory, organizational law's main purpose is to shield business assets from claims of creditors of the business's owners, thereby giving business creditors a structurally senior claim on business assets. By relieving business creditors of the need to inspect the creditworthiness of business owners, the theory goes, organizational …