Law Commons^™

Deconstructing Corporate Governance: The Mechanics Of Trusting, René Reich-Graefe

Faculty Scholarship

The phenomenon of trust among firm participants is a much neglected academic inquiry in corporate governance research and the theory of the firm. This Article elaborates on the comparatively small sample of existing legal research on the intersection of trust and corporate governance and tries to interrupt the selective (in-)attention given to the philosophical, psychological, political, sociological, economic, and legal phenomenon that is our individual as well as collective, everyday trust (or distrust) in the functionality and explainability of the world tomorrow in accordance with our preferences of today and our experiences of the past. Trust—as a phenomenon—is a concrete …

Deconstructing Corporate Governance: Absolute Director Primacy, René Reich-Graefe

Faculty Scholarship

Microtheoretical models of the corporation which focus on corporate governance attempt to answer two deceptively simple, but fundamentally elusive questions: ‘Who are in control of the corporation?’ and ‘Whose interests ultimately control those in control of the corporation?’ Both questions remain partially unanswered within the models developed to date by corporate theoreticians. This Article proposes a radically new model: 'absolute director primacy.’ Existing microtheoretical models conceive that we only need to—and, indeed, can—determine the controlling interests guiding corporate decisionmaking in order to prove the existence of control over the decisionmaking latitude of corporate boards. The absolute director primacy …

Deconstructing Corporate Governance: Director Primacy Without Principle?, René Reich-Graefe

Faculty Scholarship

If profit-maximizing is not enforced by corporate law, why does it nonetheless happen as a matter of almost overwhelming routine in today’s corporate reality? If indeed, director primacy is absolute and our theoretical models are all reliant on protolegal variables to explain general investor confidence ex-ante-investment despite the lack of director accountability ex-post-investment, then how can director primacy be understood and explained as a principled and, thus, just cor-porate governance structure in the first place? Or is director primacy not only absolute, but also without principle?

This Article provides a roadmap for purposes of answering this inquiry. Part II …