Law Commons^™

“Corporation Law Is Dead”: The Mystery Of Corporation Law At The Height Of The American Century, Harwell Wells

Studio for Law and Culture

In 1962, the corporation law scholar Bayless Manning famously wrote that “[C]orporation law, as a field of intellectual effort, is dead in the United States.” Looking back, most scholars have agreed with Manning, concluding that corporation law from the 1940s to the 1970s was stagnant, only rescued from its doldrums by the triumph of the theory of the firm and modern finance in the 1980s. This paper takes a new look at American corporate law during this time, asking why scholars believed corporation law was “dead” at the same time that the American corporation had seized the commanding heights of …