Law Commons^™

What Enron Means For The Management And Control Of The Modern Business Corporation: Some Initial Reflections, Jeffrey N. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

The Enron case plays on many different dimensions, but its prominence is not merely part of popular culture's obsession with scandal du jour. Rather, the Enron situation challenges some of the core beliefs and practices that have underpinned the academic analysis of corporate law and governance, including mergers and acquisitions, since the 1980s. These amount to an interlocking set of institutions that constitute "shareholder capitalism," American-style, 2001, that we have been aggressively promoting throughout the world. We have come to rely on a particular set of assumptions about the connection between stock market prices and underlying economic realities; the reliability …