Law Commons^™

Using Sarbanes-Oxley Act To Reward Honest Corporations, Tamar Frankel

Faculty Scholarship

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act offers an opportunity to reward truthful corporations and their management, offering them a competitive advantage by relieving them from some of the Act's provisions. Corporate culture plays an important role in a corporation's honest behavior One size does not fit all in matters of organizational integrity. The provisions of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act that apply the same internal controls and governance rules on all public corporations impose unnecessary costs on honest corporations by requiring them to change one set of good habits that are part of the corporate culture for another mandated by law. This essay suggests that …

What Default Rules Teach Us About Corporations; What Understanding Corporations Teaches Us About Default Rules, Tamar Frankel

Faculty Scholarship

This Article addresses corporate law's default rules, which allow corporations to waive their directors' liability for damages based on a breach of their fiduciary duty of care. Most large publicly held corporations have adopted such a waiver in their articles of association. This Article suggests that courts should limit the range of the waivers to the circumstances that existed when the voters voted and to the information they received before they voted. This Article distinguishes between public contracts (legislation) and private contracts (commercial transactions) and the default rules that apply to each. The Article shows that courts view corporations and …

Origins Of The Asymmetric Society: Freedom Of Incorporation In The Early United States And Canada, Jason Kaufman

Studio for Law and Culture

This article explores the origins of a phenomenon of lasting and profound impact on American society: the private business corporation. Business is only part of our concern here, however. Seen in comparative-historical terms, the modern private corporation was born in colonial (i.e. pre-Revolutionary) America. Surprisingly, this occurred not only because of the business needs of colonial Americans but also as a result of their own struggles for political autonomy. More specifically, the post-Revolutionary doctrine of freedom of incorporation first emerged in states that were originally chartered as private corporations. These “corporate colonies’” experienced repeated conflict with the Crown over their …

The Essential Role Of Securities Regulation, Zohar Goshen, Gideon Parchomovsky

Faculty Scholarship

This Article posits that the essential role of securities regulation is to create a competitive market for sophisticated professional investors and analysts (information traders). The Article advances two related theses – one descriptive and the other normative. Descriptively, the Article demonstrates that securities regulation is specifically designed to facilitate and protect the work of information traders. Securities regulation may be divided into three broad categories: (i) disclosure duties; (ii) restrictions on fraud and manipulation; and (iii) restrictions on insider trading – each of which contributes to the creation of a vibrant market for information traders. Disclosure duties reduce information traders’ …

Good Faith, State Of Mind, And The Outer Boundaries Of Director Liability In Corporate Law, Christopher M. Bruner

Scholarly Works

The Delaware General Corporation Law was amended in 1986 to permit shareholder-approved exculpatory charter provisions shielding corporate directors from monetary liability for certain fiduciary duty breaches not including (among other things) breaches of the duty of loyalty and acts not in good faith. This article examines the development of corporate fiduciary duty doctrine in Delaware leading up to and following this statutory amendment, focusing particularly on the Delaware courts' evolving conception of the meaning anddoctrinal status of the good faith concept employed in recent cases to permit a non-exculpable cause ofaction for conscious nonfeasance.

The article argues that Delaware's good …

Legal Ground Rules In Coordinated And Liberal Market Economies, Katharina Pistor

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter seeks to explain the affinity between the nature of economic systems: coordinated market economies (CMEs) and liberal market economies (LMEs) on the one hand, and legal origin (civil vs common law systems) on the other. It starts with the simple observation that LMEs tend to be common law jurisdictions, and CMEs civil law jurisdictions. It proposes that the affinity between economic and legal system offers important insights into the foundations of different types of market economies and, in particular, differences in the scope of the state vs the powers of the individual. The main argument is that the …

Federalism In Corporate/Securities Law: Reflections On Delaware, California, And State Regulation Of Insider Trading, Donald C. Langevoort

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this brief Essay, I offer some thoughts on both the theory and the politics underlying the federalism question. My comments will touch on some of the controversies and also look at a somewhat quieter question, the state regulation of insider trading. Over the course of the last few years, judges in California and Delaware have traveled markedly different routes on questions involving the states' role in regulating insider trading. A California court of appeal has recently expanded the reach of the state insider trading statute to cover a claim alleging misconduct in California by an executive of a Delaware …

Language, Deals And Standards: The Future Of Xml Contracts, Lawrence A. Cunningham

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

eXtensible Markup Language (XML) structures information in documentary systems ranging from financial reports to medical records and business contracts. XML standards for specific applications are developed spontaneously by self-appointed technologists or entrepreneurs. XML's social and economic stakes are considerable, especially when developed for the private law of contracts. XML can reduce transaction costs but also limit the range of contractual expression and redefine the nature of law practice. So reliance on spontaneous development may be sub-optimal and identification of a more formal public standard setting model necessary. To exploit XML's advantages while minimizing risks, this Article envisions creating a publicly …

Clark's Treatise On Corporate Law: Filling Manning's Empty Towers, Ronald J. Gilson, Reinier Kraakman

Faculty Scholarship

Almost 45 years ago, in an elegantly depressive account of the then current state of corporate law scholarship, Bayless Manning announced the death of corporation law "as a field of intellectual effort." Manning left us with an affecting image of a once grand field long past its prime, rigid with formalism and empty of content:

When American law ceased to take the "corporation" seriously, the entire body of law that had been built upon that intellectual construct slowly perforated and rotted away. We have nothing left but our great empty corporate statutes towering skyscrapers of rusted girders, internally welded together …