Law Commons^™

The Humanities Strike Back: (E)Esg And Justice Strine Challenge Gamer Shareholder Primacy, David H. Webber

Faculty Scholarship

Leo E. Strine, Jr. is closing in on Blair and Stout for the undisputed title of all-time top-scoring stakeholderist.³ I don't intend to squander this opportunity to roast and toast him by weighing the pros and cons of basketscoring primacy. Instead, my aim is to surface an overlooked argument in the debate over shareholder primacy and stakeholderism, the case for which has been recently reinvigorated by Strine's work. My argument is this: one underappreciated aspect of shareholder primacy's appeal is that it creates a competition with a single endpoint, basically a game, and that the exhilarating tournament that results, …

Contractual Stakeholderism, Kishanthi Parella

Scholarly Articles

In 2019, the Business Roundtable announced its commitment to all corporate stakeholders—consumers, employees, suppliers, and communities—and not just shareholders. This announcement has reawakened an old debate over corporate social responsibility. Stakeholderism advocates argue that corporate leaders must consider the interests of the various stakeholders impacted by corporate decision-making. Stakeholderism critics challenge this view, expressing concerns that stakeholderism will magnify managerial agency costs, chill regulation, risk inauthenticity, and lead to impractical solutions.

This Article proposes “contractual stakeholderism” to operationalize stakeholderism in accordance with the views of its advocates but in a way that is attentive to the concerns of its critics. …

Corporate Governance And The Feminization Of Capital, Sarah C. Haan

Scholarly Articles

At the start of the twentieth century, women made up a small proportion of shareholders in American publicly traded companies. By 1956, women were the majority of individual shareholders. Although this change in shareholder gender demographics happened gradually, it was evident early in the century: Before the 1929 stock market crash, women shareholders had come to outnumber men at some of America’s largest and most influential corporations, including AT&T, General Electric, and the Pennsylvania Railroad. This Article synthesizes information from a range of historical sources to reveal an overlooked narrative of corporate history—the feminization of capital, or the transformation of …

Power, Primacy, And The Corporate Law Pivot, Grant M. Hayden, Matthew T. Bodie

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

As a Vice Chancellor, Chancellor, Chief Justice, and now a private citizen, Leo Strine has consistently recognized the shape of power relations within corporate law. With his wry wit and sharp prose, he has cut to the quick on issues such as director independence, shareholder rights, and the separation of ownership from ownership. Underlying these decisions are both the recognition of the underlying power dynamics at play and the pursuit of fairness under the law. As the Chief Justice has gone from lawmaker to commentator, his perspective has shifted on the role of corporate law in shaping society. Like him, …