Law Commons^™

Amending The Alien Tort Claims Act: Protecting Human Rights Or Closing Off Corporate Accountability, Kevin R. Carter

Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law

No abstract provided.

Six Thinking Hats For The Lorax: Corporate Responsibility And The Environment, Robert F. Blomquist

Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

A Tale Of Two Trajectories, Cynthia A. Williams

Fordham Law Review

No abstract provided.

700 Families To Feed: The Challenge Of Corporate Citizenship, Tara J. Radin

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

When Howard Lutnick, CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, was first interviewed after September 11, 2001, a tragedy that devastated his firm and stole the life of his brother, Lutnick stated that he now had "700 families to feed." The view that he expressed was that his firm was responsible to the families of the wage earners lost in the tragedy, even though the firm was not responsible for the events that had occurred. Such assumed corporate responsibility, consistent with a stakeholder-based approach to management, is often considered to conflict with the law. The purpose of this Article is to demonstrate that …

The Aba Task Force On Corporate Responsibility And The 2003 Changes To The Model Rules Of Professional Conduct, Lawrence Hamermesh

Lawrence A. Hamermesh

No abstract provided.

Report Of The American Bar Association Task Force On Corporate Responsibility, Lawrence Hamermesh

Lawrence A. Hamermesh

No abstract provided.

Enron And The Corporate Lawyer: A Primer On Legal And Ethical Issues, Roger C. Cramton

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The stunning collapse of Enron, coupled with the large number of accounting irregularities and apparent corporate fraud, have created a climate in which reform and improvement of the law governing corporate lawyers is underway. The ABA Task Force on Corporate Responsibility has issued a preliminary report that recommends promising changes in the rules of professional conduct. And, the Corporate Reform Act of 2002 has changed the landscape by authorizing the SEC to promulgate rules of professional conduct for securities lawyers and directing the SEC to issue a rule requiring securities lawyers to climb the corporate ladder to prevent or rectify …

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act As Confirmation Of Recent Trends In Director And Officer Fiduciary Obligations, Lisa M. Fairfax

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This Article argues that, instead of dramatically altering the responsibilities of corporate officers and directors, Sarbanes-Oxley confirms at least some case law and other recent articulations of management's fiduciary duty. At a minimum, recent allegations regarding corporate misconduct may suggest some degree of confusion on the pat of corporate officers and directors about the manner in which they should comply with their fiduciary duty. By requiring more exacting standards of conduct from these corporate agents, Sarbanes-Oxley may not only clear up that confusion, but also may represent a natural extension of recent pronouncements by Delaware courts, the SEC and other …

Judges, Prosecutors, Jurors, And Organized Labor: Four Perspectives Of Corporate Citizenship, Noel Beasley, Janine P. Geske, Valerie P. Hans, E. Michael Mccann, Frank Daily

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Some people argue that the civil jury is in decline. They argue that it's not really so important to be focusing on jurors and jurors' views about corporate responsibility as it might have been in prior times. I want to raise some arguments in favor of the continuing importance of the civil jury. First of all, the cases that juries try may be very important cases in terms of the company and in terms of the role of the company vis-a-vis government regulation. Jurors are symbolic representatives of the public in the courtroom. Finding out what juries do when they …

Corporate Governance Reform And The 'New' Corporate Social Responsibility, Douglas M. Branson

Articles

The history of corporate governance "reform" begins with Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means's "The Modern Corporation and Private Property," first published in 1932. That book posited the "separation of ownership from control," discussed in the first section of this essay.

The subsequent history of corporate governance reform has been the postulation, by academics and others, of solutions to problems posed by the separation of ownership from control.

One subset of proposed reforms, those of the 1970s, formed the "corporate social responsibility movement." During that era, reformers urged governmental intervention which, as a matter of general corporate law, would expand corporate …

Is Unlimited Liability Really Unattainable: Of Long Arms And Short Sales, Mark R. Patterson

Faculty Scholarship

Unlimited shareholder liability would radically change the way we look at corporations. In an unlimited-liability world, one part at least of the veil between corporation and shareholder would no longer exist. As a result, the relationship between corporation and shareholder would be, both in law and in fact,much closer than it is currently. The two parts of this change-the legal and the factual-would reinforce each other. The legal change would be reflected in court decisions enforcing unlimited liability Regardless of the exact contours that decisions in this area took initially, there would be at least some shareholders-mutual funds, for example--whom …

The Paradox Of Corporate Giving: Tax Expenditures, The Nature Of The Corporation, And The Social Construction Of Charity, Nancy J. Knauer

Nancy J. Knauer

Corporate charitable giving is big business. Fundraisers estimate that in 1992, U.S. corporations contributed $6 billion to qualified charitable organizations. Hard-pressed for funds, qualified charities actively seek and compete for corporate contributions. Fundraising literature identifies corporate giving as the last great frontier of philanthropy. Marketing literature touts corporate giving as the latest advertising and public relations technique. Both camps proclaim that corporate giving is good for business and extol the business advantages which flow from transfers to charity. In short, corporate giving means doing best by doing good. Legal scholarship ignores the way corporate giving is described, justified, and expressed …

Attitudes Toward Corporate Responsibility: A Psycholegal Perspective, Valerie P. Hans

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

One of the most striking phenomena in the contemporary legal world is the shift toward holding businesses and corporations responsible for harm. Legal theorists and historians maintain that today business corporations are expected to provide compensation for injuries that in earlier times would have been attributed to individuals or to fate. Furthermore, criminal charges against businesses and business executives are becoming commonplace.

Despite a good deal of legal scholarship on the shift toward holding businesses culpable for harms, psychologists have conducted little systematic research on public views of corporate responsibility. How do people conceptualize the civil liability or criminal responsibility …

The Jury's Response To Business And Corporate Wrongdoing, Valerie P. Hans

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Some of the most vociferous criticisms of the jury relate to its performance in cases involving business and corporate wrongdoing. The jury's competence in such cases is assaulted on a variety of fronts. Critics question the jury's factfinding ability in cases with business and corporate parties, and doubt whether lay jurors can understand the often complex and esoteric evidence of business wrongdoing. Others claim that bias and prejudice, rather than evidence, determine jury decisions about businesses and corporations. The presumed biases cut both ways. The generally positive regard in which the public holds business is credited with creating leniency toward …

Responses To Corporate Versus Individual Wrongdoing, Valerie P. Hans, M. David Ermann

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

For many years, researchers assumed that the public was indifferent to corporate wrongdoing, but recent surveys have discovered evidence to the contrary. Taking insights from these data a step further, this study employed an experimental design to examine whether people responded differently to corporate versus individual wrongdoers. We varied the identity of the central actor in a scenario involving harm to workers. Half the respondents were informed that a corporation caused the harm; the remainder were told that an individual did so. Respondents applied a higher standard of responsibility to the corporate actor. For identical actions, the corporation was judged …

"No Soul To Damn: No Body To Kick": An Unscandalized Inquiry Into The Problem Of Corporate Punishment, John C. Coffee Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

Did you ever expect a corporation to have a conscience, when it has no soul to be damned, and no body to be kicked?
—Edward, First Baron Thurlow 1731-1806

The Lord Chancellor of England quoted above was neither the first nor the last judge to experience frustration when faced with a convicted corporation. American sentencing judges are likely to face a similar dilemma with increasing frequency in the near future, for a number of signs indicate that corporate prosecutions will become increasingly commonplace. At first glance, the problem of corporate punishment seems perversely insoluble: moderate fines do not deter, …

The Limits Of Corporate Responsibility. By Neil W. Chamberlain. New York: Basic Books, Inc. 1973. Pp. 236. $10.00., Stephen A. Block

Fordham Urban Law Journal

This book is a chronicle of past and a prediction of future corporate survival through the furtherance of the consumerist philosophy. Professor Chamberlain discusses (although all too briefly) how corporations have inculcated in American society the materialism that is its principal motivating force and how that value, feeding on itself and thereby forging an alliance of mutual need between the corporate structure and the American people, has created the situation described in the above quotation. He also analyzes the impact of this philosophy on various aspects of corporate and noncorporate life, from the corporation's relationship with its employees to that …

Private Markets And Social Control, Lloyd D. Orr

IUSTITIA

The continuing failure of society to deal adequately with its problems has led to criticism that goes beyond the imperfections of a fundamentally sound social organization. Individual economic incentive and private markets, the basics of our economic organization, are condemned as inherently destructive of desirable social goals. It may be that such criticism is naive with respect to the basic history of economic organization and the prospects for meaningful alternatives. It also may be that the "solutions" offered are frequently more authoritarian than the critics allege the present system to be. We are still left to ponder the vital, long-standing, …

Technology Assessment And Social Control, Michael S. Baram

Faculty Scholarship

The emerging concepts of corporate responsibility and technology assessment are, to a considerable extent, responses to problems arising from technological developments and their applications by industry and government. These problems appear in the relatively discrete sectors of consumer protection and occupational safety and in the diffuse sectors of community quality of life and the national and international environments.

The Shareholder's Role In Corporate Social Responsibility, Thomas H. Hay

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

In The Modern Corporation and Private Property, Professors Berle and Means concluded that the corporation should serve the interests of all society and not solely the interests of its shareholders. This concept was a break from traditional corporate theory and the beginning of the theory of corporate social responsibility. The purpose of this article is to assess the modem shareholder's role in the implementation of this doctrine. Because Berle was one of the first to consider the role of the shareholder in enforcing the corporation's responsibility to society, this article will begin with a brief review of his ideas …

Book Review. The Corporation In Modern Society. Edited By Edward S. Mason, Thomas Ehrlich

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.