Business Organizations Law Commons^™

The Irrational Actor In The Ceo Suite: Implications For Corporate Governance, Renee M. Jones

Renee Jones

This Article challenges corporate governance theorists’ standard assumptions regarding the rationality of business leaders. It reviews scholarly research that documents the presence of irrational actors among senior corporate managers and considers the impact these executives might have on corporations and society. The Article focuses analysis on psychological literature that explores why risk-related decision-making often goes wrong.

Research shows that many individuals have a dysfunctional approach to risk that leads them to engage in self-destructive conduct. A non-trivial number of individuals with problematic personality traits work at high levels of major corporations where they have the capacity to cause significant harm. …

The Corporate Conspiracy Vacuum (Formerly "Corporate Conspiracy: How Not Calling A Conspiracy A Conspiracy Is Warping The Law On Corporate Wrongdoing"), J.S. Nelson

J.S. Nelson

203 N. Lasalle Five Years Later: Answers To The Open Questions, 38 J. Marshall L. Rev. 61 (2004), Paul B. Lewis

Paul Lewis

No abstract provided.

Directors’ Legal Duties And Csr: Prohibited, Permitted Or Prescribed In Contemporary Corporate Law?, Benedict Sheehy, Donald Feaver

Benedict Sheehy

Abstract: The interaction between CSR obligations and directors’ legal duties is seriously under examined. This article addresses that lack by examining directors’ duties in case law and legislation across the major commonwealth countries and the USA. It provides an analysis of leading cases and examines how they deal with the issues of the shareholder primacy doctrine, corporate legal theory, CSR and directors’ duties. The article reviews fiduciary relations and duties, analyses the directors’ duties to exercise power in the best interests of the company as a whole and for proper purposes. As this area of law is highly contested there …

Corporate Social Responsibility In A Remedy-Seeking Society: A Public Choice Perspective, Donald J. Kochan

Donald J. Kochan

Written for the Chapman Law Review Symposium on “What Can Law & Economics Teach Us About the Corporate Social Responsibility Debate?,” this Article applies the lessons of public choice theory to examine corporate social responsibility. The Article adopts a broad definition of corporate social responsibility activism to include both (1) those efforts that seek to convince corporations to voluntarily take into account corporate social responsibility in their own decision-making, and (2) the efforts to alter the legal landscape and expand legal obligations of corporations beyond traditional notions of harm and duty so as to force corporations to invest in interests …

Co-Organizer: Symposium On The Jurisprudence Of Family Relations: Privacy, Autonomy, And Should States Regulate Family Relations?, Scott Fitzgibbon

Scott T. FitzGibbon

Professor FitzGibbon served as a co-organizer for the Symposium on the Jurisprudence of Family Relations: Privacy, Autonomy, and Should States Regulate Family Relations? at the Cardozo Law School of Yeshiva University.

Harmonious Discourse And The Good Of Family Law, Scott Fitzgibbon

Scott T. FitzGibbon

On June 6, 2013, Professor FitzGibbon presented at the North American Regional Conference for the International Society of Family Law.

Janus Capital Group, Inc. V. First Derivative Traders: The Culmination Of The Supreme Court’S Evolution From Liberal To Reactionary In Rule 10b-5 Actions, Charles W. Murdock

Charles W. Murdock

“Political” decisions such as Citizens United and National Federation of Independent Business (“Obamacare”) reflect the reactionary bent of several Supreme Court justices. But this reactionary trend is discernible in other areas as well. With regard to Rule 10b-5, the Court has handed down a series of decisions that could be grouped into four trilogies. The article examines the trend over the past 40 years which has become increasingly conservative and finally reactionary.

The first trilogy was a liberal one, arguably overextending the scope of Rule 10b-5. This was followed by a conservative trilogy which put a brake on such extension, …

Janus Capital Group, Inc. V. First Derivative Traders: The Culmination Of The Supreme Court’S Evolution From Liberal To Reactionary In Rule 10b-5 Actions, Charles W. Murdock

Charles W. Murdock

“Political” decisions such as Citizens United and National Federation of Independent Business (“Obamacare”) reflect the reactionary bent of several Supreme Court justices. But this reactionary trend is discernible in other areas as well. With regard to Rule 10b-5, the Court has handed down a series of decisions that could be grouped into four trilogies. The article examines the trend over the past 40 years which has become increasingly conservative and finally reactionary.

The first trilogy was a liberal one, arguably overextending the scope of Rule 10b-5. This was followed by a conservative trilogy which put a brake on such extension, …

Corporate Governance Reform In A Time Of Crisis, Christopher M. Bruner

Christopher M. Bruner

In this article I argue that crisis-driven corporate governance reform efforts in the United States and the United Kingdom that aim to empower shareholders are misguided, and offer an explanation of why policymakers in each country have reacted to the financial crisis as they have. I first discuss the risk incentives of shareholders and managers in financial firms, and examine how excessive leverage and risk-taking in pursuit of short-term returns for shareholders led to the crisis. I then describe the far greater power and centrality that U.K. shareholders have historically possessed relative to their U.S. counterparts, and explore historical and …

Good Faith In Revlon-Land, Christopher M. Bruner

Christopher M. Bruner

The Delaware Supreme Court has set a very high hurdle for plaintiffs challenging directors' good faith in the sale of a company. In Lyondell Chemical Company v. Ryan, the court held that unconflicted directors could be found to have breached the good faith component of their duty of loyalty in the transactional context only if they "knowingly and completely failed to undertake," and "utterly failed to attempt" to discharge their duties. In this essay I argue that the Lyondell standard effectively imports into the transactional context the exacting standard previously applied in the oversight context — a move clearly aimed …

Member, International Chair On Natural Law And Human Personhood, Scott Fitzgibbon

Scott T. FitzGibbon

No abstract provided.

Reassessing Corporate Personhood In The Wake Of Occupy Wall Street, Nick J. Sciullo

Nick J. Sciullo

This article is about corporate personhood, discussed on the backdrop of class consciousness and criticisms of capital generated, in large part, by the recent and continuing Occupy Movements. I am at first concerned with articulating the evolving jurisprudence of corporate personhood as developed in the Supreme Court of the United States. Combined with this doctrinal approach, I offer a Marxist criticism of corporate personhood jurisprudence that culminates in a discussion of the Occupy Movements' logic of resistance to corporate domination in the United States' law and policy. First, I discuss the role Marxist criticism has played in legal discourse and …

The Biological Basis For The Recognition Of The Family, Scott Fitzgibbon

Scott T. FitzGibbon

The family is matter of heart and blood. It is created, in part, by physical and emotional intimacy. It projects itself through history through its biological dimension. Any reasonable definition of the family must recognize this fundamental characteristic. “Biological dimension” here refers, not only to genetic affinities, important as those may be, but to all physical connections and to all matters closely related to the physical. Thus, it includes all the activities and dispositions which, generation after generation, bring a family together in the great procreative project: the begetting and rearing of children. The biological dimension includes making love and …

The Biological Basis For The Recognition Of The Family, Scott Fitzgibbon

Scott T. FitzGibbon

No abstract provided.

Co-Organizer: International Conference On Extended And Extending Families, Scott Fitzgibbon

Scott T. FitzGibbon

No abstract provided.

Fiduciary Relationships Are Not Contracts, Scott Fitzgibbon

Scott T. FitzGibbon

No abstract provided.

Legal Mechanization Of Corporate Social Responsibility Through Alien Tort Statute Litigation: A Response To Professor Branson With Some Supplemental Thoughts, Donald J. Kochan

Donald J. Kochan

This Response argues that as ATS jurisprudence “matures” or becomes more sophisticated, the legitimate limits of the law regress. The further expansion within the corporate defendant pool – attempting to pin liability on parent, great grandparent corporations and up to the top – raises the stakes and complexity of ATS litigation. The corporate social responsibility discussion raises three principal issues about how a moral corporation lives its life: how a corporation chooses its self-interest versus the interests of others, when and how it should help others if control decisions may harm the shareholder owners, and how far the corporation must …

Co-Organizer: International Conference On The Jurisprudence Of Parenting And The Influence On Culture, Scott Fitzgibbon

Scott T. FitzGibbon

No abstract provided.

Parenting And The Culture Of Friendship, Scott Fitzgibbon

Scott T. FitzGibbon

No abstract provided.

Educational Justice And The Recognition Of Marriage, Scott Fitzgibbon

Scott T. FitzGibbon

No abstract provided.

Parent, Child, Husband, Wife: When Recognition Fails, Tragedy Ensues, Scott Fitzgibbon

Scott T. FitzGibbon

This article briefly notes some developments in the law and society of our present age regarding the understanding — the recognition — of marriage, fatherhood, motherhood, and the family. The article warns against a certain casualness, a confusion, perhaps even a certain promiscuity of thought, that has occasionally emerged in the law. Drawing on Sophocles' drama Oedipus the King and on the scriptural narrative of David and Bathsheba, the article investigates what might be called the "moral location" of the activity of recognition. It proposes that recognition of basic family forms is a process with a deep dimension. It apprehends …

Requirements Of A Valid Islamic Marriage Vis-À-Vis Requirements Of A Valid Customary Marriage In Nigeria, Olanike Sekinat Odewale Mrs

Olanike Sekinat Adelakun

The Jurisprudence Of Marriage And Other Intimate Relationships, Scott Fitzgibbon

Scott T. FitzGibbon

Contains essays about the basic meaning and principles underlying legal regulation of marriage and other relation- ships, written by a dozen prominent legal scholars from five nations, including authorities on jurisprudence and family law and scholars of other relevant disciplines. Topics include the principles used to determine eligibility for particular legal and social recognition; the current status of such relationships in society and law; how such relationships may affect one another; the foundations for public recognition of relationships; and critical analysis of various legal theories that would level such relation- ships. All chapters consider various relationship forms in the light …

"That Man Is You!" The Juristic Person And Faithful Love, Scott T. Fitzgibbon

Scott T. FitzGibbon

No abstract provided.

Devilry, Complicity, And Greed: Transitional Justice And Odious Debt, David C. Gray

David C. Gray

The doctrine of odious debts came into its full in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century to deal with the financial injustices of colonialism and its stalking horse, despotism. The basic rule, as articulated by Alexander Sack in 1927, is that debts incurred by an illegitimate regime that neither benefit nor have the consent of the people of a territory are personal to the regime and are subject to unilateral recision by a successor government. While the traditional doctrine focused on the nature and circumstances of individual debts, it has been expanded in recent years, moving the focus from the …

Glazer And Fitzgibbon On Legal Opinions: Drafting, Interpreting And Supporting Closing Opinions In Business Transactions, Scott Fitzgibbon, Donald Glazer, Steven Weise

Scott T. FitzGibbon

No abstract provided.

The Principles Of Justice In Procreative Affiliations, Scott Fitzgibbon

Scott T. FitzGibbon

What's the Harm? is an interdisciplinary collection of perspectives on the question of harm--whether legalizing same-sex marriage will cause harm to society, and whether the denial of same-sex marriage causes harm to society. This clarifying and illuminating book explores the societal, familial, individual, and jurisprudential harms of the legalization or prohibition of same-sex marriage. The contributors wrestle with the "what's the harm" question from a variety of academic and professional perspectives, emphasizing the significance and impact of legalizing same-sex marriage for law, government, family relations, and child welfare. What's the Harm? is a valuable resource of diverse insights, arguments, and …

The Seduction Of Lydia Bennet And The Jurisprudence Of The Juristic Society, Scott Fitzgibbon

Scott T. FitzGibbon

The theme of the 12th World Conference of the ISFL is The Family Law – Balancing Interests, Pursuing Priorities. The papers presented there reflected (to a varying degree) that theme, and will analyze the family laws, doctrines, rules, decisions and reform proposals of many nations from these balance-and-priorities perspectives. Papers concerning civil and common law, spousal as well as parent-child issues, traditional as well as non-traditional relations, existing laws as well as proposed reforms, economic as well as non-economic issues, and essential as well as adjective laws will be included. The book contains selected papers chosen for the interest and …

A City Without Duty, Fault, Or Shame, Scott Fitzgibbon

Scott T. FitzGibbon

This book provides a critical examination of and reflection on the American Law Institute's (ALI) Principles of the Law of Family Dissolution: Analysis and Recommendations ('Principles', arguably the most sweeping proposal for family law reform attempted in the U.S. over the last quarter century. The volume is a collaborative work of individuals from diverse perspectives and disciplines who explore the fundamental questions about the nature of family, parenthood, and child support. The contributors are all recognized authorities on aspects of family law and provide commentary on the principles examined by the ALI - fault, custody, child support, property division, spousal …