Law and Economics Commons^™

The End Of Contractarianism? Behavioral Economics And The Law Of Corporations, Kent Greenfield

Kent Greenfield

Reviews the current state of the scholarship in the field of behavioral economics as it relates to corporate and securities law.

Unconscionability And Consent In Corporate Law (A Comment On Cunningham), Kent Greenfield

Kent Greenfield

Lawrence Cunningham has written an insightful and persuasive article calling on courts to apply the contract-law doctrine of unconscionability in evaluating executive compensation. According to Cunningham, this additional doctrinal tool will allow courts to engage in genuine and meaningful oversight of excessive compensation. He argues that such oversight is valuable because existing corporate-law doctrine too often prompts courts to defer too much and too often to management’s decisions. Cunningham’s argument is modest yet impactful. It is modest in that it simply proposes that courts take account of a well-established area of contract law to analyze and evaluate the compensation contracts …

The Impact Of "Going Private" On Corporate Stakeholders, Kent Greenfield

Kent Greenfield

As capital markets in the United States increasingly "go private," it is unclear how the privatization of corporate finance will affect non-shareholder stakeholders of firms, most centrally employees, communities, and the environment. Some scholars and public policy experts believe that concern for such stakeholders should not hold any relevance in the discussion of corporate law in general, and thus may be presumed to believe the same about a conversation about privatization. In such a view, these concerns lie outside the realm of corporate governance law; they therefore should be of no great moment in the debate over whether public policy …

The Origins And Costs Of Short-Term Management, Kent Greenfield

Kent Greenfield

Why is a fixation on the short term a problem for American businesses? One might hasten to answer that management is compensated for short-term successes. Another answer might be that some investors—particularly professional investors—value only the short term and manipulate the market in a particular stock so they can profit on the movement. These answers undoubtedly are part of the answer. But a puzzle remains: why does the market not punish such short-termism? This essay will present a possible answer.

Defending Stakeholder Governance, Kent Greenfield

Kent Greenfield

Corporations are collective enterprises, drawing on investments from various stakeholders who contribute to the firm's success. For a business to succeed over time, it must induce people and institutions to invest money, whether in the form of equity or loans. It must induce people to invest their labor, intelligence, skill, and attention by joining the firm as employees or managers. It must induce local communities to invest infrastructure of various kinds. None of these investors-for investors they all are-contributes its input out of altruism or obligation. They all do so because they believe that the corporation provides the mechanism for …

A New Era For Corporate Law: Using Corporate Governance Law To Benefit All Stakeholders, Kent Greenfield

Kent Greenfield

No abstract provided.

New Principles For Company Law, Kent Greenfield

Kent Greenfield

No abstract provided.

The Failure Of Corporate Law: Fundamental Flaws And Progressive Possibilities, Kent Greenfield

Kent Greenfield

When used in conjunction with corporations, the term “public” is misleading. Anyone can purchase shares of stock, but public corporations themselves are uninhibited by a sense of societal obligation or strict public oversight. In fact, managers of most large firms are prohibited by law from taking into account the interests of the public in decision making, if doing so hurts shareholders. But this has not always been the case, as until the beginning of the twentieth century, public corporations were deemed to have important civic responsibilities.

With The Failure of Corporate Law, Kent Greenfield hopes to return corporate law to …

It's Time To Federalize Corporate Charters, Kent Greenfield

Kent Greenfield

No abstract provided.

September 11 And The End Of History For Corporate Law, Kent Greenfield

Kent Greenfield

Using the tragic events of September 11th as case study; this Essay critiques a prominent, recent article that suggests the ideology of shareholder primacy has become so dominant that the "end of history" is at hand for corporate law. The author suggests that a dedication to shareholder primacy helped create the context in which the events of September 11th could occur, by making the airlines less attentive to security concerns that did not affect the airline companies' stock prices. Shareholder primacy makes corporations more likely to externalize the costs of the firms' decisions onto constituencies other than shareholders, and such …

Using Behavioral Economics To Show The Power And Efficiency Of Corporate Law As Regulatory Tool, Kent Greenfield

Kent Greenfield

Prepared for the Daniel J. Dykstra Corporate Governance Symposium at University of California, Davis, in February 2001, this article argues that changes in corporate governance in the United States - specifically the relaxation of the profit maximization norm, the broadening of management's fiduciary duties to include workers, and the inclusion of worker representatives on boards of directors - are likely to be efficient means of reaching certain preferred policy outcomes, such as an increase in the wages of working people and a decrease in income inequality. Instead of being seen as "private law," corporate law should be regarded as a …

Ultra Vires Lives! A Stakeholder Analysis Of Corporate Illegality (With Notes On How Corporate Law Could Reinforce International Law Norms), Kent Greenfield

Kent Greenfield

This paper argues that a remaining vestige of the ultra vires doctrine sets off illegal activities as "beyond the power" of corporations. Though largely unnoticed and unexamined until now, this part of the doctrine has been retained because none of the important corporate stakeholders has an interest in authorizing the corporation and its managers to commit illegal acts. From an ex ante perspective, the principal stakeholders in the corporate contract would want the corporation and its management to forego illegalities as a way to increase the value of the firm. Any of the stakeholders would be a potential victim of …

From Metaphor To Reality In Corporate Law, Kent Greenfield

Kent Greenfield

This essay is in response to a commentary by Professor David Millon, who ably argues in the same journal that a dependence on metaphor drives much of the debate within corporate law jurisprudence and corporate law scholarship. This essay joins Millon in his criticism.

For decades, scholars have used metaphors -- corporation as person, corporation as creature of the state, corporation as property, corporation as contract, corporation as community, to name the most prominent -- as justifications for the imposition of, or freedom from, legal and ethical requirements. The metaphors are often taken as self-evident. The legal and ethical arguments …

There's A Forest In Those Trees: Teaching About The Role Of Corporations In Society, Kent Greenfield

Kent Greenfield

This paper was prepared for the University of Georgia School of Law Conference on Teaching Corporate Law, October 16, 1999. The paper argues that the basic corporate law course should focus much more on the questions surrounding the role of the corporation in society. In the typical corporate law course, little attention is given to the broad question of the position of the corporation within society at large or the narrower question of the relationship between the corporation and workers. The lack of consideration of these issues is odd indeed, since corporate law (like all law) is understandable only within …

Truth Or Consequences: If A Company Lies, Employees Should Be Able To Sue, Kent Greenfield

Kent Greenfield

Reprinted as "Workers Should Be Able to Sue Over Lies," Salt Lake City Tribune, July 5, 1998;

"It's Illegal to Lie to Stockholders, But Not to Employees," Sacramento Bee, July 6, 1998 ;

"If Company Lies, Allow Workers to Sue," Des Moines Register, July 7, 1998.

From Rights To Regulation In Corporate Law, Kent Greenfield

Kent Greenfield

No abstract provided.