Business Commons^™

A Jurisdictional Approach To Collapsing Corporate Distinctions, Peter B. Oh

Articles

This article challenges our persistent path dependence on defunct distinctions between corporations and certain limited unincorporated associations. Recent federal tax regulations have inspired proposals for consolidated treatment of all limited business organizations through uniformly based or universally applicable statutes. I contend these proposals are preoccupied with how hybrid organizations such as the limited liability company and the limited liability partnership amalgamate, and thus implicitly preserve, traditional dichotomies between corporations and partnership categorizations as well as entities and aggregate theories. The continued use of these schemes compromises the legal basis for such proposals.

By critically examining certain jurisdictional principles, this article …

The Rule That Isn't A Rule - The Business Judgment Rule, Douglas M. Branson

Articles

On a doctrinal basis, few areas of corporate law are more confused then the duty of care applicable to corporate officials and its handmaiden, the business judgment rule. The tendency of many scholars and practitioners has been to collapse the duty of care into the business judgment rule, as Professor Stuart Cohn pointed out more than a decade ago. The business judgment rule is a separate legal construct that is related to, but separate from, the duty of care and one which protects only proactive and not somnambulant directors and officers. The business judgment rule stays at center stage for …

The Social Responsibility Of Large Multinational Corporations, Douglas M. Branson

Articles

In the 1970s, legal scholars wrote extensively on the subject, as it was then known, "corporate social responsibility." Proposals surfaced for pubic interest directors, mandatory social accounting and disclosure, increased use of Security Exchange Commission (SEC) shareholder proxy proposals, federal minimum debate was eclipsed completely by the law and economics movement of the 1980s. Now, in the new century, the inquiry into social responsibility of large corporations has begun anew. This article is an attempt to take that inquiry, or debate, and place it in the international context.

I have four stories to tell. First is that much of the …

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 …