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All Maxine Goodman Levin School of Urban Affairs Publications

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Full-Text Articles in Law

Legislation Meets Tradition: Interpretations And Implications Of The Volunteer Protection Act For Nonprofit Organizations As Viewed Through The Lens Of Hermeneutics, Patricia Groble, Nicholas C. Zingale, Joseph Mead May 2018

Legislation Meets Tradition: Interpretations And Implications Of The Volunteer Protection Act For Nonprofit Organizations As Viewed Through The Lens Of Hermeneutics, Patricia Groble, Nicholas C. Zingale, Joseph Mead

All Maxine Goodman Levin School of Urban Affairs Publications

Volunteers enable nonprofit organizations to reach more clients and more effectively fulfill their missions. However, the good done by these volunteers may be offset by their careless behavior. Rising fears that resulting lawsuits and monetary damages would deter potential volunteers from volunteering caused Congress to enact the Volunteer Protection Act. This research studies court decisions to ascertain whether the law fulfills its purpose and considers the implications of these interpretations for nonprofit managers. It also tests the usefulness of the hermeneutical approach to legal interpretation and to determine how the Act has changed as a result of these court decisions.


Courts, Constituencies, And The Enforcement Of Fiduciary Duties In The Nonprofit Sector, Joseph Mead, Michael Pollack Apr 2016

Courts, Constituencies, And The Enforcement Of Fiduciary Duties In The Nonprofit Sector, Joseph Mead, Michael Pollack

All Maxine Goodman Levin School of Urban Affairs Publications

Directors of nonprofit organizations owe fiduciary duties to their organizations, but the content of these duties—and how and when courts should enforce these duties—has long been debated among scholars and courts. This debate emerges in several areas, including the level of deference to be shown by courts to nonprofit directors (the business judgment rule), who should be allowed to sue to enforce duties (standing), and the type of relief available to prevailing plaintiffs (remedies). Existing literature explores these legal rules in isolation and in abstraction, generally failing to consider how the rules interact with each other and ignoring the empirical …