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Reality Check On Officer Liability, Lyman P.Q. Johnson
Reality Check On Officer Liability, Lyman P.Q. Johnson
Lyman P. Q. Johnson
This article addresses the fiduciary duties of corporate officers. Responding to a critique that recent scholarly analyses of officers depart from reality, it argues that, on a variety of grounds, those analyses are more realistic than the critique and provide doctrinal coherence and advance the goal of meaningful executive accountability. The divergent governance functions of directing versus managing are described and it is argued that those disparate roles should matter for fiduciary duty analysis. No great outbreak of litigation should be expected if officers are held to a stricter duty of care than directors because boards of directors, not courts, …
Are Corporate Officers Advised About Fiduciary Duties, Lyman P.Q. Johnson
Are Corporate Officers Advised About Fiduciary Duties, Lyman P.Q. Johnson
Lyman P. Q. Johnson
This Article reports the results of an empirical study of whether and how in-house corporate counsel advise corporate officers about fiduciary duties. The fiduciary duties of officers long have been neglected by courts, scholars, and lawyers, as the Introduction explains, even though executives play a central role in corporate success and failure. The study’s findings, organized by type of company (public or private), size, and attorney position within the firm, show several interesting patterns in advice-giving practices. For example, fewer than half of all respondents provided advice to officers below the senior-most rank. The results raise the possibility that, unlike …
Counter-Narrative In Corporate Law: Saints And Sinners, Apostles And Epistles, Lyman P.Q. Johnson
Counter-Narrative In Corporate Law: Saints And Sinners, Apostles And Epistles, Lyman P.Q. Johnson
Lyman P. Q. Johnson
Corporate law is bi-vocal. On the one hand, liberating and amoral statutes permit a master narrative of business persons eagerly pursuing the good life as they see it. The mixture of such lax law and human frailty frequently leads to the unleashing of boundless ambition, vanity, avarice, duplicity, and much mischief. On the other hand, another voice in corporate law occasionally moves into the foreground to interrupt and tell its own story – a counter-narrative demanding a measure of self-restraint – when those who direct or manage company affairs press self-gain (or sloth) to the point of intolerable excess. The …