Law Commons^™

Who's Causing The Harm?, Catherine A. Hardee

Faculty Scholarship

My parents started a software company out of our family room when I was just five years old As a child, the business felt like the sixth member of our family A fourth child who grew up alongside my sisters and me and whom my parents struggled with, stressed over, and strove to infuse with their values just as they did their flesh and blood children. Take pride in your work and stand behind what you do applied equally to homework and product launches. The Golden Rule to treat others as you would like to be treated meant that, long …

Newsroom: Is Wall Between Church And State Crumbling? 10-10-2017, Diana Hassel

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Rwu First Amendment Blog: Diana Hassel's Blog: Is The Wall Between Church And State Crumbling? 10-07-2017, Diana Hassel

Law School Blogs

No abstract provided.

Situating The Corporation Within The Vulnerability Paradigm: What Impact Does Corporate Personhood Have On Vulnerability, Dependency, And Resilience, Heather M. Kolinsky

Scholarly Articles

As a result of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2014 case Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, and the seemingly expanding notion of the corporation as a person within the traditional autonomous rights paradigm, a tension has developed between corporation as subject and corporation as institution. This evolution of corporation as person also highlights the problem of providing resilience to vulnerable subjects whose competing vulnerabilities are situated in the same corporate environment. Addressing this issue is of critical importance where employment has become the conduit for the responsive state to provide resilience to so many subjects, as well as the site of …

Corporate Power Is Corporate Purpose Ii: An Encouragement For Future Consideration From Professors Johnson And Millon, Leo E. Strine Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

This paper is the second in a series considering the argument that corporate laws that give only rights to stockholders somehow implicitly empower directors to regard other constituencies as equal ends in governance. This piece was written as part of a symposium honoring the outstanding work of Professors Lyman Johnson and David Millon, and it seeks to encourage Professors Johnson and Millon, as proponents of the view that corporations have no duty to make stockholder welfare the end of corporate law, to focus on the reality that corporate power translates into corporate purpose.

Drawing on examples of controlled companies that …

The Rise Of Corporate Religious Liberty, Micah Schwartzman, Chad Flanders, Zoe Robinson

All Faculty Scholarship

This Introduction to our edited book, The Rise of Corporate Religious Liberty (Oxford University Press, 2016), offers an account of the “corporate turn” in law and religion. Here the term “corporate” refers to any organized body of people - groups, associations, organizations, and institutions - and, more specifically, to for-profit corporations. Our contention is that the relationship between law and religion has shifted dramatically in the last decade, moving from a conception of religious freedom focused mainly on individual liberty toward one that privileges the rights of religious organizations. We trace this development in two stages, describing the initial movement …

Line Drawing In Corporate Rights Determinations, Elizabeth Pollman

All Faculty Scholarship

This essay was written for the 21st Annual Clifford Symposium: The Supreme Court, Business, and Civil Justice. The essay argues that existing lines drawn between corporations may be a useful starting place for analyzing the rights of corporations, but caution must be used because the lines drawn in other areas were done for various policy reasons in different contexts that may not map onto the corporate rights determination. Attention should be paid to the specific characteristics of corporations that are relevant to the right at stake and the basis for extending protection. The key contribution of this essay is to …

Constitutionalizing Corporate Law, Elizabeth Pollman

All Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court has recently decided some of the most important and controversial cases involving the federal rights of corporations in over two hundred years of jurisprudence. In rulings ranging from corporate political spending to religious liberty rights, the Court has dramatically expanded the zone in which corporations can act free from regulation. This Article argues these decisions represent a doctrinal shift, even from previous cases granting rights to corporations. The modern corporate rights doctrine has put unprecedented weight on state corporate law to act as a mechanism for resolving disputes among corporate participants regarding the expressive and religious activity …

The Derivative Nature Of Corporate Constitutional Rights, Margaret M. Blair, Elizabeth Pollman

All Faculty Scholarship

This Article engages the two hundred year history of corporate constitutional rights jurisprudence to show that the Supreme Court has long accorded rights to corporations based on the rationale that corporations represent associations of people from whom such rights are derived. The Article draws on the history of business corporations in America to argue that the Court’s characterization of corporations as associations made sense throughout most of the nineteenth century. By the late nineteenth century, however, when the Court was deciding several key cases involving corporate rights, this associational view was already becoming a poor fit for some corporations. The …