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Articles 1 - 17 of 17
Full-Text Articles in Law
Public Primacy In Corporate Law, Dorothy S. Lund
Public Primacy In Corporate Law, Dorothy S. Lund
Seattle University Law Review
This Article explores the malleability of agency theory by showing that it could be used to justify a “public primacy” standard for corporate law that would direct fiduciaries to promote the value of the corporation for the benefit of the public. Employing agency theory to describe the relationship between corporate management and the broader public sheds light on aspects of firm behavior, as well as the nature of state contracting with corporations. It also provides a lodestar for a possible future evolution of corporate law and governance: minimize the agency costs created by the divergence of interests between management and …
Corporate Law In The Global South: Heterodox Stakeholderism, Mariana Pargendler
Corporate Law In The Global South: Heterodox Stakeholderism, Mariana Pargendler
Seattle University Law Review
How do the corporate laws of Global South jurisdictions differ from their Global North counterparts? Prevailing stereotypes depict the corporate laws of developing countries as either antiquated or plagued by problems of enforcement and misfit despite formal convergence. This Article offers a different view by showing how Global South jurisdictions have pioneered heterodox stakeholder approaches in corporate law, such as the erosion of limited liability for purposes of stakeholder protection in Brazil and India, the adoption of mandatory corporate social responsibility in Indonesia and India, and the large-scale program of Black corporate ownership and empowerment in South Africa, among many …
Sustainability In Public Procurement, Corporate Law And Higher Education (Introduction), Paolo Davide Farah
Sustainability In Public Procurement, Corporate Law And Higher Education (Introduction), Paolo Davide Farah
Book Chapters
Lela Mélon’s edited collection brings a fresh perspective to the intricate relationship between corporations and sustainability. The book focuses on the role of state actors in boosting environmental protection and the increasing importance of state awareness on environmental crises. Whether it is procurement, or education or corporate governance, we are witnessing a proactive stance of the state that is balancing economic growth with ecological concerns. The difficulties faced in forcing a particular conduct in the private sphere is reviewed in detail in the book, along with national laws and regulations that, rather than promoting environmental protection, have had the opposite …
Sacred Corporate Law, Giancarlo Anello, Sergio Alberto Gramitto Ricci, Mohamed Arafa
Sacred Corporate Law, Giancarlo Anello, Sergio Alberto Gramitto Ricci, Mohamed Arafa
Faculty Works
This Article investigates the sacred origins of the corporate form. It sheds light on the sacred rituals performed to establish Ancient Roman cities as legal entities. It discusses the role of the Roman Catholic Church in developing the corporate form and in giving birth to a systemized set of rules regulating corporations, which we commonly call corporate law. It analyzes the limitations to the use of the corporate form in Islamic law as well as the streams of Islamic law jurisprudence that recognize legal capacity to specific entities with religious, social, or charitable purposes. It surveys the characteristics of two …
Religious Roots Of Corporate Organization, Amanda Porterfield
Religious Roots Of Corporate Organization, Amanda Porterfield
Seattle University Law Review
Religion and corporate organization have developed side-by-side in Western culture, from antiquity to the present day. This Essay begins with the realignment of religion and secularity in seventeenth-century America, then looks to the religious antecedents of corporate organization in ancient Rome and medieval Europe, and then looks forward to the modern history of corporate organization. This Essay describes the long history behind the entanglement of business and religion in the United States today. It also shows how an understanding of both religion and business can be expanded by looking at the economic aspects of religion and the religious aspects of …
Sacred Corporate Law, Giancarlo Anello, Mohamed Arafa, Sergio Alberto Gramitto Ricci
Sacred Corporate Law, Giancarlo Anello, Mohamed Arafa, Sergio Alberto Gramitto Ricci
Seattle University Law Review
This Article investigates the sacred origins of the corporate form. It sheds light on the sacred rituals performed to establish Ancient Roman cities as legal entities. It discusses the role of the Roman Catholic Church in developing the corporate form and in giving birth to a systemized set of rules regulating corporations, which we commonly call corporate law. It analyzes the limitations to the use of the corporate form in Islamic law as well as the streams of Islamic law jurisprudence that recognize legal capacity to specific entities with religious, social, or charitable purposes. It surveys the characteristics of two …
Proxy Access Voting: Evaluating Proxy Access And The Recent Phenomenon Of Corporations Adopting Shareholder Protective Policies, Danielle Vukovich
Proxy Access Voting: Evaluating Proxy Access And The Recent Phenomenon Of Corporations Adopting Shareholder Protective Policies, Danielle Vukovich
San Diego International Law Journal
Shareholders hold a financial stake in a corporation, and therefore are often viewed as owners of the corporation and believed to be in control for all corporate actions. However, their powers are circumscribed. Board of directors committees nominate directors to serve the corporation and these directors have the power to select the corporation’s officers. The committees provide shareholders a slate of proposed directors that are voted on and approved at the annual shareholder meeting. Shareholders may also propose their own slate of directors, but this typically requires a proxy contest, which can be expensive due to the costs both associated …
A Critical Canadian Perspective On The Benefit Corporation, Carol Liao
A Critical Canadian Perspective On The Benefit Corporation, Carol Liao
Seattle University Law Review
Part I of this Article provides a brief background and description of the American benefit corporation. Part II then delineates the Canadian model of corporate law and governance as it currently stands in the statutes, common law, and in practice. Part III applies the information gathered from the previous two sections to explain why the legal features in the American benefit corporation model are largely redundant to existing Canadian corporate laws. It also addresses how the implementation of the benefit corporation in Canada would conflate incorrect assumptions on Canada’s model of governance and potentially impede the progressive development of Canada’s …
Breaching The Accountability Firewall: Market Norms And The Reasonable Director, Joan Loughrey
Breaching The Accountability Firewall: Market Norms And The Reasonable Director, Joan Loughrey
Seattle University Law Review
This Article examines and evaluates the role of market norms in determining whether directors have acted reasonably and the appropriateness of setting a standard of reasonableness that reflects market norms. It argues that although there are situations in which a standard that reflects market norms may not be appropriate for determining the reasonableness of a director’s conduct, it is the best standard more often than not. While this Article focuses on the U.K. director’s duty of care, the question of whether compliance with market norms should be exculpatory arises every time legal or regulatory enforcement depends upon establishing that a …
"Quack Corporate Governance" As Traditional Chinese Medicine: The Securities Regulation Cannibalization Of China's Corporate Law And A State Regulator's Battle Against Party State Political Economic Power, Nicholas Calcina Howson
"Quack Corporate Governance" As Traditional Chinese Medicine: The Securities Regulation Cannibalization Of China's Corporate Law And A State Regulator's Battle Against Party State Political Economic Power, Nicholas Calcina Howson
Seattle University Law Review
From the start of the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) “corporatization” project in the late 1980s, a Chinese corporate governance regime subject to increasingly enabling legal norms has been determined by mandatory regulations imposed by the PRC securities regulator, the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC). Indeed, the Chinese corporate law system has been cannibalized by all-encompassing securities regulation directed at corporate governance, at least for companies with listed stock. This Article traces the path of that sustained intervention and makes a case—wholly contrary to the “quack corporate governance” critique much aired in the United States—that for the PRC this phenomenon …
What Is A Corporation? Liberal, Confucion, And Socialist Theories Of Enterprise Organization (And State, Family, And Personhood), Teemu Ruskola
What Is A Corporation? Liberal, Confucion, And Socialist Theories Of Enterprise Organization (And State, Family, And Personhood), Teemu Ruskola
Seattle University Law Review
What is a corporation? An easy, but not very informative, answer is that it is a legal person. More substantive answers suggest it is a moral person, a person/thing, a production team, a nexus of private agreements, a city, a semi-sovereign, or a (secular) God. Despite the economic, political, and social importance of the corporate form, we do not have a generally accepted legal theory of what a corporation is, apart from the law’s questionable assertion that it is a “person.” In this Article, the author places the idea, and law, of the corporation in a comparative context and suggests …
State Capital: Global And Australian Perspectives, George Gilligan, Megan Bowman
State Capital: Global And Australian Perspectives, George Gilligan, Megan Bowman
Seattle University Law Review
The activities of state-related pools of capital need to be understood within the context of an era of globalization, in which economic and political ties between many jurisdictions are deepening, A variety of modes of governance are emerging that have a capacity for impacts of broad international scope. The rising influence of more proactive state-led capitalism is one of the shaping variables in how the global economy has been changing swiftly in recent decades, and the effects of the Global Financial Crisis have arguably accelerated these structural shifts. This Article identifies three discrete phenomena in the state capital arena. First, …
Good Faith In Revlon-Land, Christopher M. Bruner
Good Faith In Revlon-Land, Christopher M. Bruner
Christopher M. Bruner
The Delaware Supreme Court has set a very high hurdle for plaintiffs challenging directors' good faith in the sale of a company. In Lyondell Chemical Company v. Ryan, the court held that unconflicted directors could be found to have breached the good faith component of their duty of loyalty in the transactional context only if they "knowingly and completely failed to undertake," and "utterly failed to attempt" to discharge their duties. In this essay I argue that the Lyondell standard effectively imports into the transactional context the exacting standard previously applied in the oversight context — a move clearly aimed …
Persuasion Treaties, Melinda (M.J.) Durkee
Persuasion Treaties, Melinda (M.J.) Durkee
Scholarship@WashULaw
All treaties formalize promises made by national parties. Yet there is a fundamental difference between two kinds of treaty promise. This difference divides all treaties into two categories: treaties that govern the behavior of state parties and their agents fall in one category; treaties in the second category—those I call “persuasion” treaties—commit state parties to changing the behavior of non-state actors as well. The difference is important because the compliance problems for the two sets of treaties sharply diverge. Persuasion treaties merit our systematic attention because they are both theoretically and practically significant. In areas such as international environmental affairs, …
Persuasion Treaties, Melissa J. Durkee
Persuasion Treaties, Melissa J. Durkee
Scholarly Works
All treaties formalize promises made by national parties. Yet there is a fundamental difference between two kinds of treaty promise. This difference divides all treaties along a fault line: Treaties that govern the behavior of state parties and their agents fall on one side. Treaties in the second category — those I call “persuasion” treaties — commit state parties to changing the behavior of non-state actors as well. The difference is important because the compliance problems for the two sets of treaties sharply diverge. Persuasion treaties merit our systematic attention because they are both theoretically and practically significant. In areas …
Strategic Alliances: Emerging Trends In Future Corporate Business, Naresh Menghraj Gehi
Strategic Alliances: Emerging Trends In Future Corporate Business, Naresh Menghraj Gehi
LLM Theses and Essays
A strategic alliance is an arrangement for economic collaboration between firms at the same level of distribution, involving an exchange of critical skills aimed at buffering the core business strategy, technology, or markets of the partners. Research indicates that the care and thought of the strategic alliance partners increases with the importance of the venture to the strategic objectives of the entity. This paper describes the importance of strategic alliances in today’s competitive world. It examines the benefits of entering into strategic alliances, the legal implications of strategic alliances, and various industries where strategic alliances are dominant. Finally, this paper …