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Full-Text Articles in Law
Mind Control: Firms And The Production Of Ideas, Anthony J. Casey
Mind Control: Firms And The Production Of Ideas, Anthony J. Casey
Seattle University Law Review
The central questions for economic theories of the firm concern how the production of a good is organized (in the market or within a firm) and why that organization prevails. Derivative to these questions, legal scholars ask how the law affects and is affected by any particular organizational structure. Emerging literature looks at these questions in connection with the law of intellectual property. The prevailing theories in that literature focus primarily, though not exclusively, on patent law and generally adopt a property-rights theory of the firm. Those theories, focusing on residual control and hold-up problems, have shown that as patent …
Hired To Invent Vs. Work Made For Hire: Resolving The Inconsistency Among Rights Of Corporate Personhood, Authorship, And Inventorship, Sean M. O'Connor
Hired To Invent Vs. Work Made For Hire: Resolving The Inconsistency Among Rights Of Corporate Personhood, Authorship, And Inventorship, Sean M. O'Connor
Seattle University Law Review
Corporations have long held core aspects of legal personhood, such as rights to own and divest property and to sue and be sued. U.S. copyright law allows corporations to be authors while U.S. patent law does not allow them to be inventors. To be sure, both copyright law and patent law allow corporations to own copyrights and patents as assignees. But only copyright law, through its work-made-for-hire doctrine, provides for the nonnatural person of the corporation to “be” the author in an almost metaphysical sense. Under patent law, the natural-person inventors must always be listed in the patent documents, even …
The Evolution Of The American Corporation And Global Organizational Biodiversity, Ugo Pagano
The Evolution Of The American Corporation And Global Organizational Biodiversity, Ugo Pagano
Seattle University Law Review
The Evolution of the Modern Corporate Structure has been one of the most influential chapters of The Modern Corporation & Private Property. But Berle and Means’s superb analysis is framed in the American context and cannot be easily generalized to other experiences. Their corporate model arose in a democratic country where “production engineers” commanded more respect than financiers and capitalist dynasties. Other countries followed different organizational paths, characterized by different institutional complementarities between labor and financial markets that generated “concentrated equilibria” different from the American “dispersed equilibrium.” This Article argues that the divide can be traced to the different aristocratic …
The Citizen Shareholder: Modernizing The Agency Paradigm To Reflect How And Why A Majority Of Americans Invest In The Market, Anne Tucker
Seattle University Law Review
This Article examines corporate law from the perspective of personal investment and discusses the economic realities of modern investments in order to understand the role of shareholders within the agency paradigm. Corporate law, its scholars, and suggested reforms traditionally focus on the internal organization of the corporation. For example, agency principles inform corporate law by acknowledging a potential conflict of interest between the managers and shareholders of a corporation. Reforms such as increased shareholder voting rights and proxy access, which seek to give shareholders a more direct means to make their interests known to managers, illustrate corporate law’s focus on …
Consumer Lock-In And The Theory Of The Firm, David G. Yosifon
Consumer Lock-In And The Theory Of The Firm, David G. Yosifon
Seattle University Law Review
The advent of the modern corporation separated not only ownership from control but also production from consumption. The agency problem that arose between owners and managers of firms also emerged between producers and consumers. Just as corporations needed to lock-in capital to sustain large-scale operations, so too did they need to lock-in consumers to justify and reduce the risks of asset-specific investment. Large corporate operations succeeded because they solved both the capital and consumer lock-in challenges. This Article explores ways in which modern consumers, like shareholders, can find themselves in a very real sense locked into the corporations with which …
Nevada And The Market For Corporate Law, Bruce H. Kobayashi, Larry E. Ribstein
Nevada And The Market For Corporate Law, Bruce H. Kobayashi, Larry E. Ribstein
Seattle University Law Review
Berle and Means’s view that managers rather than shareholders control our largest corporations finds important expression in William Cary’s famous article arguing that managers have led shareholders on a “race to the bottom” whose finish line is Delaware. These views, in turn, support supplanting state corporation law with federal regulation of corporate governance. Concerns about a race to the bottom lately focus on Nevada, which seeks to be Delaware’s first real competitor for out-of-state firms in the national incorporation market. Evidence suggests that Nevada’s strategy is to raise tax revenues by offering a significantly laxer corporate law than Delaware. We …
The Post-Revolutionary Period In Corporate Law: Returning To The Theory Of The Firm, Matthew T. Bodie
The Post-Revolutionary Period In Corporate Law: Returning To The Theory Of The Firm, Matthew T. Bodie
Seattle University Law Review
The consensus on corporate law theory has narrowed the field’s doctrinal and methodological foci. Although the vibrancy of shareholder primacy has at times been called into question as a matter of law, both boardrooms and courts have taken the normative call for shareholder wealth maximization increasingly to heart. There is little doubt that the revolution has not only substantially affected legal theory but also legislation, court decisions, and corporate behavior. It achieved a level of success unusual for an academic discipline; it not only transformed the field but also the world. We now find ourselves in the post-revolutionary period. For …
Law And Legal Theory In The History Of Corporate Responsibility: Corporate Personhood, Lyman Johnson
Law And Legal Theory In The History Of Corporate Responsibility: Corporate Personhood, Lyman Johnson
Seattle University Law Review
This Article, the first of a multipart project, addresses the nature of corporate personhood, one area where law has played a central role in the history of corporate responsibility in the United States.1 The treatment will be illustrative, not exhaustive. Consistent with the theme of the larger project, the Article serves to make the simple but important point that a full historical understanding of corporate responsibility requires an appreciation of the law’s significant, if ultimately limited, contribution to the longstanding American quest for more responsible corporate conduct. On one hand, the spheres of law and corporate responsibility, although clearly complementary, …
Rethinking The Nature Of The Firm: The Corporation As A Governance Object, Peer Zumbansen
Rethinking The Nature Of The Firm: The Corporation As A Governance Object, Peer Zumbansen
Seattle University Law Review
This Article attempts to bridge two discourses—corporate governance and contract governance. Regarding the latter, a group of scholars has recently set out to develop a more comprehensive research agenda to explore the governance dimensions of contractual relations, highlighting the potential of contract theory to develop a more encompassing theory of social and economic transactions. While a renewed interest in the contribution of economic theory for a concept of contract governance drives one dimension of this research, another part of this undertaking has been to move contract theory closer to theories of social organization. Here, these scholars emphasize the “social” or …
A Shallow Harbor And A Cold Horizon: The Deceptive Promise Of Modern Agency Law For The Theory Of The Firm, David A. Westbrook
A Shallow Harbor And A Cold Horizon: The Deceptive Promise Of Modern Agency Law For The Theory Of The Firm, David A. Westbrook
Seattle University Law Review
Modern agency law—the consensual agreement of one person to work for and under the control of another—has been widely used to provide a general framework for understanding a great deal of business law. Agency law concepts can be used to frame pedagogical, scholarly, institutional, and even political discourses. In so doing, modern agency law addresses concerns about the institution of the corporation, generally by reference to contract: institutions are created out of essentially consensual, and hence justifiable, relationships among autonomous individuals. So modern agency law is more than a “theory” of the firm in the narrow sense of theory; modern …