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Scholarly Articles

Series

2009

Executives' liability

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Law

Counter-Narrative In Corporate Law: Saints And Sinners, Apostles And Epistles, Lyman P.Q. Johnson Jan 2009

Counter-Narrative In Corporate Law: Saints And Sinners, Apostles And Epistles, Lyman P.Q. Johnson

Scholarly Articles

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 …


Are Corporate Officers Advised About Fiduciary Duties, Lyman P.Q. Johnson Jan 2009

Are Corporate Officers Advised About Fiduciary Duties, Lyman P.Q. Johnson

Scholarly Articles

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 …