Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 3 of 3
Full-Text Articles in Law
Paper Dragon Thieves, J.S. Nelson
Paper Dragon Thieves, J.S. Nelson
J.S. Nelson
Developments in the law are making the corporate form more opaque and allowing the agents who animate it to escape individual accountability for their actions. The law now provides protection for agents to engage in widespread frauds that inflict massive harm on the public. This article challenges the academic orthodoxy that shareholder and director liability are enough to control agent behavior by developing a paper dragon analogy to focus on the importance of agents in corporate animation. Lack of agent accountability encourages the patterns of fraud that caused the financial crisis in which forty-five percent of the world’s wealth disappeared, …
The Corporate Shell Game, J.S. Nelson
The Corporate Shell Game, J.S. Nelson
J.S. Nelson
This Article identifies for the first time the hardening of the corporate shell. It provides compelling evidence that shell-hardening pushes and disguises the way that corporations and agents commit large-scale wrongdoing, and it traces the contributing legal streams that protect the agents who engage in this behavior. The only way to combat widespread frauds that inflict damage on the public is for the corporate shell to be-come less opaque.
Protecting Employee Rights And Prosecuting Corporate Crimes: A Proposal For Criminal Cumis Counsel, Josephine Sandler Nelson
Protecting Employee Rights And Prosecuting Corporate Crimes: A Proposal For Criminal Cumis Counsel, Josephine Sandler Nelson
J.S. Nelson
To address multi-dimensional conflict of interest problems in directors and officers (D&O) indemnification cases, we propose a solution that was originally developed for civil insurance cases in California, but that has an even more powerful and appropriate application in the context of criminal employee defendants.
Corporate crime costs the United States a staggering $600 billion a year. By contrast, the total cost of all non-corporate crime in 2001 from robbery, burglary, larceny-theft, and motor vehicle theft combined was $17.2 billion; less than one-third of what fraudulent activities at the single company of Enron cost investors, pensioners, and employees in the …