Law Commons^™

Why Not Good Faith?-The Foibles Of Fairness In Closely Held Corporations, Daniel S. Kleinberger

Faculty Scholarship

This essay describes the contours of the shareholder’s duty to be fair and explores some of the problems caused by the law’s imprecision in defining the duty of fairness. Because this duty is best understood as a rejection of old norms, part one of this essay describes the traditional doctrines of intra-corporate responsibility. Part two describes the special characteristics of a close corporation and outlines how those characteristics pushed close corporation law to new concepts of fairness and shareholder duties. Part three attempts to delineate those duties of fairness and also to highlight some of the dangers that arise when …