Law Commons^™

Astroturf Activism, Melinda (M.J.) Durkee

Scholarship@WashULaw

Corporate influence in government is more than a national issue; it is an international phenomenon. For years, businesses have been infiltrating international legal processes. They secretly lobby lawmakers through front groups: “astroturf” imitations of grassroots organizations. But because this business lobbying is covert, it has been underappreciated in both the literature and the law. This Article unearths the “astroturf activism” phenomenon. It offers an original descriptive account that classifies modes of business access to international officials and identifies harms, then develops a critical analysis of the laws that regulate this access. I show that the perplexing set of access rules …

The Death Of The Firm, June Carbone, Nancy Levit

Faculty Works

This Article maintains that the decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, which referred to the corporation as a legal fiction designed to serve the interests of the people behind it, signals the “death of the firm” as a unit of legal analysis in which business entities are treated as more than the sum of their parts and appropriate partners to advance not just commercial, but public ends. The Hobby Lobby reference to the firm as a fiction is a product of a decades-long shift in the treatment of corporations. This shift reflects both an ideological embrace of the free-market-oriented “agency-cost” …

Astroturf Activism, Melissa J. Durkee

Scholarly Works

Corporate influence in government is more than a national issue; it is an international phenomenon. For years, businesses have been infiltrating international legal processes. They secretly lobby lawmakers through front groups: “astroturf” imitations of grassroots organizations. But because this business lobbying is covert, it has been underappreciated in both the literature and the law. This Article unearths the “astroturf activism” phenomenon. It offers an original descriptive account that classifies modes of business access to international officials and identifies harms, then develops a critical analysis of the laws that regulate this access. I show that the perplexing set of access rules …

The Business Of Treaties, Melinda (M.J.) Durkee

Scholarship@WashULaw

Business entities play important and underappreciated roles in the production of international treaties. At the same time, international treaty law is hobbled by state- centric presumptions that render its response to business ad hoc and unprincipled.

This Article makes three principal contributions. First, it draws from case studies to demonstrate the significance of business participation in treaty production. The descriptive account invites a shift from attention to traditional lobbying at the domestic level and private standard-setting at the transnational level to the ways business entities have become autonomous international actors, using a panoply of means to transform their preferred policies …

Federalism, Variation, And State Regulation Of Franchise Termination, Jonathan Klick, Bruce Kobayashi, Larry Ribstein

All Faculty Scholarship

This article discusses and expands on our recent work examining the effects of franchise-termination laws. In a prior article, we examined empirically the effect of franchise-termination laws on the level of franchise activity. Our analysis improved upon the prior literature in two major ways. First, our work exploited two new sources of panel data to provide new empirical evidence on the effect of franchise termination laws. Second, our analysis examined variation in states’ restrictions on the ability of franchisors and franchisees to contract around a particular state’s regulation. We found that the effects of termination laws on the overall level …

Private Standards, Public Governance: A New Look At The Financial Accounting Standards Board, William W. Bratton

All Faculty Scholarship

The Financial Accounting Standards Board (the “FASB”) presents a puzzle: How has this private standard setter managed simultaneously (1) to remain independent, (2) to achieve institutional stability and legitimacy, and (3) to operate in a politicized context in the teeth of op-position from its own constituents? This Article looks to governance design to account for this institutional success. The FASB’s founders made a strategic choice to create a regulatory agency that sought independence rather than political responsiveness. The FASB also set out a coherent theory of accounting, the “Conceptual Framework,” to contain and direct its decisions. The Conceptual Framework contributed …

Transcending The Individualist Paradigm In Sexual Orientation Antidiscrimination Law, Holning S. Lau

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

"The Race To The Bottom": Competition In The Law Of Property, John V. Orth

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Medical Research Oversight From The Corporate Governance Perspective: Comparing Institutional Review Boards And Corporate Boards, Richard S. Saver

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

A Property-Based Theory Of Security Interests: Taking Debtor's Choices Seriously, Steven L. Harris, Charles W. Mooney Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Taxing Prometheus: How The Corporate Interest Deduction Discourages Innovation And Risk-Taking, Michael S. Knoll

All Faculty Scholarship

This paper uses recent developments in the theory of optimal capital structure to demonstrate how the federal corporate income tax with an interest deduction, but without a corresponding dividend deduction, misallocates capital within the corporate sector by encouraging investment in low-risk, low-growth projects employing tangible assets over high-risk, high-growth projects employing intangible assets.

Corporate Law Through An Antitrust Lens, Edward B. Rock

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Decision To Incorporate, Thomas Lee Hazen

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.