Law Commons^™

Purpose With Profit: Governance, Enforcement, Capital-Raising And Capital-Locking In Low-Profit Limited Liability Companies, J. Haskell Murray, Edward I. Hwang

University of Miami Law Review

No abstract provided.

Director Accountability And The Mediating Role Of The Corporate Board, Margaret M. Blair, Lynn A. Stout

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

One of the most pressing questions facing both corporate scholars and businesspeople today is how corporate directors can be made accountable. Before addressing this issue, however, it seems important to consider two antecedent questions: To whom should directors be accountable? And for what?

Contemporary corporate scholarship often starts from a "shareholder primacy" perspective that holds that directors of public corporations ought to be accountable only to the shareholders, and ought to be accountable only for maximizing the value of the shareholders' shares. This perspective rests on the conventional contractarian assumption that the shareholders are the sole residual claimants and …

The Statutory Derivative Action In Singapore: A Critical And Comparative Examination, Pearlie Koh

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

As a mechanism for shareholder control of corporate wrongs and thus as a tool of corporate governance, the statutory derivative action has had much international attention given to it, particularly in the last 10 years. Singapore introduced its statutory derivative action in 1993 and since then, there have been two reported cases in which the action was invoked. In this paper, I consider the Singapore derivative action as contained in sections 216A and 216B of the Singapore Companies Act. The approach taken is a comparative one as I also look at the statutory derivative actions in Australia and other common …

Unocal Revisited: No Tiger In The Tank, Mark J. Loewenstein

Publications

No abstract provided.

The Very Uncertain Prospect Of 'Global' Convergence In Corporate Governance, Douglas M. Branson

Articles

Elites in the United States legal academy have been uniform in their prediction of "global" convergence on a single model of governance for large publicly held corporations. That model is, of course, the U.S. model. The evidence, though, is only of some trans Atlantic convergence with an outlier here or there. Moreover, the existing scholarship is culturally and economically insensitive. U.S. style corporate governance, with its requirements for truly independent directors who will confront and remove badly performing CEOs, and which has as an element lawsuits brought by activist shareholders, is simply inappropriate for many cultural settings. Post Confucian and …

Seeking Sunlight In Santa Fe's Shadow: The Sec's Pursuit Of Managerial Accountability, Donald C. Langevoort

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

My aim in this paper is not to justify at length an expansive "new corporation law" perspective, though I do believe in it. Nor do I want to try to resolve a controversial question that the new learning admittedly leaves open: which jurisdictional body should set the disclosure and antifraud standards insofar as they are designed to promote better corporate governance? To say that corporate and securities law are largely unitary does not necessarily mean that centralization of authority in the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC or Commission) is the right choice. Perhaps the states, foreign countries, or stock exchanges …

A Property Theory Perspective On Russian Enterprise Reform, Michael Heller

Book Chapters

Why have Russian enterprises performed so poorly since privatization? This is a problem with many answers, each independently sufficient: the bleak mix includes vacillating macroeconomic policy, endemic corruption, a corrosive tax structure, poor human capital, and so forth. Even well-performing companies must hide good results because visible profits or dividends provoke confiscatory taxation and mafia visits. In such a difficult environment, the rule of law generally, and corporate governance in particular, may seem not to count. Macroeconomic implosions dwarf subtle distinctions in corporate dividend rules or minority voting rights.

Sales And Elections As Methods For Transferring Corporate Control, Ronald J. Gilson, Alan Schwartz

Faculty Scholarship

Delaware case law has rendered the tender offer obsolete as a method for purchasing a company whose directors oppose the acquisition. A potential acquirer facing target opposition today must run an insurgent director slate, in the expectation that its directors are more likely to sell. The Delaware courts have not justified their preference for elections over markets as the preferred vehicle for implementing changes in control. Informal scholarly analyses ask transaction cost questions, such as whether proxy contests are more costly than takeovers. This article attempts to break new ground by asking whether there are systematic differences in the performance …