Business Organizations Law Commons^™

A Difficult Conversation: Corporate Directors On Race And Gender, Kimberly D. Krawiec, John M. Conley, Lissa L. Broome

Faculty Scholarship

This symposium essay summarizes our ongoing ethnographic research on corporate board diversity, discussing the central tension in our respondents’ views – their overwhelmingly enthusiastic support of board diversity coupled with an inability to articulate coherent accounts of board diversity benefits that might rationalize that enthusiasm. As their reactions make clear, frank dialogue about race and gender – even a seemingly benign discussion of diversity’s benefits – can be a difficult conversation.

Private Equity Firms As Gatekeepers, Elisabeth De Fontenay

Faculty Scholarship

Notwithstanding the considerable attention private equity receives, there continues to be substantial confusion about what private equity does and whether this creates value. Calls for more aggressive regulation of the industry reflect a skeptical view of private equity as—at best—a zero-sum game, in which profits are generated only at the expense of other constituencies. The standard defense of private equity points to its corporate governance advantages as a source of value. This Article identifies an overlooked and increasingly important way in which private equity creates value: private equity firms act as gatekeepers in the debt markets. As repeat players, private …

Internal Compliance Officers In Jeopardy?, Deborah A. Demott

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Crucial But (Potentially) Precarious Position Of The Chief Compliance Officer, Deborah A. Demott

Faculty Scholarship

This Article, written for a symposium on compliance issues in financial-services firms, focuses on the role of the chief compliance officer (“CCO”). Contrasting the position with that held by a firm’s general counsel or Chief Legal Officer (CLO), the article argues that a CCO’s position holds distinct challenges. Additionally, although internal compliance systems and personnel may be characterized as functional substitutes for external regulation, assessing the strengths and weaknesses of internal compliance requires a willingness to look deep within firms. The article argues that the law and regulation may enhance firms’ incentives to invest in effective internal compliance but may …

The Stages Of Scandal And The Roles Of General Counsel, Deborah A. Demott

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay examines the roles of a general counsel, as the corporation’s chief legal officer, in responding to scandals when they happen and in developing and enforcing internal preventive practices prior to the occurrence of any particular scandal. The Essay differentiates between scandals and crises more generally, emphasizing the integral connection between scandal and jeopardy to reputation and tracing the interrelationships between a corporation’s reputation and that of its general counsel. The Essay argues that risks associated with scandal may strengthen general counsel’s power within the senior management team, in particular in general counsel’s relationship with the corporation’s CEO. Although …

Introduction: For Love Or Money? Defining Relationships In Law And Life, Kimberly D. Krawiec, Marion Crain

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Dangerous Categories: Narratives Of Corporate Board Diversity, Lissa Lamkin Broome, John M. Conley, Kimberly D. Krawiec

Faculty Scholarship

In this article, we report the results of a series of interviews with corporate directors about racial, ethnic, and gender diversity on corporate boards. On the one hand, our respondents were clear and nearly uniform in their statements that board diversity was an important goal worth pursuing. Yet when asked to provide examples or anecdotes illustrating why board diversity matters, many subjects acknowledged difficulty in illustrating theory with reference to practice.

This expressed reluctance to come to specific terms with general claims about the value of director diversity inspired our title phrase: dangerous categories. That is, while "diversity" evokes universal …

The Milieu Of The Boardroom And The Precinct Of Employment, Deborah A. Demott

Faculty Scholarship

This Commentary explores differences between employer-employee relationships and service on a board of directors. Against this backdrop, this Commentary argues that the research findings surveyed by Brooke and Tyler (Jennifer K. Brooke & Tom R. Tyler, Diversity and Corporate Performance: A Review of the Psychological Literature, 89 N.C. L. REV. 715 (2011)), although specific to the employment context, may be salient in assessing the impact of diversity among members of a board of directors.

Does Critical Mass Matter? Views From The Board Room, Lissa Lamkin Broome, John M. Conley, Kimberly D. Krawiec

Faculty Scholarship

In this Article, we report and analyze the results of forty-six wide-ranging interviews with corporate directors and other relevant insiders on the general topic of whether and how the racial, ethnic, and gender composition of corporate boards matters. In particular, we explore their views on the concept of “critical mass” — that is, the theory that women and racial or ethnic minorities are unlikely to have an impact in the boardroom until they grow from a few tokens into a considerable minority of the board.

In contrast to other recent qualitative research on corporate boards, we find more limited support …

Potentially Perverse Effects Of Corporate Civil Liability, Samuel W. Buell

Faculty Scholarship

Inadequate civil regulatory liability can be an incentive for public enforcers to pursue criminal cases against firms. This incentive is undesirable in a scheme with overlapping forms of liability that is meant to treat most cases of wrongdoing civilly and to reserve the criminal remedy for the few most serious institutional delicts. This effect appears to exist in the current scheme of liability for securities law violations, and may be present in other regulatory structures as well. In this chapter for a volume on "Prosecutors in the Boardroom," the author argues that enhancements of the SEC's enforcement processes likely would …

Keynote Address: The Role Of Lawyers In The Global Financial Crisis, Steven L. Schwarcz

Faculty Scholarship

In recent articles, the author has argued that the global financial crisis can be attributed in large part to three causes — conflicts, complacency and complexity — as well as to a type of tragedy of the commons. This article, which comprised the keynote address for the 2010 Corporate Law Teachers Association Conference, will focus on the failure of market observers, including corporate lawyers, to foresee or act on critical correlations that might have prevented, or at least mitigated, the crisis. Although conflicts, complacency, complexity and the tragedy of the commons can help to explain this failure, the goal will …

How Delaware Law Can Support Better Corporate Governance, James D. Cox

Faculty Scholarship

Corporate governance, or more particularly, improving corporate governance, has been an important national topic for decades – indeed from the first appearance of the public corporation. Within this discourse, we frequently find that the public and academics alike have short memories. We too frequently focus on the present more than on the sweep of history. So it is with the present corporate governance discussions. We tend to begin with the collapse of Enron in late 2001 and focus on the most recent tinkering with governance, such as the New York Stock Exchange's (NYSE) and Nasdaq's listing requirements and the novel, …

Art Deaccessions And The Limits Of Fiduciary Duty, Sue Chen

Duke Law Student Papers Series

Art deaccessions prompt lawsuits against museums, and some commentators advocate using the stricter trust standard of care, instead of the prevailing corporate standard (business judgment rule), to evaluate the conduct of non‑profit museum boards. This Article explores the consequences of adopting the trust standard by applying it to previously unavailable deaccession policies of prominent art museums. It finds that so long as museum boards adhere to these policies, their decisions would satisfy the trust standard. This outcome illustrates an important limitation of fiduciary law: the trust standard evaluates procedural care but cannot assess deaccessions on their merits. Yet this limitation, …

Guests At The Table?: Independent Directors In Family-Influenced Public Companies, Deborah A. Demott

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

A Response To The Critics Of Corporate Criminal Liability, Sara Sun Beale

Faculty Scholarship

This essay responds to critics of corporate liability and to the claim that elimination or limitation of such liability should be a priority for law reform. It discusses four points. First, imposing criminal liability on corporations makes sense, because corporations are not mere “fictional” entities. Rather, corporations are very real – and enormously powerful – actors whose conduct often causes very significant harms both to individuals and to society as a whole. Second, in evaluating the priorities for law reform it is critical to recognize that most of the problems with corporate liability are endemic to U.S. criminal law, rather …

Conflicts And Financial Collapse: The Problem Of Secondary-Management Agency Costs, Steven L. Schwarcz

Faculty Scholarship

Corporate governance scholarship has long focused on conflicts of interest between firms and their top executive officers. This Essay contends that increasing leverage and financial complexity make it important for scholars to also focus on conflicts of interest between firms and their secondary managers.

Understanding The ‘Corporate’ In Corporate Social Responsibility, Barak D. Richman, Aaron K. Chatterji

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Signaling Through Board Diversity: Is Anyone Listening?, Kimberly D. Krawiec, Lissa Lamkin Broome

Faculty Scholarship

The ethnic and gender make-up of corporate boards has been the subject of intense public and regulatory focus in many countries, including the United States, in recent years. Of particular interest has been quantitative research on the impact, if any, of board diversity on corporate performance. This body of work leaves substantial gaps in our understanding of the precise mechanisms by which board diversity may alter the corporate environment, if indeed it does. In this Symposium, we discuss some preliminary findings from our first thirty-five of a series of confidential, semi-structured interviews of 45 to 90 minutes in length with …

Irrevocable Proxies, Deborah A. Demott

Faculty Scholarship

This short article explores the circumstances under which the power to vote shares owned by another may be made irrevocable. Irrevocable proxies often serve as integral ingredients within corporate governance arrangements because they serve as mechanisms that enable alliances among shareowners or enhance the holder’s voting power in disproportion to the holder’s residual economic interest in the corporation. The rights and duties of holders of irrevocable proxies are best understood against a background of common-law agency relationships, in which agent and principal always have the power–albeit having contracted otherwise–to terminate their relationship and the agent’s actual authority. Courts in the …

Criminal Procedure Within The Firm, Samuel W. Buell

Faculty Scholarship

It seems improbable that the theoretical and doctrinal framework of criminal procedure, developed mostly through a binary model of the individual and the state, would fit without modification in the tripartite model of the state, the firm, and the individual that characterizes the investigation and sanctioning of criminal conduct within legal entities. This intuition—which has been underexplored in spite of heated public debate about the state’s practices in this area—proves correct. I develop some components of a framework for understanding procedure for individual cases of criminal wrongdoing within firms and generating insights to guide reform. The process of pursuing individual …

Organizational Form As Status And Signal, Kimberly D. Krawiec

Faculty Scholarship

In this Article, the author analyzes the reactions of 147 New York City law firms to the 1994 enactment of the New York Limited Liability Partnership statute, which provided New York law firm partners with the first convenient mechanism to limit their personal liability for partnership debts. Using both quantitative and qualitative evidence, she evaluates whether the behavior of New York law firms supports the signaling theory of organizational form - that is, the theory that firms use the partnership form to signal to the marketplace that they provide high quality legal services, due to either superior monitoring or to …

The Economics Of Limited Liability: An Empirical Study Of New York Law Firms, Kimberly D. Krawiec, Scott Baker

Faculty Scholarship

Since the rapid rise in organizational forms for business associations, academics and practitioners have sought to explain the choice of form rationale. Each form contains its own set of default rules that inevitably get factored into this decision, including the extent to which each individual firm owner will be held personally liable for the collective debts and obligations of the firm. The significance of the differences in these default rules continues to be debated. Many commentators have advanced theories, most notably those based on unlimited liability, profit-sharing, and illiquidity, asserting that the partnership form provides efficiency benefits that outweigh any …

Economic Organization In The Construction Industry: A Case Study Of Collaborative Production Under High Uncertainty, William A. Klein, Mitu Gulati

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Transatlantic Perspectives On Partnership Law: Risk And Instability, Deborah A. Demott

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Building The Basic Course Around Intra-Firm Relations, Kimberly D. Krawiec

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Firm Capabilities And Managerial Decision-Making: A Theory Of Innovation Biases, Janet E. L. Bercovitz, John M. De Figueiredo, David J. Teece

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Proprietary Norms In Corporate Law: An Essay On Reading Gambotto In The United States, Deborah A. Demott

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

It Does The Crime But Not The Time: Corporate Criminal Liability In Federal Law, Michael E. Tigar

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Changing Perceptions Into Reality: Fiduciary Standards To Match The American Directors’ Monitoring Function, James D. Cox

Faculty Scholarship

This paper describes the historical fiduciary obligations of the American outside director and contrasts those obligations with prevailing obligations in today’s environment of the monitoring director. Special attention is devoted to the role of outside directors when their firm is the target of a takeover. In no other context are the demands on the outside director greater and more strain placed on the monitoring model than in the context of a corporate takeover. The final section of this paper examines the relief modern statutory provisions provide to the director and the monitoring function

The Business Judgment Rule In The Context Of Termination Of Derivative Suits By Independent Committees, James D. Cox, Donald E. Schwartz

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.