Business Organizations Law Commons^™

The Coevolution Of Transnational Corporations And Institutions, Sarianna M. Lundan

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

While economic theories of the firm have traditionally focused on the ownership of assets, the increasing use of contractual partnerships is beginning to challenge our conception of the firm by emphasizing its coordinating role. In structuring their contracts, as well as in managing the relationships governed by the contracts, firms try to mitigate uncertainties that could destroy the value-adding potential of such transactions. These uncertainties may be specific to the transaction partner, but they might also arise from the institutional context of the contracting parties, particularly in the case of transactions that cross borders. The coevolutionary process whereby firms both …

The Changing Face Of Transnational Business Governance: Private Corporate Law Liability And Accountability Of Transnational Groups In A Post-Financial Crisis World, Peter Muchlinski

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

This article seeks to critically assess the recently dominant financialized model of corporate law and governance and its contribution to the creation of the "asocial corporation" geared only to the enhancement of shareholder value. This article places corporate law in a wider context of national and international legal developments that, together, create a framework for the financialization of transnational corporate activity. This article shows that a new approach to transnational corporate governance is emerging from a number of sources. These predate the crisis but have been given impetus by it. In particular, three important phenomena are examined: the rise of …

Introduction: Transnational Corporations Revisited, Gralf-Peter Calliess

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

Articles first presented at a symposium in the context of the biannual conference of the German Law & Society Association (Vereinigung fur Recht und Gesellschaft e. V) on "Transnationalism in Law, the State, and Society." This conference was organized together with the Collaborative Research Center (CRC) 597 "Transformations of the State" at the University of Bremen from March 3-5, 2010. The Collaborative Research Center 597 'Transformations of the State," U. BREMEN, www.staat.uni-bremen.de

Private Actors And Public Governance Beyond The State: The Multinational Corporation, The Financial Stability Board, And The Global Governance Order, Larry Cata Backer

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

Transnational corporations are at the center of extraordinary and complex governance systems that are developing outside the state and international public organizations and beyond the conventionally legitimating framework of the forms of domestic or international hard law. Though these systems are sometimes recognized as autonomous and authoritative among its members, they are neither isolated from each other nor from the states with which they come into contact. Together these systems may begin to suggest a new template for networked governance beyond the state, but one in which public and private actors are integrated stakeholders. This provides the source of the …

Self-Constitutionalizing Tncs? On The Linkage Of "Private" And "Public" Corporate Codes Of Conduct, Gunther Teubner

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

What is special about the intertwining of private and public corporate codes? It is not only tendencies of juridification but also of constitutionalization that materialize in this interplay. Both types of corporate codes taken together represent the beginnings of specific transnational corporate constitutions conceived as constitutions in the strict sense. This point is based on a concept of constitutionalization that is not limited to the nation-state and implies that also nonstate societal orders develop autonomous constitutions under particular historical circumstances. The following arguments highlight how corporate codes feature functions, structures, and institutions of genuine constitutions:

1. To the extent that …

Transnational Corporations, Global Competition Policy, And The Shortcomings Of Private International Law, Gralf-Peter Calliess, Jens Mertens

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

In this article we criticize the so-called more economic approach to European competition law for disregarding the importance of a functional system of private law. Based on the availability of market governance as an alternative mode for organizing transactions, it is presumed that vertical integration, which is the central organizational structure of transnational corporations, is economically efficient. Since the enforcement of cross-border contracts by state-organized systems of private law, however, is insufficient, "make-or-buy" decisions in international commerce are prejudiced against arms' length transactions in markets. Consequently, international transactions are integrated vertically into firms' structures to a higher degree than comparable …

The Transnational Law Market, Regulatory Competition, And Transnational Corporations, Horst Eidenmuller

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

In many regions of the world and across various fields, law has become a product. Individuals and companies seek attractive legal regulations, and countries advertise their legal wares globally as they compete for customers. Transnational corporations in particular are prominent actors in the emerging transnational law market. This article investigates the causes of this development and discusses these changes with respect to company law, contract law, the law of dispute resolution, and insolvency law. It assesses the market for legal rules and its practical consequences, and it provides legal policy recommendations for an efficient framework of the transnational law market. …

Mind Control: Firms And The Production Of Ideas, Anthony J. Casey

Seattle University Law Review

The central questions for economic theories of the firm concern how the production of a good is organized (in the market or within a firm) and why that organization prevails. Derivative to these questions, legal scholars ask how the law affects and is affected by any particular organizational structure. Emerging literature looks at these questions in connection with the law of intellectual property. The prevailing theories in that literature focus primarily, though not exclusively, on patent law and generally adopt a property-rights theory of the firm. Those theories, focusing on residual control and hold-up problems, have shown that as patent …

Theories Of The Firm And Judicial Uncertainty, Andrew S. Gold

Seattle University Law Review

There is no necessary connection between academics’ theories of the firm and judicial theories of the firm. Economists and legal scholars may adopt one theory of the firm, and courts may adopt another. We might even predict this result. Judges are not economists, and as increasingly sophisticated theories of the firm emerge in the academic literature, judges are not well-positioned to keep pace with the evolving accounts. Indeed, judges may reasonably choose to adopt no theory at all. Given these premises, this Essay explores the relationship between academically developed theories of the firm and corporate legal doctrine. Legal scholars who …

Coase, Knight, And The Nexus-Of-Contracts Theory Of The Firm: A Reflection On Reification, Reality, And The Corporation As Entrepreneur Surrogate, Charles R.T. O'Kelley

Seattle University Law Review

Working within the nexus-of-contracts model, scholars have struggled to develop a rhetorical paradigm that accurately predicts or describes corporation law. This difficulty flows from twin flaws in the currently dominant model—the equation of the corporation and the firm and the exclusion of the entrepreneur. Coase and his progenitor, Frank Knight, saw the firm as having an “inside” and an “outside” and a distinct central actor—the entrepreneur. Contrary to the allocation of resources by the unconscious processes of the market fundamental to the perfect competition model favored by free-market, nexus-of-contracts theorists, Knight and Coase looked inside the firm and identified the …

Salomon Redux: The Moralities Of Business, Allan C. Hutchinson, Ian Langlois

Seattle University Law Review

In this Essay, we revisit the Salomon case and its related litigation not only from a legal standpoint but also from a broader moral perspective. 4 In the second Part, we offer a detailed context for and account of the Salomon litigation. The third Part focuses on the historical roots of the corporation and the judicial arguments in Salomon. In the fourth Part, we explore the moral and legal consequences of the Salomon decision. Throughout the Essay, our ambition will be not only to give the Salomon case a more contextual and richer spin but also to tackle the relationship …

Law And Legal Theory In The History Of Corporate Responsibility: Corporate Personhood, Lyman Johnson

Seattle University Law Review

This Article, the first of a multipart project, addresses the nature of corporate personhood, one area where law has played a central role in the history of corporate responsibility in the United States.1 The treatment will be illustrative, not exhaustive. Consistent with the theme of the larger project, the Article serves to make the simple but important point that a full historical understanding of corporate responsibility requires an appreciation of the law’s significant, if ultimately limited, contribution to the longstanding American quest for more responsible corporate conduct. On one hand, the spheres of law and corporate responsibility, although clearly complementary, …

Nevada And The Market For Corporate Law, Bruce H. Kobayashi, Larry E. Ribstein

Seattle University Law Review

Berle and Means’s view that managers rather than shareholders control our largest corporations finds important expression in William Cary’s famous article arguing that managers have led shareholders on a “race to the bottom” whose finish line is Delaware. These views, in turn, support supplanting state corporation law with federal regulation of corporate governance. Concerns about a race to the bottom lately focus on Nevada, which seeks to be Delaware’s first real competitor for out-of-state firms in the national incorporation market. Evidence suggests that Nevada’s strategy is to raise tax revenues by offering a significantly laxer corporate law than Delaware. We …

Hired To Invent Vs. Work Made For Hire: Resolving The Inconsistency Among Rights Of Corporate Personhood, Authorship, And Inventorship, Sean M. O'Connor

Seattle University Law Review

Corporations have long held core aspects of legal personhood, such as rights to own and divest property and to sue and be sued. U.S. copyright law allows corporations to be authors while U.S. patent law does not allow them to be inventors. To be sure, both copyright law and patent law allow corporations to own copyrights and patents as assignees. But only copyright law, through its work-made-for-hire doctrine, provides for the nonnatural person of the corporation to “be” the author in an almost metaphysical sense. Under patent law, the natural-person inventors must always be listed in the patent documents, even …

A Shallow Harbor And A Cold Horizon: The Deceptive Promise Of Modern Agency Law For The Theory Of The Firm, David A. Westbrook

Seattle University Law Review

Modern agency law—the consensual agreement of one person to work for and under the control of another—has been widely used to provide a general framework for understanding a great deal of business law. Agency law concepts can be used to frame pedagogical, scholarly, institutional, and even political discourses. In so doing, modern agency law addresses concerns about the institution of the corporation, generally by reference to contract: institutions are created out of essentially consensual, and hence justifiable, relationships among autonomous individuals. So modern agency law is more than a “theory” of the firm in the narrow sense of theory; modern …

The Future Of Socialism, Robert Paul Wolff

Seattle University Law Review

An unpromising title, this, in the seventh year of the third millennium of the Common Era; rather like “Recent Developments in Ptolemaic Astronomy” or “Betamax—a Technology Whose Time Has Come.” My grandfather’s dream, the faith of my younger days, has turned to ashes. And yet, I remain persuaded that Karl Marx has something important to teach us about the world in which we live today. In what follows, I propose to take as my text a famous statement from Marx’s A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy1—a sort of preliminary sketch of Das Kapital2—and see what it can tell …

Strengthening Investment In Public Corporations Through The Uncorporation, Kelli A. Alces

Seattle University Law Review

We cannot completely overcome the difficulties caused by the separation of ownership and control. In The Modern Corporation and Private Property, Adolf A. Berle and Gardiner Means focused our attention on what was then a relatively new phenomenon: widely dispersed public shareholding.1 They marveled at how, for the first time in the history of the American economy, the owners of assets had so little to do with the management of those assets, and managers had so much power over so much health that did not belong to them.2 Berle and Means described what we now call the Berle−Means corporation, the …

The Post-Revolutionary Period In Corporate Law: Returning To The Theory Of The Firm, Matthew T. Bodie

Seattle University Law Review

The consensus on corporate law theory has narrowed the field’s doctrinal and methodological foci. Although the vibrancy of shareholder primacy has at times been called into question as a matter of law, both boardrooms and courts have taken the normative call for shareholder wealth maximization increasingly to heart. There is little doubt that the revolution has not only substantially affected legal theory but also legislation, court decisions, and corporate behavior. It achieved a level of success unusual for an academic discipline; it not only transformed the field but also the world. We now find ourselves in the post-revolutionary period. For …

The Evolution Of The American Corporation And Global Organizational Biodiversity, Ugo Pagano

Seattle University Law Review

The Evolution of the Modern Corporate Structure has been one of the most influential chapters of The Modern Corporation & Private Property. But Berle and Means’s superb analysis is framed in the American context and cannot be easily generalized to other experiences. Their corporate model arose in a democratic country where “production engineers” commanded more respect than financiers and capitalist dynasties. Other countries followed different organizational paths, characterized by different institutional complementarities between labor and financial markets that generated “concentrated equilibria” different from the American “dispersed equilibrium.” This Article argues that the divide can be traced to the different aristocratic …

Consumer Lock-In And The Theory Of The Firm, David G. Yosifon

Seattle University Law Review

The advent of the modern corporation separated not only ownership from control but also production from consumption. The agency problem that arose between owners and managers of firms also emerged between producers and consumers. Just as corporations needed to lock-in capital to sustain large-scale operations, so too did they need to lock-in consumers to justify and reduce the risks of asset-specific investment. Large corporate operations succeeded because they solved both the capital and consumer lock-in challenges. This Article explores ways in which modern consumers, like shareholders, can find themselves in a very real sense locked into the corporations with which …