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Neo-Brandeisianism And The New Deal: Adolf A. Berle, Jr., William O. Douglas, And The Problem Of Corporate Finance In The 1930s, Jessica Wang 2010 Seattle University School of Law

Neo-Brandeisianism And The New Deal: Adolf A. Berle, Jr., William O. Douglas, And The Problem Of Corporate Finance In The 1930s, Jessica Wang

Seattle University Law Review

This essay revisits Adolf A. Berle, Jr. and The Modern Corporation and Private Property by focusing on the triangle of Berle, Louis D. Brandeis, and William O. Douglas in order to examine some of the underlying assumptions about law, economics, and the nature of modern society behind securities regulation and corporate finance in the 1930s. I explore Douglas and Berle’s academic and political relationship, the conceptual underpinnings of Brandeis, Berle, and Douglas’s critiques of modern finance, and the ways in which the two younger men—Berle and Douglas—ultimately departed from their role model, Brandeis.


Law As Hidden Architecture: Law, Politics, And Implementation Of The Burnham Plan Of Chicago Since 1909, 43 J. Marshall L. Rev. 375 (2010), Richard J. Roddewig 2010 UIC School of Law

Law As Hidden Architecture: Law, Politics, And Implementation Of The Burnham Plan Of Chicago Since 1909, 43 J. Marshall L. Rev. 375 (2010), Richard J. Roddewig

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.


Real Estate Law And Practice Symposium: Foreword, 43 J. Marshall L. Rev. Iii (2010), Celeste M. Hammond 2010 John Marshall Law School

Real Estate Law And Practice Symposium: Foreword, 43 J. Marshall L. Rev. Iii (2010), Celeste M. Hammond

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.


Burnham, Water, And The Plan Of Chicago: A Historical Explanation Of Why Water Was Ignored And The Consequences Of Ignoring Water, 43 J. Marshall L. Rev. 413 (2010), Virginia M. Harding 2010 UIC School of Law

Burnham, Water, And The Plan Of Chicago: A Historical Explanation Of Why Water Was Ignored And The Consequences Of Ignoring Water, 43 J. Marshall L. Rev. 413 (2010), Virginia M. Harding

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.


International Commercial Surrogacy And Its Parties, 43 J. Marshall L. Rev. 1009 (2010), Margaret Ryznar 2010 UIC School of Law

International Commercial Surrogacy And Its Parties, 43 J. Marshall L. Rev. 1009 (2010), Margaret Ryznar

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.


Running From The United States Treasury: The Need To Reform The Taxation Of Multinational Corporations, 43 J. Marshall L. Rev. 1041 (2010), Jennifer Barton 2010 UIC School of Law

Running From The United States Treasury: The Need To Reform The Taxation Of Multinational Corporations, 43 J. Marshall L. Rev. 1041 (2010), Jennifer Barton

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.


The Price Of Admission: How Inconsistent Enforcement Of Antitrust Laws In America's Live Entertainment Sector Hurts The Average Consumer, 44 J. Marshall L. Rev. 261 (2010), Nathan B. Grzegorek 2010 UIC School of Law

The Price Of Admission: How Inconsistent Enforcement Of Antitrust Laws In America's Live Entertainment Sector Hurts The Average Consumer, 44 J. Marshall L. Rev. 261 (2010), Nathan B. Grzegorek

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.


Everything In Its Right Place: Social Cooperation And Artist Compensation, Leah Belsky, Byron Kahr, Max Berkelhammer, Yochai Benkler 2010 Yale Law School Information Society Project

Everything In Its Right Place: Social Cooperation And Artist Compensation, Leah Belsky, Byron Kahr, Max Berkelhammer, Yochai Benkler

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

The music industry's crisis response to the Internet has been the primary driver of U.S. copyright policy for over a decade. The core institutional response has been to increase the scope of copyright and the use of litigation, prosecution, and technical control mechanisms for its enforcement. The assumption driving these efforts has been that without heavily-enforced copyright, artists will not be able to make a living from their art. Throughout this period artists have been experimenting with approaches that do not rely on technological or legal enforcement, but on constructing web-based business models that engage fans and rely on voluntary …


Foreword: In Berle’S Footsteps, Charles R.T. O'Kelley 2010 Seattle University School of Law

Foreword: In Berle’S Footsteps, Charles R.T. O'Kelley

Seattle University Law Review

On the weekend of November 6–8, 2009, scholars from around the world gathered in Seattle for a symposium—In Berle’s Footsteps—celebrating the launch of the Adolf A. Berle, Jr. Center on Corporations, Law and Society. As founding director of the Berle Center, I described our undertaking: “It is with a profound sense of obligation to the legacy that has been entrusted to my care, that I announce the launching of the Adolf A. Berle, Jr. Center on Corporations, Law and Society. It is a privilege to follow in Berle’s footsteps.”


Opening Remarks, Chancellor William B. Chandler III 2010 Seattle University School of Law

Opening Remarks, Chancellor William B. Chandler Iii

Seattle University Law Review

Law is, in many ways, a backwards-looking field. We litigate over facts that have already occurred, challenge deals that have already been signed, and apply rules of decision based on previously-established precedent or statutes already enacted. To the extent that this Center and the symposium reflect on Berle’s work, they too are an exercise in looking back. Indeed, some might say the establishment of a Center named in Berle’s honor is a monument to the past.


Revisiting Berle And Rethinking The Corporate Structure, Kelli A. Alces 2010 Seattle University School of Law

Revisiting Berle And Rethinking The Corporate Structure, Kelli A. Alces

Seattle University Law Review

Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means painted what remains a defining portrait of corporate law. The separation of ownership and control they described and the agency costs it causes are still a central concern of the law of corporate governance. For that reason, Berle’s work is relevant nearly eighty years after its publication. Seemingly forgotten, however, is that Berle’s enduring description of the corporate structure was published before most of today’s corporate law was in place. His work preceded the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and even preceded the dominance of Delaware common law in …


Tracking Berle’S Footsteps: The Trail Of The Modern Corporation’S Last Chapter, William W. Bratton, Michael L. Wachter 2010 Seattle University School of Law

Tracking Berle’S Footsteps: The Trail Of The Modern Corporation’S Last Chapter, William W. Bratton, Michael L. Wachter

Seattle University Law Review

Readers game enough to work through all three hundred pages of The Modern Corporation and Private Property looking for insights on corporate law today encounter two, apparently contradictory, lines of thought. One line, set out in Books II and III, resonates comfortably with today’s shareholder-centered corporate legal theory. Here the book teaches that even as ownership and control have separated, managers should function as trustees for the shareholders and so should exercise their wide-ranging powers for the shareholders’ benefit. The other line of thought emerges in Books I and IV, where The Modern Corporation encases this shareholder trust model in …


Power Without Property, Still: Unger, Berle, And The Derivatives Revolution, Cristie Ford, Carol Liao 2010 Seattle University School of Law

Power Without Property, Still: Unger, Berle, And The Derivatives Revolution, Cristie Ford, Carol Liao

Seattle University Law Review

We are in a time when the notion of property is in flux. The derivatives revolution has shattered the “atom of property” well beyond what was originally imagined in 1932 by Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means. This disaggregation has had fascinating, and often adverse, effects on corporate law and securities regulation. Moreover, the phenomenon has had the unexpected effect of permitting some parties that already possess considerable social, economic, and political power to accumulate even more.


The New Financial Assets: Separating Ownership From Control, Tamar Frankel 2010 Seattle University School of Law

The New Financial Assets: Separating Ownership From Control, Tamar Frankel

Seattle University Law Review

In The Modern Corporation and Private Property, Adolf A. Berle and Gardiner Means wrote about the separation of ownership from control in corporations. They noted that the interests of the controlling directors and managers can diverge from those of the shareholder owners of the firm. . . . There are those who consider such a decoupling beneficial. Others express the same concern that Berle and Means have expressed. And depending on what one focuses on in viewing the pluses and minuses of these separations, one could reach different conclusions. I reach a number of conclusions. First, the separation of …


Then And Now: Professor Berle And The Unpredictable Shareholder, Jennifer G. Hill 2010 Seattle University School of Law

Then And Now: Professor Berle And The Unpredictable Shareholder, Jennifer G. Hill

Seattle University Law Review

Shareholders, and the relationship between shareholders and management, lay at the heart of Professor Berle’s scholarship. The goal of this Article is to compare the image of shareholders emerging from The Modern Corporation and Private Property and the Berle/Dodd debate with a range of contemporary visions of the shareholder that underpin some international regulatory responses to recent financial debacles, from Enron to the current global financial crisis. As the Article dis- cusses, these recent developments in the era of financial crises have prompted a reevaluation of the traditional image of the shareholder—and the role of the shareholder in the modern …


Berle And The Entrepreneur, Charles R.T. O'Kelley 2010 Seattle University School of Law

Berle And The Entrepreneur, Charles R.T. O'Kelley

Seattle University Law Review

In the first and last four chapters (“the Five Chapters”) of The Modern Corporation and Private Property, Adolf Berle, Jr. describes in sweeping terms a fundamental transformation of the American economy. . . . Writing more than ten years before Berle, another seminal scholar, Frank Knight . . . developed a theory of the entrepreneur as part of his larger effort to more carefully explain the theoretical underpinnings of a free-market economy. . . . Given Knight’s prominence and the fact that Knight apparently reached dramatically different conclusions than did Berle concerning the consequences flowing from separation of ownership …


Berle’S Vision Beyond Shareholder Interests: Why Investment Bankers Should Have (Some) Personal Liability, Claire Hill, Richard Painter 2010 Seattle University School of Law

Berle’S Vision Beyond Shareholder Interests: Why Investment Bankers Should Have (Some) Personal Liability, Claire Hill, Richard Painter

Seattle University Law Review

This essay, published in a symposium on the work of Adolf Berle, approaches the Berle-Dodd debate from the perspective that corporate managers have responsibilities beyond pursuing the interests of shareholders. Stock based executive compensation, designed to align managers’ interests with those of shareholders, has, in the investment banking industry in particular, failed to avert, and may have caused, managers (in this case, bankers) to take excessive risks that in the present financial crisis inflicted great damage on creditors and on society as a whole. We describe here the broad outlines of a proposal that we will discuss in future publications …


The Birth Of Corporate Governance, Harwell Wells 2010 Seattle University School of Law

The Birth Of Corporate Governance, Harwell Wells

Seattle University Law Review

Part I of this Article briefly examines the concept of “corporate governance” and argues for dating the concept’s origins to the debates of the 1920s. Part II then moves on to examine early scholarly and popular discussions of the separation of ownership and control. After surveying the historical developments that produced the recognizably modern corporate economy around the turn of the century, it examines early scholarly and popular discussions of the separation of ownership and control, focusing on three major thinkers, Louis D. Brandeis, Walter Lippmann, and Thorstein Veblen. It argues that, while each of these authors examined the separation …


Distorting Legal Principles, Steven L. Schwarcz 2010 Duke Law School

Distorting Legal Principles, Steven L. Schwarcz

Faculty Scholarship

Legal principles enable society to order itself by preserving broadly based expectations. Sometimes, however, parties transact in ways that are so inconsistent with generally accepted principles as to create uncertainty or confusion that undermines the basis for reasoning afforded by the principles. Such a distortion might occur, for example, if a normally mandatory legal rule were unexpectedly treated as a default rule. This article explores the problem of distorting legal principles, initially focusing on rehypothecation, a distortion whose uncertainty and confusion contributed to the downfall of Lehman Brothers and the resulting global financial crisis. But not all distortions are, on …


A Non-Fatal Collision: Interpreting Rluipa Where Religious Land Uses And Community Interests Meet, Adam J. MacLeod 2010 St. Mary’s University School of Law,

A Non-Fatal Collision: Interpreting Rluipa Where Religious Land Uses And Community Interests Meet, Adam J. Macleod

Faculty Articles

Imagine a large church located in a multi-family residential zoning district, where commercial uses are not permitted and religious uses are permitted by special use permit. The church applies for a special use permit to open a coffee shop, which would operate throughout the week during normal business hours and would supplement and support the church's other ministries. At the hearing on the permit application, many neighbors object. They fear increased traffic, visual blight, and safety hazards for their children. The city denies the permit. The church files an action against the city, alleging that the city has substantially burdened …


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