Shareholder supremacists argue that corporate management should be constrained by additional shareholder power to nominate directors, approve executive pay, or receive financial disclosures. Meanwhile, managerial and directorial apologists suggest that the way forward is to protect managerial...

We are in the midst of this generation's re-thinking of the basic principles of corporate law: How are corporations best conceptualized? Who owns them? What are their obligations? This moment has been brought about by a confluence of events that revealed the financial, environmental, and...

This essay is a critique of this attack on corporate personhood. It explains that the corporate separateness - corporate “personhood” - is an important legal principle as a matter of corporate law. What's more, as a matter of constitutional law, corporate “personhood” deserves a more...

Over the last few years there has been a shift in the core ideas of business with respect to corporate responsibility. A new type of business classification called benefit corporations is gaining popularity in the United States. Benefit corporations are required to have a positive impact on...

When pondering the question of the “sustainable corporation,” as we did in this symposium, one of the intractable problems is the nature of the corporation to produce externalities. By noting this characteristic, I am not making a moral point but an economic one. The nature of the firm is to...

Rhetorically, the notion of choice has always been a powerful one in politics and law. This essay is intended to offer a note of caution about its use. Despite its progressive hue of individual freedom, the rhetoric of choice increasingly tends to be a notion used to defend and uphold existing...

Prepared for a roundtable on corporate ethics at the University of Maryland School of Law, this essay argues that discussions of corporate ethics that focus on mere compliance with law are too narrow. While an emphasis on legal compliance is indeed crucial, a dedication to legality standing...

As capital markets in the United States increasingly quot;go private,quot; it is unclear how the privatization of corporate finance will affect non-shareholder stakeholders of firms, most centrally employees, communities, and the environment. Some scholars and public policy experts believe that...