“Offensive shareholder activism” involves buying up sizeable stakes in underperforming companies and agitating for changes predicted to increase shareholder returns. Though hedge funds are currently highly publicized practitioners of this corporate governance tactic, there has been no...

Many concerned about UK corporate governance have urged those who own equity in listed companies to forsake a traditional bias in favour of passivity and act as responsible, engaged ‘owners'. The recent financial crisis has given added impetus to such calls, with the notion of ‘stewardship'...

An important tenet of a burgeoning 'law and finance' literature is that stock market development is contingent upon corporate law offering ample protection to shareholders. This paper addresses this claim, using as its departure point developments occurring in the United States between 1930 and...

A 1970 New York Times essay on corporate social responsibility by Milton Friedman is often said to have launched a shareholder-focused reorientation of managerial priorities in America's public companies. The essay correspondingly is a primary target of those critical of a shareholder-centric...

While issues that prompt corporate governance responses are endemic to the corporate form, the term “corporate governance” only began to feature with any regularity in discussions of public companies in Britain as the 1990s got underway. It is well known that work done by the Committee on...

This Article offers the first systematic attempt to measure the development of shareholder protection in the United States across time. Using three indices developed to measure the relative strength of shareholder protection across nations, we evaluate numerically the protections corporate and...

Team production theory, which Margaret Blair developed in tandem with Lynn Stout, has had a major impact on corporate law scholarship. The team production model, however, has been applied sparingly outside the United States. This paper, given as part of a symposium honoring Margaret Blair’s...

In the UK, in contrast to most other countries, a hallmark of corporate governance is a separation of ownership and control. There is evidence suggesting that this pattern may have been the norm in Britain as far back as the late 19th century. This paper investigates the extent to which law, in...