Corporate law has done a very bad job on executive pay: executives have been rewarded for stellar performance that turned out to be anything but stellar, and shareholders have had no meaningful recourse. Indeed, there are many other such cases, where there is no breach of the fiduciary duties of...

Financial regulation should be countercyclical, strengthening during speculative booms to contain excessive leverage and loosening following crises so as to not limit credit extension in hard times. And yet, financial regulation in fact tends to be procyclical, strengthening following crises and...

This essay explores the new countercyclical capital buffer requirement that is a part of both the Basel III and Dodd-Frank rulemaking efforts following the financial crisis. The new buffer will require banks to hold higher levels of capital reserves during times that regulators determine capital...

Corporate law scholarship has long debated the extent to which corporate law rules are default or mandatory. It has paid less attention to corporate law's "altering rules," which prescribe what a corporation must do for its attempt at opting out of a given default rule to be recognized as...

Recent scholarship has begun to assess the role of intellectual property rights in the theory of the Coasean firm. Some of this scholarship has looked at the effects of intellectual property on decisions to "make or buy" inputs to production. Other scholarship has looked at the effects of...

People making decisions under uncertainty may need to justify those decisions to their reputational community. This Essay considers when and how the potential need to justify might lead a decision-maker to employ a methodology better suited to yielding a justifiable choice that may not be the...

Lines in the broader short versus long-term battle have been drawn between various camps: those favoring corporate management versus those favoring shareholder activists; those believing that corporations are best run for the exclusive benefit of shareholders versus those believing that other...

This is the introduction to a symposium, The New Realism in Business Law and Economics, published in the Wisconsin Law Review. The symposium features papers from Afra Afsharipour, Robert Anderson IV, Elizabeth deFontenay, Sean Griffith, Mitu Gulati (with Steven Choi and Robert Scott), Claire...

When tax lawyers are shown to have been particularly "successful" in limiting or even eliminating their clients' tax liability, there is often an outcry, including for more law. But law's ability to deal with these problems is limited, for many reasons, including one less remarked upon than it...

Law and economics holds that people are rational maximizers of their own self-interest. What people regard as being in their interest turns enormously on their priors -- which include, among other things, their beliefs, temperaments, sense of identity and identification, values, and other...