Investing the Social Security Trust Fund in a well diversified portfolio of stocks, bonds, and other investments remains the best hope of continuing to fund social insurance without substantially raising taxes or reducing benefits. The problem with investing the Trust Fund in the market is the...

Business history and theory reflect a tension between public and private conceptions of the corporation. This tension and conceptual ambiguity lay close to the surface of The Modern Corporation and Private Property, in which Berle and Means portrayed the modern public corporation as straddling...

In the debate over contractual freedom or enabling-versus-mandatory rules in fiduciary law, those who do not adhere to an unbridled contractatian approach tend to justify fiduciary law's strict posture by appealing to transaction cost reasoning. In this view, fiduciary law more efficiently sets...

Spending by private health insurers exceeds $800 billion and is expected to rise. The Affordable Care Act provides $2 billion in subsidies to jump-start health insurers owned by their policyholders in an attempt to bring these costs under control. Firms with this corporate ownership structure...

A number of recent corporate law scandals (including the Wells Fargo fraudulent accounts scandal, the Volkswagen emissions scandal, sexual harassment claims at Fox News and CBS, and various banking scandals currently under investigation in a high profile Australian Royal Commission) epitomize...

The concept of ‘investor protection' has a long-standing legal pedigree in relation to the business corporation. Since the early 20th century, when Berle and Means famously highlighted shareholder vulnerability in the modern public corporation, investor protection has been an important ideal...

In the first months after a decision of the Delaware Supreme Court upholding a fee-shifting bylaw under which the unsuccessful plaintiff shareholder was required to reimburse all defendants for their legal and other expenses in the litigation, some 24 public companies adopted a similar provision...

This short article addresses recent attempts by liquidators to incorporate the costs of running the liquidation into proceedings against directors for breaches of directors' duties. Taking New Zealand's companies (corporations) legislation as its starting point, it considers recent New Zealand...

In the 1970s and 80s, as major financial institutions grew and diversified their operations, courts and scholars recognized that fiduciary law posed profound challenges for the organizational practices of these firms. The challenges were considered existential by some: firms, ultimately, would...

This article investigates the development of accountability and fiduciary loyalty as an institutional response to information asymmetries in agency relations, especially in firm-like settings. Lord Eldon articulated the crucial role of information asymmetries in opportunistic behaviour in early...