Should the United States pay reparations to African Americans? A majority of Americans object that they are not personally responsible for slavery or Jim Crow. The objection is rooted in the principle of ethical individualism, which holds that people can be blamed only for their own actions.This...

When a collective-choice situation places coercive pressure on individual participants, the law's traditional protection of individual autonomy against coercion must be reconciled with its necessary role in resolving problems of collective action. On the one hand, the law might seek to remove...

Unless corporations prioritize climate change mitigation, efforts to control global warming will fail. Yet, the strategies that have been proposed for enlisting corporations are insufficient to the task. In our era of political polarization, a comprehensive “Green New Deal” to transition the...

The corporate social responsibility debate asks whether the managers of large, publicly traded corporations may sacrifice profits to pursue other socially valuable goals. Most scholars contend that the dominant role of corporations in society is to maximize value for shareholders and that...

In the law school classroom, the Socratic method of legal analysis removes a dispute at issue in a given case from its sociocultural context and takes the cultural backgrounds of the parties into account only when they serve the legal argument. The language of the law commands law students to...

This century's major disasters from Hurricane Katrina and the Fukushima nuclear meltdown to devastating Nepalese earthquakes and the recent crippling volcanic eruptions and tsunamis in Tonga have repeatedly taught that government institutions are ill-prepared for major disaster events, leaving...

In Wilkes v. Springside Nursing Home, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court sought to clarify the fiduciary duty it had previously imposed upon majority shareholders in closely held corporations. As the Court recognized, the fiduciary duty cannot be absolute, because majority shareholders...

Despite the economic importance of family businesses, legal scholarship has often overlooked their distinctive character. Instead, scholars focus on the chosen form of business organization — partnership, corporation, LLC — and assume that the participants are economically rational actors...

According to conventional wisdom, insider control of businesses is detrimental to the interests of non-controlling investors. Family-run businesses, in particular, are seen as nepotistic and inefficient. Yet, commentators have overestimated the dangers of insider control and overlooked its...

Ordinary principles of corporate governance leave minority shareholders in close corporations vulnerable to oppression: majority shareholders have broad discretion to make employment, dividend, and other business decisions that may disadvantage the minority. Unlike shareholders in public...