Prepared for a symposium on the role business and legal ethics played in the Enron, WorldCom, and other recent corporate governance scandals, and the relationship (if any) between business ethics and the legal profession's rules of professional responsibility, this paper examines the changes...

Pay Without Performance: The Unfulfilled Promise of Executive Compensation by Harvard law professor Lucian Bebchuk and UC Berkeley law professor Jesse Fried is an important contribution to the literature on executive compensation. Bebchuk and Fried's positive account of executive compensation is...

Who decides what products a company should sell, what prices it should charge, and so on? Is it the board of directors, the top management team, or the shareholders? In large corporations, of course, the answer is the top management team operating under the supervision of the board. As for the...

This is a draft chapter for a forthcoming research handbook on shareholder power and activism. This chapter provides an analysis of shareholder activism based on the so-called director primacy model of corporate governance, which argues for a board-centric, rather than a shareholder-centric,...

This chapter in a forthcoming handbook on corporate compliance provides an overview of corporate insider trading compliance programs. It sets out the basic legal framework of the federal insider trading prohibition. It then reviews the reasons corporations adopt compliance programs. The chapter...

Insider trading is one of the most controversial aspects of securities regulation, even among the law and economics community. One set of scholars favors deregulation of insider trading, allowing corporations to set their own insider trading policies by contract. Another set of law and economics...

In our new book, Outsourcing the Board: How Board Service Providers Can Improve Corporate Governance, Todd Henderson and I change the conversation about corporate governance by examining the origins, roles, and performance of boards with a simple question in mind: why does the law require...

In the wake of the 2016 US Presidential election and similar developments parts of Europe, commentators widely acknowledged the rise of populist movements on both the right and left of the political spectrum that both were deeply suspicious of big business. This development potentially has...

On its surface, Jesus' Parable of the Talents is a simple story with four key plot elements: (1) A master is leaving on a long trip and entrusts substantial assets to three servants to manage during his absence. (2) Two of the servants invested the assets profitably, earning substantial returns,...

In a 2014 opinion (<em>ATP Tour, Inc. v. Deutscher Tennis Bund</em>), the Delaware Supreme Court upheld a fee-shifting bylaw, which required unsuccessful shareholder litigants in either derivative or direct actions to reimburse the corporation for its legal expenses. Although the entity in question was a...