In 1962, the corporation law scholar Bayless Manning famously wrote that “[C]orporation law, as a field of intellectual effort, is dead in the United States.” Looking back, most scholars have agreed, concluding that corporation law from the 1940s to the 1970s was stagnant, only rescued from...

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...

This paper, prepared for a University of Illinois College of Law symposium honoring Prof. Larry Ribstein, deals with the historical development of corporate law in the United States, focusing on the promise and perils of quantification. The paper is part of a larger project where we have already...

Challenges to executive compensation occupy today's headlines, but as this Article shows fights over executive compensation have a long history. Executive compensation first took the national stage in the 1930s, when revelations of corporate chieftains' million-dollar-a-year pay packages sparked...

Who makes corporation law? The study of corporation lawmaking has been a lively area in recent years, but scholars have limited their studies by focusing on only one kind of corporation law, the law of the public corporation. This article takes a new approach to the question through a legal...

The Research Handbook on the History of Corporation and Company Law is a collection of 25 chapters surveying the history of corporation law from ancient times to the present in jurisdictions across the Americas, Europe, and Asia. This Introduction briefly summarizes the chapters, and suggests...

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...

CEO pay is a controversial issue in America but there was a time, often overlooked today, when chief executives were not paid nearly as much as they are now. From 1940 to the mid-1970s executive pay was modest by today's standards even though U.S. business was generally thriving. What worked to...