Category: 98:6

Countless high-profile abuses of user data by leading technology companies have raised a basic question: should firms that traffic in user data be held legally responsible to their users as “information fiduciaries”? Privacy legislation to impose fiduciary-like duties on data collectors enjoys bipartisan support but faces strong opposition from scholars. First, critics argue that the information-fiduciary concept flies in the…

This Article responds to recent proposals calling for the SEC to adopt a mandatory ESG-disclosure framework. It illustrates how the breadth and vagueness of these proposals obscures the important—and controversial— policy questions that would need to be addressed before the SEC could move forward on the proposals in a principled way. The questions raised include some of the most contested…

Fiduciary duties in the vicinity of insolvency form a notoriously murky area where legal space warps. Courts openly acknowledge that it is difficult to identify its boundaries, and the content of these duties is equally uncertain and inconsistent across jurisdictions. This Article expands the theoretical basis for a special legal regime in virtually or liminally insolvent firms. In addition to…

Whistleblowers are not among the actors who populate academic accounts of corporate governance. Nor are whistleblowers visible in formal governance frameworks consisting of legal and non-legal elements that enable a firm to operate, all traceable to a corporation’s charter and bylaws adopted in compliance with the law of the state of incorporation. Within a corporation,…

What role does corporate law play in holding directors accountable for compliance failures? Until recently, the answer has been “very little.” The prevalent standard for director oversight duties (Caremark duties) was set high, effectively demanding that plaintiffs show scienter without having access to discovery. As a result, derivative actions over directors’ failure of oversight were routinely dismissed at the pleading…

Comparative corporate governance has focused either on prevailing differences across legal systems or on spontaneous legal transplants of foreign institutions in response to global competition. This Essay argues that corporate law today is not only a product of the invisible hand of the market but also of the soft (and not-so-soft) hands of international organizations and standard setters. By tracing…

A 1970 New York Times essay on corporate social responsibility by Milton Friedman is often said to have launched a shareholder-focused reorientation of managerial priorities in corporate America. The essay correspondingly is a primary target of a rapidly growing group of critics of the present shareholder-centric approach to corporate governance. This article argues that it is erroneous to blame (or…