Interesting book, I'll have to take a look at it.

Although I just skimmed the TOC and I'm shocked that it doesn't have any contributions from Jeanne Schroeder, who's one of my own favorite feminist L & E scholars.

And by the way, your own contribution to the fireworks over at Kelo-blog -- err, Prawfsblawg -- was great.

All Kelo, all the time. That's how to drive the comments.

What is a "progressive" corporate and securities scholar? I can't imagine people being against unambiguous progress, so you must be using the term in a specific sense.

And does L&E stand for Law & Economics?

Ann, in the legal academy, "progressive" is sort of a euphemism for "liberal." So, I would say that I'm a progressive corporate law scholar because I view corporate law through a liberal lens or a feminist theory lens. Most progressive corporate law scholars view corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a viable alternative to the shareholder maximization theory. One of the tensions within the progressive corporate law movement is whether to use L&E (law & econ) tools to arrive at progressive ends (i.e., do empirical research to support your liberal thesis or show how a progressive policy would be more efficient) or to eschew that way of thinking altogether and stick to arguments based on fundamental fairness, human flourishing, etc.

I agree with Dave here that L&E is so pervasive that ignoring it makes your research look naive and unsophisticated.

Thanks for the explanation. L&E seems to mean a lot that one wouldn't guess simply from the title.

Does corporate social responsibility conflict with shareholder maximization? If so, then we haven't set up the regulatory environment properly. One of the justifications for focusing on shareholders is because they're last in line - they don't get anything until all other obligations have been fully satisfied.

Treating employees well, being a responsible part of the community, etc. are all a big part of long-term shareholder maximization.
Was Enron maximizing shareholder value? It doesn't look like it, given what happened to the stock price when the "problems" were revealed.

I guess what I'm saying is that I hope the two aren't treated as being entirely separate. What I tell my finance students is that, if they think that shareholder maximization means Enron-type activity, then they don't understand the concept.

As for arguments based on human flourishing, it seems like those would need some empirical or theoretical backing. It's a strawman to say "we have to do this because we want humans to flourish". The catch is figuring out what allows this to happen, and extreme liberalism (i.e. communism) certainly didn't work in that sense, so there seem to be trade-offs. How can one establish precisely what allows humans to flourish without using some sort of tools?