This post comes to us from David Millon, the J.B. Stombock Professor of Law at Washington & Lee University School of Law.

As I explained in my earlier post, at Washington and Lee we divide the basic course into two, Close Business Arrangements (CBA) and Publicly Held Businesses (PHB). We don't deal much with CSR in the CBA course because privately owned firms, typically small in size, are much less likely to generate significant externalities (e.g, environmental or human rights costs) than are larger ones. Or at least the magnitude of any such effects is generally far smaller. Further, because there is usually a unity of ownership and control, those in charge of closely held firms are much less likely to possess the discretion or the inclination to deviate from profit maximization and, if they do, they do it with the consent of their fellow investors so there is typically no one to complain about it.

So CSR is really a problem for publicly held corporations and therefore needs to be addressed in the PHB course, which I teach. I don't spend a lot of time with the political or moral question of whether large corporations have an obligation to temper profit maximization with pursuit of conflicting objectives. I do, though, want the students to see that their size and the scope of their operations necessarily mean that there are substantial and potentially negative effects on the wider society in which our largest corporations operate. And I think they also need to know that there is significant disagreement here and abroad about the appropriate social responsibilities of large businesses. So I start the course by explaining the shareholder primacy conception of corporate purpose and management responsibility and then contrast it with CSR as a competing alternative that is taken seriously in most quarters (even if not by many of the most prominent corporate law academics in this country). No effort is made to resolve what is essentially a dispute about social policy or moral obligation.

In my view, the students need to understand that corporate law – this is supposed to a course about law, after all – is ambivalent on the question of shareholder primary, at times conflicted or agnostic or even hostile. (My colleague Christopher Bruner's articles on this subject are important.) So, for example, state statues authorize corporate philanthropy. Federal Rule 14a-8 allows shareholders to communicate with each other about the social, political, or ethical implications of what their firms are doing. The business judgment rule insulates from shareholder scrutiny policies aimed at promoting nonshareholder interests. Corporations confronted by hostile takeovers can take effects on nonshareholders into account in formulating defensive responses (except in the narrowly-defined and readily avoidable Revlon situation). At the same time, even if the law does not require it, it does allow corporate management to disregard nonshareholder interests (as long as it honors contracts and complies with applicable regulations) and pursue profit maximization if it chooses to do so.

So corporate law ends up being irrelevant to the crucial question of corporate purpose and management's responsibility. The students therefore need to understand the non-legal incentives – including compensation arrangements, pressure from institutional shareholders, social norms – that nowadays lead management to prioritize current share price maximization over long-term strategic considerations or costly (as opposed to public relations) CSR policies.

Corporate Governance, Corporate Law, Roundtable: Corps/B.A., Social Responsibility, Teaching | Bookmark

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