I really enjoyed this conference! One of the best parts about it was that it threw together people who think quite differently about corporate law. One of the great things about Steve Bainbridge is his openness to critics and his genuine desire to engage in a conversation with opposing viewpoints. Most people just want to hear that they're right. Steve doesn't, and that's a rare thing in this business.

As is often the case, as the panels unfolded a thought kept percolating in my mind and never made it to a question. Luckily, I'm a blogger, so I can keep talking!

In the first panel proponents of the director primacy, shareholder primacy, and team production model made their case. The next panel critiqued them, and yours truly was tasked with Steve Bainbridge's director primacy. One concern I voiced about both team production and director primacy it that they don't map on to closely held corporations particularly well. Both Blair & Stout and Bainbridge generally concede this point, focusing on public corporations.

But whenever Steve starts his director primacy riff, he says that he set out to explain the Delaware code as it is. And the Delaware code, as I remind my BA students when we move to the close corporation setting, doesn't consist of a "public corporation" law and a "private corporation" law. It's just corporate law--with the weird and relatively seldom used statutory close corporation provisions thrown in. So if you start with the code you have to deal with that basic point--it's the same code for private and public corporations--shouldn't your explanatory theory explain both?

The next panel talked about implications for corporate purpose, and we got to talk hot-button Supreme Court cases. Margaret Blair said something I'd been thinking for a while. Part of what bollixes up the Court is this same one-size-fits-all corporate form. Hobby Lobby is a big corporation, but it's a private corporation. The Justices talk about a little kosher or halal slaughterhouse which we all know is different from a large publicly traded corporation. Yet it's the same form and the same law. Why? I suggest to my students that it's because states, most pointedly Delaware, find more value in a large bank of corporate law precedents than in having categories of corporations to which different laws apply. That is, if Delaware is marketing its rich corporate case law as part of its competition for corporate charters, it's not going to want to divide up its precedents into close corporation law versus public corporation law. Divide and suffer, precedentially speaking. But this "one law" approach causes problems because we know, intuitively and as a matter of reality, that public and private corporations are different.

Citizens United is even more problematic, because there you do have a different code, and actually a different organizational form--the nonprofit. As I wrote in Entity and Identity, form matters. A nonprofit corporation is quite different from a for-profit one, and according a non-profit certain speech rights doesn't necessitate the same for a for-profit.

These nuances get elided, though, if you lump everything together as a "corporation." And, of course, the corporate codes--Delaware and the Model Act--are guilty of that on the public/close corp front, if not on the for/nonprofit one.

"Let's get together and feel all right" is a great plan for a conference (thanks again, Steve!), but does it work as well for corporate law?

Conferences, Corporate Governance, Corporate Law | Bookmark

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