Cornell Law School is hosting a memorial conference for Lynn Stout on February 1st and 2nd. The announcement is below. Lynn was not only one of the titans of corporate law, she was, more importantly, an incredibly generous soul. When I was struggling to write my first law review article while practicing at a law firm, I desperately sought any advice I could get from academics. I sent a draft to scholars whose work I admired and cited. Shockingly, Lynn responded. She not only gave me written comments, but spent an hour on the phone with me talking through the draft. There was little for her to gain in talking to a random associate at a big law firm. Her advice improved the paper immensely. It also modeled for me how a creative scholar thinks and how a generous scholar should act. Perhaps the most fitting way to honor Lynn is to mentor a scholar or anyone without any thought of recompense.
Here is the announcement from Cornell:
Please join us on February 1-2, 2019, in New York City, for a special two-part event celebrating the life and work of our colleague and friend, Professor Lynn Stout.
On February 1, 2019, Cornell University Law School will hold the Lynn Stout Memorial Conference, honoring Professor Stout’s scholarly work and significant impact in corporate governance. The conference will feature a series of cutting-edge paper presentations and discussion panels; the conference celebrates Professor Stout’s scholarship and highlights the lasting impact of her ideas and writings on the present and future trajectory of legal research in corporate law, securities and derivatives regulation, law and economics, and law and ethics.
The conference will take place at the Cornell Club in New York City (6 East 44th Street, New York, NY 10017).
On February 2, 2019, at 10 a.m., an informal memorial service will be held at St. Paul’s Chapel of Trinity Church Wall Street (209 Broadway, New York, NY 10007).
The agenda and RSVP information can be found at:
LYNN STOUT MEMORIAL CONFERENCE
Please note that capacity is limited for this event, so please RSVP before January 25.
Last night, as part of the NPR Marketplace series "The Price of Profits," a report by Scott Tong provided an intellectual history of shareholder primacy, from Milton Friedman through Gordon Gekko and on to the present. The overview was fairly long for a news program -- my wife wondered if we had stumbled into a podcast -- and sought to provide an in-depth look at the shareholder primacy phenomenon. Lynn Stout was quoted in her role as the loyal opposition. Perhaps the newsiest part of the segment was the perspective of Michael Jensen, long one of the intellectual godfathers of primacy. Although Jensen defended the initial discipline that shareholder primacy imposed on markets, he backed away from any sort of muscular approach to the doctrine. Here's the excerpt:
“Has it happened the way I wanted it to happen? Eh, probably not,” Jensen said. “There’s always going to be some people who take it too far. And then cause damage.”
Jensen said focusing solely on stocks and stockholders is a “misreading” of his scholarship. He wrote in 1990 that CEOs should “do what’s in the shareholders’ best interests.”
“I wouldn’t put shareholders at the center," he said. "I’m still unhappy about the situation where people end up thinking that shareholders are primary. That they are our only bosses. No.”
Jensen has backed away from his scholarship -- or, at least, the commonly understood ramifications of his scholarship -- before. In 2007, he told the New York Times that "I would never award the standard executive stock option again," despite his early advocacy for such compensation packages.
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The board at SABMiller PLC has formally accepted (right under the wire) the buyout offer from Anheuser-Busch InBev NV for £44 a share, or about $106 billion. Aside from having too many names smushed together (will the new company be ABInBevSABM?), the company will be a global giant in beer production, with about a 30% share of world beer sales. The WSJ has a really nice piece about how the deal finally came together. A few thoughts:
- There was a fair amount of intrigue between the first offer and the final agreement, as big SAB shareholder Altria Group came out in favor of a £42.15 deal that the board rejected. But the board was right -- there was more money to be had from Brito et al.
- A-B InBev would owe a $3 billion breakup fee if the deal fails to go through. Is that the highest on record, or am I behind the times?
- It seems like a foregone conclusion that the new company will have to dump its portion of the MillerCoors joint venture with Molson Coors. That has to help Molson's bargaining position, no? The Toronto Star seems to agree. A good day for the Great White North yesterday!
- Even if the new company jettisons Milller Lite & Coors Light, will the company still face antitrust scrutiny? This Fortune article thinks beer drinkers will lose overall on the deal. And AB InBev is getting scrutiny on another front -- the acquisition of some of their California distributors. It could mean issues ahead -- anything from small speedbumps to a total roadblock. I'm interested to see what the folks at the Truth have to say about it.
Bainbridge and Allison Frankel have the details. The standing hurdle has been cleared, so that's good news for the campaign.
Last week, the NY Times did a piece on Dan Price, CEO of Gravity Payments, who announced in April that each of his employees should make at least $70,000 a year. You might think that this announcement would make him a very popular figure, but I guess you would be wrong. Polarizing, maybe. Story here. You can read the details, but Price, who was raised in a very religious home, believed very strongly in creating an atmosphere in which employees would not need to worry about basic human needs and therefore be more productive and creative and happy. Where would the new money come from? Well, from his own salary, leveling the pay chart. But not everyone is happy.
Here is probably an incomplete list of the haters: (1) clients who feared their bills would be increased to cover the shortfall; (2) other employers who compete in the labor market; (3) other employers who don't compete for the same labor but who don't want to look bad; (4) Gravity Payments employees who feel that some employees don't deserve $70,000; and (5) Dan's brother and co-founder Lucas Price who feels that as a shareholder, he is being denied a return on his investment. That last number (5) reminds us corporate law geeks a little of Dodge v. Ford. I'm also interested in number (4), having written before on the hatred of so-called "windfalls."
Price v. Price. Here is the complaint. It is brief, and the answer is more brief. The brothers started the company as a 50/50 LLC in 2004. After disagreements, the brothers reorganized as a corporation in 2008, with Daniel having a majority share. This would seem to be a definitive moment for Lucas and possibly his downfall. The complaint does not give any hints as to why Lucas would agree to this, but there must be more to the story -- My brother was trying to grab control of the company, so we reorganized and gave him control to solve the problem? As part of the reorganization, the brothers entered into a Shareholders Agreement, which is not attached. The causes of action are breach of fiduciary duty, not breach of the agreement. The complaint states that Daniel used his majority control to grant himself "excessive compensation and to deprive Lucas of the benefits of ownership in Gravity Payments. Daniel's actions have been burdensome, harsh, and wrongful, and have shown a lack of fair dealing toward Lucas." The complaint does not give examples of the wrongful actions. The complaint was filed shortly after the minimum wage announcement, but had been in the works before. Further litigation may flesh out whether this complaint has a future, but shareholder oppression is a hard case to make out. Most notably, and possibly good news for Lucas, Gravity Payments is a Washington corporation, not a Delaware corporation. Lucas wants, among other things, either dissolution or to be bought out without a minority/marketability discount. Corporations aren't partnerships, Lucas. Dissolution seems a stretch. How does this affect Daniel's minimum wage plan? Well, he wasn't counting on having high litigation expenses when he changed the salary structure.
Employee Envy. According to the article, several employees have left Gravity Payments because they suddenly felt undervalued when junior employees and recent hires received raises, even though they themselves did also. When I wrote The Windfall Myth, I researched the use of the term "windfall" in the NYT and WSJ in a 12-month period. I was astounded at the depth of bitterness people have against other people's "windfalls," even when the windfall does not affect the observer at all. Hundreds or thousands of experiments have tried to capture why subjects will give up money if they believe under that regime others will get more (the Ultimatum Game). Here, GP employees were given raises, but others were given larger ones, and some small raise receivers left for jobs that paid less.
This story is a great case study in how to tackle wealth inequality in the U.S., where a fidelity to pure meritocracy is heavily ingrained. Even when the founder and CEO is willing to reduce the salary disparity at his company, some of his employees were not. Fascinating.
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I just posted a new paper on SSRN entitled "The Modern Business Judgment Rule." It's short, so it won't take long to read, especially if you skip the footnotes. My goal is to describe this complex doctrine in simple terms, but the paper is packed with insights that were new to me, even though I have been teaching and writing about this subject for 20 years. Here is the abstract:
For over 150 years, the business judgment rule performed a relatively straightforward task in the corporate governance system of the United States, namely, protecting corporate directors from liability for honest mistakes. Under the traditional version of the business judgment rule, when the board of directors is careful, loyal, and acting in good faith, courts refuse to second-guess the merits of the board’s decisions, even if the corporation or its shareholders are harmed by those decisions.
While modern courts continue to insulate directors from liability for honest mistakes according to this traditional formula, in the 1980s Delaware courts began assigning the business judgment rule a more expansive role. The modern business judgment rule is applied not only in cases without procedural infirmities, but in cases where procedural infirmities at the board level have been mitigated by a special committee, stockholder approval, or partial substantive review by the court. In these new contexts, a court must satisfy itself that a board decision is worthy of respect, not because the decision was substantively correct, but because the effect of the procedural infirmities was sufficiently muted. After the court reaches that point, the business judgment rule “attaches” to protect the substantive merits of the decision from (further) review.
The modern business judgment rule is not a one-size-fits-all doctrine, but rather a movable boundary, marking the shifting line between judicial scrutiny and judicial deference. In describing the transformation of the business judgment rule, this chapter focuses on Delaware judicial opinions, with special attention to cases involving mergers and acquisitions, where the most important changes in the business judgment rule have been forged. The scripting of the business judgment rule’s new role by the Delaware courts is a work in progress, and the current law is inconsistent and confusing. Nevertheless, I trace the development of the modern business judgment rule and attempt to rationalize that development around the simple idea that the rule guides courts through the review of director conduct and marks the point at which judicial evaluation of a decision ends.
I hope you find this paper worthwhile. Comments and insights are most welcome.
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Breakingviews says yes, here's an announcement on the HLS website:
During the previous three academic years (2011-2012 through 2013-2014), the SRP operated a clinic that assisted institutional investors (several public pension funds and a foundation) in moving S&P 500 and Fortune 500 companies towards annual elections. This work contributed to board declassification at about 100 S&P 500 and Fortune 500 companies. With work on the declassification project completed last summer, the clinic has not been operating during the current academic year. This website provides information about the work done by the SRP clinic during its three years of operation; a detailed final report on this work will be issued in 2015.
The clinic has indeed changed a great deal about corporate governance; it was also the target of that paper by Gallagher and Grundfest about whether it had conducted securities fraud in its various proxy campaigns by not discussing research that did not support its position on staggered boards, a paper with less importance, perhaps, if the thing it was complaining about was no longer in existence. I thought the project was interesting, in that it was actually giving students a chance, it seemed to me, to do corporate law in a clinical setting, which is difficult to pull off. But perhaps it was at the natural end of its efforts anyway.
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It has been a pleasure to guest-blog for the last two weeks here at the Glom. (Previous posts available here: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, and nine.) This final post will introduce the book that Lynn Stout and I propose writing to give better direction to business people in search of ethical outcomes and to support the teaching of ethics in business schools.
Sometimes bad ethical behavior is simply the result of making obviously poor decisions. Consider the very human case of Jonathan Burrows, the former managing director at Blackrock Assets group. Burrows’s two mansions outside London were worth over $6 million U.S., but he ducked paying a little over $22 U.S. in train fare each way to the City for five years. Perhaps Burrows had calculated that being fined would be less expensive than the inconvenience of complying with the train fare rules. Unluckily, the size of his $67,200 U.S total repayment caught the eye of Britain’s Financial Conduct Authority, which banned Burrows from the country’s financial industry for life. That’s how we know about his story.
But how do small bad ethical choices snowball into large-scale frauds? How do we go from dishonesty about a $22 train ticket to a $22 trillion loss in the financial crisis? We know that, once they cross their thresholds for misconduct, individuals find it easier and easier to justify misconduct that adds up and can become more serious. And we know that there is a problem with the incentive structure within organizations that allows larger crises to happen. How do we reach the next generation of corporate leaders to help them make different decisions?
Business schools still largely fail to teach about ethics and legal duties. In fact, research finds “a negative relationship between the resources schools possess and the presence of a required ethics course.” Moreover, psychological studies demonstrate that the teaching of economics without a strong ethical component contributes to a “culture of greed.” Too often business-school cases, especially about entrepreneurs, venerate the individual who bends or breaks the rules for competitive advantage as long as the profit and loss numbers work out. And we fail to talk enough about the positive aspects of being ethical in the workplace. The situation is so bad that Luigi Zingales of the University of Chicago asks point-blank if business schools incubate criminals.
New business-school accreditation guidelines adopted in April 2013 will put specific pressure on schools to describe how they address business ethics. Because business schools are accredited in staggered five-year cycles, every business school that is a member of the international accreditation agency will have to adopt ethics in its curriculum sometime over the next few years.
We hope that the work outlined in my blogposts, discussed at greater length in my articles, and laid out in our proposed book will be at the forefront of this trend to discuss business ethics and the law. We welcome those reading this blog to be a part of the development of this curriculum for our next generation of business leaders.
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My previous blogposts (one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and eight) discussed the dangers of granting intracorporate conspiracy immunity to agents who commit coordinated wrongdoing within an organization. The last two blogposts (here and here) highlighted the harm that public and judicial frustration with this immunity inflicts on alternative doctrines.
In addition to exacerbating blind CEO turnover, substituting alternative doctrines for prosecuting intracorporate conspiracy affects an executive’s incentives under Director’s and Officer’s (D&O) liability insurance. This post builds on arguments that I have made about D&O insurance in articles here and here.
In traditional conspiracy prosecutions, the Model Penal Code (MPC) provides an affirmative defense for renunciation. The MPC’s standard protects the actor, who “after conspiring to commit a crime, thwarted the success of the conspiracy, under circumstances manifesting a complete and voluntary renunciation of his criminal purpose.” This means that the executive who renounces an intracorporate conspiracy faces no charges.
In contrast with conspiracy prosecutions, responsible corporate officer doctrine and its correlates fail to reward the executive who changes course to mitigate damages or to abandon further destructive behavior. Although the size of the damages may be smaller with lesser harm if the executive renounces an organization’s course of conduct, the executive’s personal career and reputation may still be destroyed by entry of a judgment. Modest whistle-blower protections are ineffectual.
Specifically, because of the way that indemnification and D&O insurance function, the entry of judgment has become an all-or-nothing standard: an employee’s right to indemnification hinges on whether the employee is found guilty of a crime or not. To receive indemnification under Delaware law, for example, an individual must have been “successful on the merits or otherwise in defense of any action, suit or proceeding.” Indemnification is repayment to the employee from the company; D&O insurance is a method that companies use to pass on the cost of indemnification and may contain different terms than indemnification itself.
Indemnification and D&O insurance are not a minor issues for executives. In fact, under many circumstances, employees have a right to indemnification from an organization even when the alleged conduct is criminal. Courts have acknowleged that “[i]ndemnification encourages corporate service by capable individuals by protecting their personal financial resources from depletion by the expenses they incur during an investigation or litigation that results by reason of that service.” And when hiring for an executive board, “Quality directors will not serve without D&O coverage.” Because of this pressure from executives, as many as ninety-nine percent of public U.S. companies carry D&O insurance.
So what does this standard mean for executives prosecuted under responsible corporate officer doctrine instead of for traditional conspiracy? Executives are incentivized either not to get caught, or to perpetrate a crime large enough that the monetary value of the wrongdoing outweighs the potential damage to the executive’s career. Because an executive’s right to indemnification hinges on whether he is found guilty of a crime or not, he has an enormous incentive to fight charges to the end instead of pleading to a lesser count. Thus, unless the executive has an affirmative defense to charges, like renunciation in traditional conspiracy law, there is no safety valve. Litigating responsible corporate officer doctrine cases creates a new volatile high-wire strategy. Moreover, as discussed in my last blogpost, responsible corporate officer doctrine imposes actual blind “respondeat superior” liability. Regardless of the merits, the executive may be penalized. So you can see the take-home message for executives: go ahead and help yourself to the largest possible slice pie on your way out the door.
I argue that in sending this message, and in many other ways, our current law on corporate crime is badly broken. My last blogpost for the Glom will introduce the book that Lynn Stout and I propose writing to give better direction to business people in search of ethical outcomes.
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My previous blogposts (one, two, three, four, five, six, and seven) discussed why conspiracy prosecutions were the best method to penalize coordinated wrongdoing by agents within an organization. Using alternative doctrines to impose liability on behavior that would otherwise be recognized as an intracorporate conspiracy results in flawed incentives and disproportionate awards.
The fundamental problem with substituting responsible corporate officer doctrine and control person liability for reforming the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine is that these alternative doctrines represent exactly what Professor Martin objects to: actual imposition of blind “respondeat superior” liability. For example, under these doctrines, “in most federal courts, it is not necessary to show that the corporate official being charged had a culpable state of mind.” Instead, the issue before the court is merely whether the officer had control and responsibility for the alleged actions. Accordingly, it is not a defense to control person liability that the officer did not “knowingly participate in or independently commit a violation of the Act.”
But simply penalizing the officer who is in the wrong place at the wrong time does little to define and encourage best practices. Moreover, with these and other explosive hazards for corporate service, it should be no surprise that top executives are demanding and receiving ever-increasing compensation for often short-term positions. Since 2009, the year that the NSP case establishing “control person” liability was settled, the discrepancy in pay between top management and the average worker has been growing dramatically. In 2013, the CEO of J.C. Penny Co., for example, was exposed for making 1,795 times what the average U.S. department store employee made. From 2009 to 2013, as measured across Standard & Poor’s 500 Index (S&P 500) of companies, “the average multiple of CEO compensation to that of rank-and-file workers” has risen to 204, an increase of twenty percent.
It is true that the financial crisis did reduce executive compensation packages before 2009, and that there has been a historical trend towards the growth of executives’ salaries as a multiple of average workers’ salaries. For example, “[es]timates by academics and trade-union groups put the number at 20-to-1 in the 1950s, rising to 42-to-1 in 1980 and 120-to-1 by 2000.” But the jump in executives’ salaries from 2009 has been extraordinary. The new emphasis on vicarious liability for individuals under the responsible corporate officer doctrine since that date must be considered part of executives’ demands for such high compensation in exchange for their risky positions.
The average duration of a CEO’s time in office has diminished as well. In 2000, the average tenure of a departing S&P 500 CEO in the U.S. was ten years. By 2010, it was down to eight years. In 2011, merely a year later, the average tenure of a Fortune 500 CEO was barely 4.6 years. In 2013, that former CEO of J.C. Penny Co. served for only eighteen months.
With an eighteen-month tenure, how much can the chief executive of a large company discover about the wrongdoing that his or her new company is committing? Furthermore, how much can that person design and institute good preventative measures to guide his or her subordinates to avoid that harm? A blindly revolving door for CEOs does not help those interested in effectively reducing the wrongdoing of agents within the corporation. Incentives without intracorporate conspiracy immunity would be different because they would reward the agent who abandons a conspiracy. (More about this argument here, here, here, and here.)
My next blogpost will examine how substituting alternative doctrines for prosecuting intracorporate conspiracy affects incentives under Director’s and Officer’s (D&O) liability insurance.
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My previous blogposts (one, two, three, four, five, and six) discussed why conspiracy prosecutions should be used to reach coordinated wrongdoing by agents within an organization. The intracorporate conspiracy doctrine has distorted agency law and inappropriately handicaps the ability of tort and criminal law to regulate the behavior of organizations and their agents.
My Intracorporate Conspiracy Trap article argues that the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine is not properly based in agency law, and that it should most certainly not be applied throughout tort law and criminal law. As a result of the immunity granted by the doctrine, harmful behavior is ordered and performed without consequences, and the victims of the behavior suffer without appropriate remedy. My Corporate Conspiracy Vacuum article argues that public and judicial frustration with the lack of accountability for corporate conspiracy has now warped the doctrines around it.
Courts have used a wide variety of doctrines to hold agents of enterprises responsible for their actions that should have prosecuted as intracorporate conspiracy. Some of these doctrines include:
• piercing the corporate veil,
• responsible corporate officer doctrine, and related control person liability,
• denying the retroactive imposition of the corporate veil, and
• reverse piercing of the corporate veil.
But the new applications of these alternative doctrines are producing distortions that make the doctrines less stable, less predictable, and less able to signal proper incentives to individuals within organizations.
An example of how piercing the corporate veil has been used to defeat intracorporate conspiracy immunity can be seen in the Morelia case. A previous blogpost discussed how the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine has defanged RICO prosecutions of agents and business entities. In Morelia, which was a civil RICO case, the federal district court, obviously outraged by defendants’ behavior in the case, explicitly permitted plaintiffs to pierce the corporate veil to avoid application of the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine. In a creative twist invented from whole cloth to link the two doctrines, the Morelia court overruled its magistrate judge’s recommendation to announce:
Regarding its test for piercing the corporate veil, the Morelia court further overruled its magistrate’s recommendation by focusing on plaintiffs’ arguments regarding undercapitalization, and its decision included only a single footnote about the disregard of corporate formalities.
The Morelia court is not alone in its frustration with the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine and in its attempt to link analysis under the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine with the stronger equitable tenets of piercing the corporate veil. More subtly, courts across the country have started to entangle the two doctrines’ requirements as intracorporate conspiracy immunity has become stronger and courts have increasingly had to rely on piercing the corporate veil as an ill-fitting alternative to permit conspiracy claims to proceed. Even large public companies should take note. No public company has ever been pierced, but a bankruptcy court recently reverse-pierced corporate veils of the Roman Catholic Church, which is far from a single-person “sham” corporation. My Corporate Conspiracy Vacuum article discusses additional examples and repercussions for incentives under each of these alternative doctrines.
My next blogpost will examine how frustration with intracorporate conspiracy immunity has led to volatility in responsible corporate officer doctrine and related control person liability. Ironically, executive immunity from conspiracy charges fuels counterproductive CEO turnover.
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My previous blogposts (one, two, three, four, and five) introduced why conspiracy prosecutions should be used to reach wrongdoing by agents within an organization. The 2012 prosecution of Monsignor Lynn for twelve years of transferring predator priests from parish to parish at the command and for the benefit of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia was defeated by the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine. Moreover, this was not the first time that the Roman Catholic Church had used the doctrine to help its bureaucrats escape liability for suppressing sex abuse cases.
In 1997, employees of the Roman Catholic Church in Connecticut were alleged—very much like Lynn—to have covered up the sexual misconduct of a priest, enabling him to continue to abuse children entrusted to the Church’s care by virtue of his office. When sued for civil conspiracy by the victims, the employees’ defense was that they were acting in the best interest of the corporation.
The Connecticut court found that the test for whether an agent is acting within the scope of his duties “is not the wrongful nature of the conspirators’ action but whether the wrongful conduct was performed within the scope of the conspirators’ official duties.” If the wrongful conduct was performed within the scope of the conspirators’ official duties, the effect of applying the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine is to find that there was no conspiracy. Because covering up the priest’s sex abuse was in the best interest of the corporate organization, the court found that the employees were all acting on behalf of the corporation. The court never reached the issue of whether the employees’ actions rose to the level of a civil conspiracy. Under the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine, it was a tautology that no conspiracy could be possible.
This case is interesting not only because it documents the way that the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine protects enterprises from inquiry into conspiracies, but also because of the subsequent history of its allegations. The full extent of the Bridgeport Diocese’s wrongdoings—if current public knowledge is indeed complete—only came to light in December 2009, twelve years after the 1997 case. It took twelve years, the combined resources of four major newspapers, an act displaying public condemnation of the Roman Catholic Church by members of the state legislature, and finally a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to release the documents that could have become the basis of the intracorporate conspiracy claim in 1997. There is still no conspiracy suit or any criminal charge against the Diocese. Additional details about the case are available in my article The Intracorporate Conspiracy Trap. The article will be published soon in the Cardozo Law Review, and it is available in draft form here.
Astonishingly, none of the extensive news coverage about the sexual abuse cases in Bridgeport over those additional twelve years has connected these facts to the original 1997 case defeated by application of the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine. If the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine had not provided immunity, the case might have revealed the Diocese’s pattern of wrongdoing long beforehand and in a much more efficient way.
My next blogpost reveals additional dangers from the spread of the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine: frustration with the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine has started to distort other areas of law.
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My previous blogposts (one, two, three, and four) introduced why conspiracy prosecutions should be used to reach wrongdoing by agents within a business organization. The same legal analysis applies to religious organizations.
We should have been able to charge Monsignor Lynn and the Archdiocese of Philadelphia that directed his actions to hide the sexual abuse by priests with criminal conspiracy. Instead, Pennsylvania charged Lynn with two things: child endangerment and conspiracy with the priests.
As international news outlets later reported, Lynn could not be guilty of child endangerment because the state’s statute could not apply to an administrative church official who did not directly supervise children.
Lynn could not be guilty of conspiracy with the priests because he did not share their “particular criminal intent.” As the jury understood, Lynn was not trying to help a predator priest get from parish to parish so that “he can continue to enjoy what he likes to do.” Lynn was trying to protect the reputation of his employer, the Archdiocese—if the priests benefitted, that was a side issue.
So why didn’t the prosecution charge Lynn and the Archdiocese with conspiracy? It was the Archdiocese that directly coordinated and profited from Lynn’s actions. The intracorporate conspiracy doctrine, as discussed before, would bar that prosecution. In Pennsylvania, it is “well-settled that a corporation cannot conspire with its subsidiary, its agents, or its employees.”
Finally, considering other options, Lynn could not have been charged with possible crimes such as obstruction of justice. Lynn was too good: Lynn and the Archdiocese were so successful at covering up the sexual abuse and silencing victims, there was no ongoing investigation to obstruct. “Aiding and abetting” the Archdiocese’s cover-up of the sex abuse would have been difficult to pursue (see more here) and is not allowed under RICO in the Third Circuit.
My next blogpost will demonstrate that the Monsignor Lynn case was also part of a pattern by the Roman Catholic Church in America to use the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine to hide the coordinated wrongdoing of its agents to cover-up sexual abuse by priests. Fifteen years before prosecutors attempted to try Monsignor Lynn, the silenced Connecticut sex-abuse case showed the Church how effective this defense could be.
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My previous blogposts (one, two, and three) introduced the topic of how the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine prevents the prosecution of coordinated wrongdoing by individuals within organizations. This post illustrates the doctrine’s effect in the context of a specific organization—here a religious one: the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia and the systematic transfer of predator priests. This post is based on my article The Intracorporate Conspiracy Trap to be published soon in the Cardozo Law Review. The article is available in draft form here.
For twelve years, from 1992 to 2004, as Secretary for Clergy, Monsignor William Lynn’s job within the Philadelphia Archdiocese was to supervise priests, including the investigation of sex-abuse claims. In 1994, Monsignor Lynn compiled a list of thirty-five “predator” priests within the archdiocese. He compiled the list from secret church files containing hundreds of child sex-abuse complaints. On the stand, Lynn testified that he hoped that the list would help his superiors to address the growing sex-abuse crisis within the Archdiocese. But for twelve years Lynn merely re-assigned suspected priests, and he hid the abuse within the church. His superiors never acted on the list that Lynn gave them—in fact, they ordered all copies of the list destroyed—and Lynn never contacted outside authorities. As late as 2012, one of the “predator” priests on Lynn’s list was still serving in a parish.
All parties agree that Lynn’s actions in transferring priests who molested children allowed those priests to continue to abuse children, sheltered the priests from potential prosecution, and directly protected the Philadelphia Archdiocese’s reputation.
In fact, Lynn’s actions had been ordered by the archbishop on behalf of the Archdiocese. Lynn reported what he was doing to his superiors, who rewarded Lynn with twelve years of employment and a prominent position within the Archdiocese for doing his job as they saw it. Moreover, the archbishop himself inadvertently revealed the existence of the number thirty-five “predator” priests to the media, and he was the one who ordered all copies of the list to be shredded to keep it from being discovered in legal proceedings.
The instinct here is that this behavior—the transferring of predator priests to cover-up the sexual abuse of children—should have been illegal for Monsignor Lynn to pursue. But the Commonwealth could not prosecute Monsignor Lynn and the Archdiocese for conspiracy. Furthermore, immunity for Lynn’s behavior is now the rule in most state and federal jurisdictions around the country. As described in an earlier blogpost, the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine provides immunity to an enterprise and its agents from conspiracy prosecution, based on the legal fiction that an enterprise and its agents are a single actor incapable of the meeting of two minds to form a conspiracy.
My next blogpost will further investigate why this behavior was not illegal under our current system, and how we should have tried Monsignor Lynn.
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My first and second blogposts introduced why conspiracy prosecutions are particularly important for reaching the coordinated actions of individuals when the elements of wrong-doing may be delegated among members of the group.
So where are the prosecutions for corporate conspiracy??? The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act of 1970 (“RICO”, 18 U.S.C.A. §§ 1961 et seq.), no longer applies to most business organizations and their employees. In fact, business organizations working together with outside agents can form new protected “enterprises.”
What’s going on here? In this area and many other parts of the law, we are witnessing the power of the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine. This doctrine provides immunity to an enterprise and its agents from conspiracy prosecution, based on the legal fiction that an enterprise and its agents are a single actor incapable of the meeting of two minds to form a conspiracy. According to the most recent American Law Reports survey, the doctrine “applies to corporations generally, including religious corporations and municipal corporations and other governmental bodies. The doctrine applies to all levels of corporate employees, including a corporation’s officers and directors and owners who are individuals.” Moreover, it now extends from antitrust throughout tort and criminal law.
What is the practical effect of this doctrine? The intracorporate conspiracy doctrine has distorted agency law and inappropriately handicaps the ability of tort and criminal law to regulate the behavior of organizations and their agents. Obedience to a principal (up to a point) should be rewarded in agency law. But the law should not immunize an agent who acts in the best interest of her employer to commit wrongdoing. Not only does the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine immunize such wrongdoing, but the more closely that an employer orders and supervises the employee’s illegal acts, the more the employer is protected from prosecution as well.
My next blogpost illustrates how the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine operates to defeat prosecutions for coordinated wrongdoing by agents within an organization. Let’s examine the case of Monsignor Lynn.
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