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.

Permalink | Agency Law| Business Ethics| Business Organizations| Businesses of Note| Corporate Governance| Corporate Law| Crime and Criminal Law| Financial Crisis| Financial Institutions| Law & Economics| Law & Entrepreneurship| Law & Society| Legal History| Management| Masters: Dodd-Frank| Masters: Dodd-Frank@1| Politics| Religion| Roundtable: Corps/B.A.| Social Responsibility| Torts| White Collar Crime | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Bookmark

Corporate disclosure, especially in securities regulation, has been a standard regulatory strategy since the New Deal. Brandeisian “sunlight” has been endorsed widely as a cure for nefarious inside dealings. An impressive apparatus of regulatory disclosure has emerged, including annual and quarterly reports enshrined in Forms 10K and 10Q. Other less comprehensive disclosures are also required: for initial public offerings and various debt issuances, as well as for unexpected events that require an update of available information in the market (Form 8K).

For the most part, corporate disclosure has focused on financial information: for the good and sufficient reason that it is designed to protect investors – especially investors who are relatively small players in large public trading markets. Some doubts have been raised about the effectiveness of this kind of disclosure and, indeed, the effectiveness of mandatory disclosure in general. A recent book by Omri Ben-Shahar and Carl Scheider, More Than You Wanted to Know: The Failure of Mandated Disclosure, advances a wide-ranging attack on all mandatory disclosure. (I think that their attack goes too far: I’ll be coming out with a short review of the book for Penn Law’s RegBlog called “Defending Disclosure”).   Assuming, though, that much financial disclosure makes sense, what about expanding it to include other activities of business firms?

Consider three types of nonfinancial information that might usefully be disclosed: information about a business firm’s activities with respect to politics, the natural environment, and religion.

1. Politics. One good candidate for enhanced corporate disclosure concerns business activities in politics. Lobbying laws require various disclosures, and various campaign finance laws do too. It is possible to obscure actual political spending through the complexity of corporate organization. (For a nice graphic of the Koch brothers’ labyrinth assembled by the Center for Responsive Politics, see here.) Good reporters can ferret out this information – but they need to get access to it in the first place. My colleague Bill Laufer has been an academic leader in an effort to encourage public corporations to disclose political spending voluntarily, with Wharton’s Zicklin Center for Business Ethics Research teaming up with the nonpartisan Center for Political Accountability to rank companies with respect to their transparency about corporate political spending. The rankings have been done for three years now, and there are indications of increased business participation.  Recently, even this voluntary effort has been attacked by business groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for being “anti-business.” See letter from U.S. Chamber of Commerce quoted here.  Jonathan Macey of Yale Law School has also objected to the rankings in an article in the Wall Street Journal, arguing that the purpose of political disclosure is somehow part of “a continuing war against corporate America.” These objections, however, seem overblown and misplaced. What is so wrong about asking for disclosure about the political spending of business firms? One can Google individuals to see their record of supporting Presidential and Congressional candidates via the Federal Election Commission’s website, yet large businesses should be exempt? Political spending by corporations and other business should be disclosed in virtue of democratic ideals of transparency in the political process. Media, non-profit groups, political parties, and other citizens may then use the resulting information in political debates and election campaigns. Also, it seems reasonable for shareholders to expect to have access to this kind of information.

In Business Persons, I’ve gone further to argue (in chapter 7) that both majority and dissenting opinions in Citizens United appear to support mandatory disclosure as a good compromise strategy for regulation. One can still debate the merits of closer control of corporate spending in politics (and I believe that though business corporations indeed have “rights” to political speech these rights do not necessarily extend to unlimited spending directed toward political campaigns). It seems to me hard to dispute that principles of political democracy – and the transparency of the process – support a law of mandatory disclosure of corporate spending in politics.

2. Natural environment. Increasingly, many large companies are also issuing voluntary reports regarding their environmental performance (and often adding in other “social impact” elements). Annual reports issued under the International Standards Organization (the ISO 14000 series), the Global Reporting Initiative, and the Carbon Disclosure Project are examples. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has also established a mandatory program for greenhouse gas emissions reporting, which is tailored to different industrial sectors. One can argue about whether these kinds of disclosures are sufficiently useful to justify their expense, but my own view is that they help to encourage business firms to take environmental concerns seriously. Many firms use this reporting to enhance their internal efficiency (often leading to financial bottom-line gains). As important, however, is the engagement of firms to consider environmental issues – and encouraging them to act as “part of the solution” rather than simply as a generating part of the problem.

One caveat that is relevant to all nonfinancial disclosure regimes:   The scope of firms required to disclose should be considered.  I do not believe that the case is convincing that only public reporting companies under the securities laws should be included.  (For one influential argument to the contrary, see Cynthia A. Williams, “The Securities and Exchange Commission and Corporate Social Transparency,”  112 Harvard Law Review 1197 (1999)).  Instead, it makes to sense for different agencies appropriate to the particular issue at hand to regulate:  the Federal Election Commission for political disclosures and the EPA for environmental disclosures.

Permalink | Business Ethics| Business Organizations| Corporate Governance| Corporate Law| Employees| Environment| Finance| Financial Institutions| Hobby Lobby| Legal Theory| Organizational Theory| Politics| Religion| Securities| Social Responsibility | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Bookmark

Father's Day has special meaning to me this year because my son Conrad will be giving his "farewell" talk at church before commencing his missionary work in Berlin, Germany. He enters the Missionary Training Center on Wednesday, and we will not see him (except via Skype twice a year) for two years. This morning, we made our traditional trek to the Provo Temple for some family photos, and here I am with Conrad ...

Conrad is a twin, and his brother Christian is planning to serve a mission after attending fall semester at BYU. After 18 years of inseparability, I will miss seeing these two goofing together for the next two and a half years ...

Earlier this week, I had another father moment, as my oldest daughter gave birth to our first grandchild, Esther Anne Randle. Here is Esther at three days old:

Being a law professor is a great job, but it is nothing compared with being a father. Reflecting on all of this, I actually got a bit teary watching this Father's Day message ...

Permalink | Religion | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Bookmark

The Religious Freedom Restoration Act applies only to "persons." Invoking this limitation, the Obama Administration claims that for-profit corporations such as Hobby Lobby are not RFRA persons, thus negating Hobby Lobby’s challenge to the Administration’s contraception mandate. In particular, the Administration claims that treating corporations as RFRA persons capable of exercising religion contravenes "fundamental tenets" of American corporate law.

In a brief amicus curiae, 44 professors of corporate and criminal law have elaborated on this argument. These scholars contend that treating corporations as RFRA persons that exercise their shareholders' religion violates basic principles of corporate law and would undermine that law's goals. The scholars’ brief emphasizes that corporations are separate legal entities protected from intrusion by shareholders, who enjoy limited liability behind the corporate veil. These essential attributes of corporateness, these scholars say, categorically preclude shareholders’ religion from “passing through” a boundary between shareholders and the firm and thus prevent shareholders from "impos[ing] their personal religious beliefs" on the firm. Allowing such imposition, the scholars say, would encourage intra-corporate struggles over religious identity, struggles that would sometimes result in litigation and discourage investment.

In a recent essay, Nate Oman and I argue that the Obama Administration and the scholars who support it are mistaken on this point and that for-profit corporations are in fact RFRA persons. Corporations often adopt policies that reflect shareholders’ religious beliefs. Examples include Jewish-owned restaurants or groceries that keep Kosher and remain closed on the Jewish sabbath, Christian-owned establishments that decline to sell alcohol and/or close on Sunday, and Muslim-owned firms that refuse to enter contracts that require the payment of interest. These practices do not offend corporate law, and the scholars cite no case to the contrary.

None of this is a surprise. Americans are the most religious people in the developed world. Moreover, the now-prevalent theory teaches that firms are nexuses of contracts among suppliers of various inputs. Modern corporate law reflects this contractual vision, allowing investors to alter default rules so as to facilitate the exercise of religion under the aegis of the corporate form. While the “standard” corporation entails separation of ownership from control of the sort found in large, publicly traded firms, the vast majority of corporations are closely held entities like Hobby Lobby, firms that courts and scholars have dubbed “chartered partnerships,” “incorporated partnerships,” or “corporations de jure and partnerships de facto.”

Several facets of modern corporate law empower shareholders to impose their religious beliefs on such corporations. Shareholders can adopt provisions in the corporate charter or the firm’s bylaws that limit what products firms may sell, days firms will operate, and how firms treat employees, customers, or the wider community. None of these provisions would contravene corporate law, which allows firms to pursue “any lawful businesses or purposes.” Shareholders can also enter shareholder agreements that govern operation of the firm or require unanimous consent before the firm takes certain actions. Indeed, shareholders can eliminate the Board of Directors altogether and operate the firm as a de facto partnership. Delaware law, for instance, expressly provides that shareholders may “treat the corporation as if it were a partnership or [ ] arrange relations among the stockholders or between the stockholders and the corporation in a manner that would be appropriate only among partners.” Shareholders may properly rely upon these devices (and perhaps others) to induce corporations to pursue religious objectives, even to the detriment of profits.

To be sure, shareholders of such “chartered partnerships” would retain limited liability (unless waived in the corporate charter) as well as entity status. But non-profit corporations, including churches, synagogues and mosques, and their members possess these very same attributes without forfeiting their ability to exercise religion. States confer limited liability on shareholders of for-profit corporations to encourage investment, risk taking and the like. Moreover, entity status reduces transaction costs that would result from individual shareholder transacting. Nothing about the rationales for these institutional devices justifies limiting the ability of shareholders to induce firms to pursue religious objectives.

Perhaps, however, pursuit of religion by for-profit corporations is inconsistent with the goals of corporate law, thereby suggesting that Congress did not extended RFRA to such entities. For example, the law professors’ brief suggests that allowing RFRA exemptions will lead to costly derivative suits over whether a corporation ought to adopt a particular religion and that firms will manufacture spurious religious claims to avoid onerous regulations.

We doubt it. Under current law a for-profit corporation may pursue a religious mission. It’s unclear why the predicted corporate-governance litigation over religion hasn’t already happened. It’s telling that the critics have been unable to cite a single derivative action or corporate governance dispute related to religion. In theory, it is possible that firms might manufacture insincere religious claims. This, however, has nothing to do with the corporate form. Natural persons also have incentives to manufacture religious claims. In applying RFRA, courts properly inquire into the sincerity of religious beliefs, booting spurious claims.

Finally, one might object that it simply makes no sense to give free-exercise rights (even statutory ones) to corporations. After all, a corporation has no soul, and religion is something that only natural persons can practice. We disagree. First, churches and other religious entities are corporations and no one has ever claimed that this fact disables them from practicing religion or meriting protection. Furthermore, these claims are not confined to uniquely “religious” corporations. Many churches, for example, are organized as LLCs. As a legal matter, they have the same form as Chrysler. The validity of RFRA claims should not turn on a claimant’s corporate status or lack thereof.

Perhaps the real problem is the for-profit character of firms like Hobby Lobby. Natural persons, however, also pursue profits. It would be very odd to say that a sole proprietorship or a partnership may claim the protections of RFRA but a corporation or an LLC may not. At a deeper level, it would be perverse to suggest that once a person is engaged in profit making activity they have given up their right to practice their religion. Such a principle would gut the idea of religious freedom.

Implicit in these arguments against RFRA personhood for corporations are two problematic assumptions. The first is that religion is fundamentally an individual and private affair, rather than a collective and public affair. This is a good description of a seventeenth-century Calvinist examining his or her soul for the signs of irresistible grace. This account does not work very well for many other approaches to religion. Jewish law, for example, denies that there is a distinction between the “private” and “religious” activity of the home and the “public” and “secular” activity of the marketplace. God’s demand that Israel live according to his law applies equally in both realms. Likewise, Catholic theology has a rich tradition of understanding corporate religious experience within a host of subsidiary organizations, including for-profit firms.

None of this means that the RFRA claims of for-profit corporation should always succeed. Courts should scrutinize all RFRA claims for sincerity, substantial burden, and whether any substantial burden is narrowly tailored to further a compelling interest. There is, however, no good reason for categorically excluding for-profit corporations from RFRA’s protection for religious freedom.

Permalink | Business Organizations| Corporate Governance| Corporate Law| Religion | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Bookmark

The following is from Rick Garnett at Notre Dame Law School:

Thanks very much to Gordon for including me in this very rich and thoughtful discussion.  The care and civility with which the various questions raised in the Hobby Lobby case are being handled here at The Conglomerate is a model, and should be an inspiration, for all of us.

I had the chance, yesterday afternoon, to read the transcript of the oral arguments in the case.  The usual caveats apply:  it is difficult and dangerous to make confident predictions about the Court based on oral arguments.  That said, it appears that at least three justices are highly skeptical regarding Hobby Lobby’s RFRA claim and also that at least four justices are similarly skeptical -- as I think they should be -- with respect to the notions that (a) “corporations” or “businesses” are categorically excluded from RFRA’s protections; (b) that it would violate the Establishment Clause to accommodate Hobby Lobby; and (c) that the contraception-coverage provisions at issue do not “substantially burden” Hobby Lobby’s exercise of religion.

One thing that stood out, for me, in the argument (besides some of the justices’ maddening habit of so frequently interrupting counsel and each other as to make the arguments near useless) was Paul Clement’s exchange with Justice Kennedy about “the position and the rights of . . . the employees.”  In some places, it has been suggested that accommodating the religious-liberty rights of the employer would violate the religious liberty of an employee who did not share the employer’s religious beliefs.  (An example “close to home”:  some have argued that it would violate the religious freedom of Notre Dame faculty or students who do not accept Catholic teaching regarding the use of contraception to exempt Notre Dame from the contraception-coverage rules.)  In my view, this suggestion is not convincing -- it conflates state-imposed burdens and state coercion with the presumptive right of non-state institutions, including employers, to act in accord with a religious mission or character.  In any event, I don’t think Justice Kennedy was making this suggestion.  His concern seemed, instead, to be with accommodations that put the employees of some employers in a “disadvantageous position.”

Paul Clement was (sigh) interrupted by another justice before he was able to answer Justice Kennedy but it appeared to me that he wanted to make the point (and he did say something like this in conversation with Justices Sotomayor and Kagan) that we should not regard it as “imposing a burden on” or “disadvantaging” an employee to say that it was not lawful – because it violated RFRA – to require the employer to provide a benefit to that employee in the first place.  This is, of course, the “where’s the baseline?” point with which we law professors are so familiar.  (For more on this, take a look at this short essay I did for the Vanderbilt Law Review’s “En Banc” feature.)

Permalink | Corporate Law| Employees| Hobby Lobby| Religion | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Bookmark

I have no time just now to respond to some of the thoughtful reactions to my earlier post.  But a quick follow-up is in order to refute the repeated assertions by Professors Scharffs and Bainbridge that the law is shot through with exemptions, thereby undermining the government's compelling interest in reducing unintended pregnancies (and abortions) by ensuring that women have affordable access to the FDA-approved contraceptive methods.

For one thing, even if there were many exemptions, that would not undermine the government's compelling interest, any more than the numerous legal exemptions to tax laws, antidiscrimination laws, wage and hour laws, etc., undermine the compelling interests that have historically sufficed to justify denial of religious exemptions under those statutes.  See, e.g., Tony & Susan Alamo Foundation, 471 U.S. at 300 n.21 (although Fair Labor Standards Act contains many exceptions to the definition of “employee” (see 29 U.S.C. 203(e)) and to the requirement of minimum wages (see 29 U.S.C. 213(a)), the Court deemed them to be “not relevant here,” and denied the requested religious exemption); Hernandez, 490 U.S. at 700 (“The fact that Congress has already crafted some deductions and exemptions in the Code . . . is of no consequence . . . .”); see also the examples in the government's reply brief at 19-22.

More to the point, the Professors fundamentally misunderstand this law.  As I’ve explained in previous posts, with one minor exception, the purported “exemptions” the Professors identify are not exemptions at all; in each case, women will be entitled to cost-free contraception insurance.  And that one exception—HHS’s exemption for churches—will affect very few female employees who would otherwise make claims for cost-free contraception coverage.  The contraceptive coverage here, therefore—like all of the other preventive care services the statute requires, such as immunizations and colo-rectal cancer screening—is a benefit to which virtually all women in the United States will be entitled, and the government has a compelling interest in ensuring that remains the case. 

(Also, one important specific correction on a major misunderstanding:  Professor Scharffs writes that "the mandate (indeed the entire Affordable Care Act) does not apply to employers with fifty or fewer employees."  That's just wrong.)

Permalink | Constitutional Law| Corporate Law| Hobby Lobby| Religion| Supreme Court | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Bookmark

The Wall Street Journal live blog of the contraception mandate cases before the Supreme Court reports that:

Chief Justice John Roberts suggested he was thinking of a narrow ruling allowing closely held companies like Hobby Lobby Stores Inc. to claim a religious exemption, while leaving aside more-complicated ownership structures of publicly traded corporations to another day — a position that Justice Stephen Breyer indicated he might, or might not, be open to.

If you'll pardon one more episode of self-promotion, reverse veil piercing would provide the basis for just such a narrow ruling. As I observed in A Critique of the Corporate Law Professors’ Amicus Brief in Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood, which is now available in final form at the the Virginia Law Review Online:

In another red herring, the Brief argues that:

If this Court were to accept the arguments being advanced by Hobby Lobby and Conestoga, it would … invite … disruptive proxy contests … regarding whether the corporation should adopt a religion and, if so, which one.

Proxy contests are principally an issue for public corporations, while RVP-I—like forward veil piercing—is exclusively an issue for close corporations. The claim is thus disingenuous, at best. Nevertheless, this claim—while false—does provide a valuable opportunity for reminding the reader that the Brief’s concern for minority shareholders with diverse interests is largely irrelevant. As this author has noted:

[A] public corporation with many shareholders holding diverse views is a poor candidate for RVP-I. In contrast, a closely held corporation – even if quite large by metrics such as assets or employees – with a small number of shareholders holding common religious beliefs is a good candidate.

Courts routinely differentiate cases for piercing the veil from cases in which the veil should not be pierced based on, inter alia, the number of shareholders in the corporation. There is no reason why they could not do the same in cases like those brought by Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood.

So here is a proposed narrow test, taken from my article Using Reverse Veil Piercing to Vindicate the Free Exercise Rights of Incorporated Employers, 16 Green Bag 2d 235 (2013):

Analysis of the RVP-I cases thus suggests a three-pronged version of RVP that should be adopted in the mandate cases:

1. Is there such substantial identity of the shareholder(s)’s religious beliefs and the manner in which the corporation is operated and the purposes to which it is devoted that the corporation is effectively the shareholder’s alter ego?
2. How strong is the government’s interest in ensuring that the corporation’s employees get the mandated insurance coverage?
3. Would reverse piercing this corporation’s veil advance significant public policies?

As to the first prong, Judge Walton’s analysis in Tyndale provides a useful model for future courts to follow.

Permalink | Health Care| Hobby Lobby| Religion| Supreme Court | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Bookmark

I'm very grateful to Gordon for inviting me to post on the Conglomorate about the Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood cases--in particular, to summarize some of the arguments I've made about the cases over on Balkinization and SCOTUSblog.  Links to my posts about various different aspects of the cases, and to some posts of others, are collected here.  As for the issues of particular interest to Conglomorate readers . . . well, I'm afraid I think there's less there than meets the eye as to several of them.

The Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood cases do not require the Court to decide, once and for all, whether and under what circumstances for-profit corporations can ever have religious beliefs or consciences; whether they can exercise religion; or whether they can be “persons” under RFRA.

Those formulations pitch the question at far too broad a level of generality, and one untethered from the facts of these particular cases.  The issue in these cases is much narrower than that. 

This is not a case about whether a particular corporation can "advance" a religious agenda, take steps to further a religious mission (such as by selling religious books), or promulgate religious doctrine; indeed, it's not a case in which the state is alleged to be preventing a corporation from doing anything at all.  Therefore it bears no resemblance to, say, a law restricting for-profit religious bookstores from selling certain books.  The particular burden being alleged here is that the HHS Preventive Services Rule allegedly coerces a violation of religious duties--thatis to say, rather than restricting a religious practice, HHS is alleged to be focring someone to act in a manner contrary to religiously inspired limitations.  The federal government allegedly is putting someone to a choice between compliance with a civil obligation and adherence to a restrictive religious injunction (roughly speaking:  “Thou Shalt Not Cooperate With Evil”).

If there is such a burden on religious exercise here, it is not one that is imposed on the corporations—on Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., Mardel, Inc. (in the Hobby Lobby litigation) or on Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp.  That's not because those corporations don’t have “consciences”—neither do churches—or because they cannot advance religious objectives (perhaps they can), but because they don’t have religious obligations.  I’m not aware of any religion that imposes duties or injunctions on for-profit corporations.  And, more to the point, the complaints in these cases make countless allegations about religious duties and how the government allegedly is compelling certain parties to violate those duties, but they nowhere allege that any of the three corporations here are subject to any religious obligations.

2.  A conclusion that the HHS Rule does not substantially burden any religious exercise of these corporate plaintiffs, however, hardly resolves the cases.  As you will see if you begin to peruse the plaintiffs' complaints and briefs, the crux of the alleged burden in these cases is not on the corporations’ alleged exercise of religion, but instead on the purported religious exercise of the individual plaintiffs—five members of the Green family in Hobby Lobby, and five members of the Hahn family in Conestoga Wood.

For starters, the federal legal obligations in these cases run against the corporations themselves, and/or their insurance plans, not against the shareholders.  So the shareholders are not directly burdened by federal law.  The question, then, is whether shareholders nevertheless can obtain relief for injuries that they allegedly suffer derivatively, by virtue of the state's regulation of the corporation, notwithstanding the black-letter law that corporations and their shareholders are distinct entities for purposes of liability and benefits.  

Individuals typically form a corporation so that they will not be personally liable for any claims against the corporation--indeed, that's one of the principal reasons state law creates the corporate form.  Does it follow that shareholders cannot complain about injuries they suffer derivatively when other actors, including the government, take action against the corporation?  By accepting the “sweet” (limited liability), must shareholders also accept the “bitter,” in the form of abandonment of rights they otherwise might have had to recover for injuries they suffer by virtue of their ownership of the corporate shares?  As Judge Matheson put the question in his separate concurrence in Hobby Lobby, should “[t]he structural barriers of corporate law give [one] pause about whether the plaintiffs can have their corporate veil and pierce it too”?

In response to this question, Professor Bainbridge published an article suggesting that the Court should make use of a corporate law doctrine called "insider reverse veil piercing" in order to allow the Greens and the Hahns to assert RFRA claims as shareholders notwithstanding the fact that they are generally immune from liability for any wrongs committed by their corporations--i.e., to allow them to reap the sweet and also avoid the bitter.

Subsequently, a group of 44 corporate and criminal law professors filed an amicus brief arguing that "reverse veil piercing" would be inappropriate here, and that the Court should not allow the plaintiffs to sue as shareholders.

Professor Bainbridge has now responded with a follow-up article critiquing the corporate law professors' brief.  He argues again that the Court should use "insider reverse veil piercing," or "RVP-I," "to allow . . . shareholder standing to sue if the [C]ourt is unwilling to allow the corporation to do so." 

What (if anything) should the Court make of this corporate law dispute about RVP-I? 

a.  First of all, it's not clear that these cases are even about injuries to the individuals in their capacities as shareholders.  Indeed, it appears that the individual plaintiffs in Hobby Lobby, members of the Green family, are not shareholders of Hobby Lobby and Mardel, the two corporate plaintiffs in that case; they are, instead, trustees of a management trust that owns the companies.  The Greens do not allege that they own the companies; and unless I've missed something, their complaint does not allege any way in which their funds would be used to "pay for" contraception.  As I explained in a recent post, Hobby Lobby's brief confirms that the case is not fundamentally about coercing the Greens to pay forcontraception, or about the Greens' religious exercise in their capacity as shareholders.  The Greens' fundamental complaint, instead, is that federal law coerces them to violate a religious obligation in their capacities as corporate directors, i.e., decision-makers.  "[T]he precise religious [religious] exercise at issue here," the brief explains, is that "the Greens cannot in good conscience direct their corporations to provide insurance coverage for the four drugs and devices at issue because doing so would 'facilitat[e] harms against human beings.'”  

A decision by the Court limited to shareholder rights, therefore, would not resolve Hobby Lobby.

That leaves the Conestoga Wood case.  The individual plaintiffs in that case, members of the Hahn family, also primarily complain about federal law burdening them in their capacity as corporate directors, or decision-makers.  In addition, however, paragraph 11 of their complaint alleges that the Hahns are collectively the “principal[]” owners of the shares of Conestoga Wood.  So perhaps the RVP-I question does arise vis-a-vis the Hahns, whose shareholder funds presumably would be used, not to pay for contraception reimbursement directly, but instead to pay for part of the overall premiums to the plan insurance carrier.  (Remarkably, the Conestoga Wood complaint does not specify whether CW has a self-insured employee health insurance plan or a plan issued through an independent insurer.  But in its Supreme Court brief, it refers to its (unidentified) "issuer" as having "inserted coverage of the contraceptives into its plan over Petitioners’ objection" after the district court denied a preliminary injunction.)  So, in some very attenuated sense, the Hahns' shareholder funds are subsidizing the plan's reimbursement for employees' use of contraception . . . and the complaint might be read to suggest that this use of the Hahns' funds would make the Hahns complicit in their employees' use of so-called "abortifacients" in the rare case (if any) in which use of certain contraceptive methods prevented a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterine wall. 

b.  But even if the "shareholders' complicity" issue is teed up in Conestoga Wood . . . Honestly? 

Can it really be the case that the Supreme Court of the United States ought to decide Conestoga Wood based upon the assumption that the corporate law "RVP-I doctrine" would apply in this unprecedented context?  This is a state law question, the answer to which depends upon the legal relationship between a corporation and its principal shareholders . . . presumably under Pennsylvania law.  

Professor Bainbridge cites as his primary authorities two 30-year-old state-law cases--one from Minnesota, the other from Michigan--both involving questions far-flung from the RFRA context in Conestoga Wood.  To be sure, he also cites one Pennsylvania case--Barium Steel Corp. v. Wiley, 108 A.2d 336(1954).  But in that case, which was decided 60 years ago, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court split 3-3 on what we (well, what corporations law professors) would today apparently call an "insider reverse veil piercing" theory, in a case that has almost nothing in common with Conestoga Wood.  And the three Pennsylvania Justices who would not have recognized the RVP-I in Barium Steel wrote this:  "The decisions in this State will be searched in vain for a single instance where a piercing of the corporate veil has been judicially sanctioned in order to confer a benefit upon the ones responsible for the presence of the veil.  Certainly, the opinion for this court in the instant case cites no such decision."

That exhausts my knowledge of how Pennsylvania law treats insider reverse veil-piercing.  Perhaps Professor Bainbridge is right that Pennsylvania (and other state) courts would or should "reverse-pierce" the veil in this RFRA context, in which a federal statute is implicated.  Perhaps he's wrong.  But how should the Supreme Court of the United States resolve that question?  

Bainbridge argues that courts have historically "pierced the corporate veil" in 13.41% of RVP cases, and that the Court should decide whether Conestoga Wood should be among that number based upon the simple test of whether piercing here would advance a "significant public policy."  But he does not cite any other Pennsylvania authority in support of this view, or any case at all involving RVP and RFRA, or RVP and shareholders' religious exercise more broadly, from any jurisdiction.  

This absence of precedent ought to be a serious problem for his RVP-I argument, particularly in light of the principal case cited in the corporate professors' brief (and in the government's brief), Domino's Pizza, Inc. v. McDonald, 546 U.S. 470 (2006).  

McDonald was the sole shareholder of a Nevada corporation.  He alleged that Domino's had broken contracts with that corporation because of racial animus toward him, in violation of 42 U.S.C. § 1981.  The Court held that section 1981 offers relief to a plaintiff when racial discrimination impairs an existing contractual relationship, so long as the plaintiff himself has or would have rights under the existing or proposed contractual relationship.  Of course, the contracts themselves, between corporations, did not afford McDonald any rights, because he was merely a shareholder.  Citing some of the same Minnesota cases Professor Bainbridge cites, however, McDonald argued that "under state law shareholders are at times permitted to disregard the existence of the intermediate corporate entity where failing to do so would impair full enforcement of important . . . statutes."  Resp. Br at 32 n.34. 

At oral argument, Justice Kennedy identified this claim as "kind of an inverse corporate veil piercing," and asked:  "[A]re there any cases where we pierced the corporate veil in order to help the shareholder?"  (The answer, of course, is that the Court has never done so.)

Not surprisingly, the Court unanimously rejected McDonald's inverse veil piercing claim.  Justice Scalia's opinion for the Court explained that "it is fundamental corporation and agency law—indeed, it can be said to be the whole purpose of corporation and agency law—that the shareholder and contracting officer of a corporation has no rights and is exposed to no liability under the corporation's contracts."   

The Court presumably was able to issue such a categorical interpretation of state law because it had been offered no examples, in any jurisdiction, of reverse veil piercing to vindicate shareholder contract rights.  To be sure, Conestoga Wood does not involve shareholders' contract rights, so McDonald does not directly resolve the RVP-I question here.  But the Hahns have the burden to show a RFRA burden, and neither they nor Professor Bainbridge have cited any case, from Pennsylvania or elsewhere, in which shareholders have been permitted to use RVP-I to allege harms to their religious exercise, under a state or local RFRA, resulting from a law that has an impact on corporate funds.  The Court presumably should, therefore, treat the RVP-I argument here the way in which it treated the equally unsupported and unprecedented argument in Domino's--i.e., summarily reject it.      

Domino's appears to be the one and only occasion in which the Supreme Court has specifically considered the relationship between the "RVP" doctrine and a federal statute.  You'd think, therefore, that Professor Bainbridge would devote serious attention to the case.  His analysis of Domino's is relegated to a footnote, however.  And his efforts to distinguish the holding in that case are unpersuasive.  For example, he notes that the shareholder in Domino's raised "only" contractual and statutory rights.  ButConestoga Wood's claim here (the only claim with any traction, anyway) is based on a federal statute (RFRA), just as McDonald's was.  Bainbridge's suggestion that the federal statutory right established by RFRA is more "fundamental" than the federal statutory right against race discrimination established by section 1981--indeed, so much more "fundamental" that it ought to result in an about-face on the Court's RVP-I holding--is so implausible that it doesn't warrant a response.  

His principal argument fares no better.  He insists that Domino's is a "weak precedential reed" because the Court in that case "made no effort to analyze the issues raised by RVP, but simply dismissed it out of hand," without addressing "any of the points made [by Prof. Bainbridge] in defense of the doctrine."  In other words, Bainbridge thinks that the Court should ignore its unanimous holding in Domino's because the Court did not do its homework in that case, even after Justice Kennedy had specifically teed up the question as whether the Court should recognize a claim of "inverse corporate veil piercing."  Suffice it to say that that argument is unlikely to have any traction with the Court.  Moreover, it misses the point:  The Court rejected the RVP-I claim in Domino's because the plaintiff there gave the Court absolutely no basis for concluding that state law would recognize such an exception to the default "fundamental corporation and agency law" principle that a corporate shareholder has no rights and is exposed to no liability under the corporation's contracts.  The same thing is true in this case:  Neither the Hahns nor Professor Bainbridge has offered the Court any authority at all in support of the proposition that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court -- or other state courts, for that matter -- would recognize an RVP-I claim in a case involving RFRA.

Moreover, even if the Court were somehow able to answer the RVP-I question as a matter of Pennsylvania law (after certifying it to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, perhaps?), that state-law-based judgment would not govern similar cases arising in the other 49 states and the District of Columbia, and therefore would hardly be a satisfactory resolution of the question on which the Court granted certiorari in Conestoga Wood.  (And it wouldn't have any impact on a non-shareholder case such as Hobby Lobby.)

* * * *

In the absence of any indication that Pennsylvania law would allow RVP-I in this novel context, the more appropriate approach for the Court would be to follow its example in Domino's, and simply move on from a shareholder-injury inquiry to address the principal question raised both in Conestoga Wood and in Hobby Lobby--namely, whether federal law coerces the individual plaintiffs (the Hahns and the Greens) to violate religious injunctions in their capacities as decision-makers, or directors, of the three corporations in question in these two cases.  In an earlier post, I discuss why I think the plaintiffs have failed to adequately plead facts to support such a claim.

4.  Finally, and most importantly, in posts at both SCOTUSblog and Balkinization, I've tried to explain that, wholly apart from the questions regarding corporations and shareholders, a broad ruling in favor of Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood could mark a sea-change in the way the Court has traditionally resolved claims for religious exemptions in the commercial sector, with potentially dramatic ramifications for an array of laws involving taxes, wages and hours, antidiscrimination norms, etc.  This is so because, when it comes to regulation of commercial activities, the Supreme Court—and virtually every other court and legislature, for that matter—has consistently construed the Free Exercise Clause and religious accommodation statutes not to require religious exemptions from generally applicable regulations.  The Supreme Court, in particular, has rejected such claims in at least nine cases, from 1944 through 1990--and has almost always done so without a dissenting vote.

This long line of consistent denials of exemptions to actors in the commercial sphere reflects the view of Justice Jackson in the first such case (Prince v. Massachusetts), in which he wrote in his concurrence that “money-raising activities on a public scale are, I think, Caesar's affairs, and may be regulated by the state so long as it does not discriminate against one because he is doing them for a religious purpose and the regulation is not arbitrary and capricious, in violation of other provisions of the Constitution.” 

A unanimous Court put the point this way in U.S. v. Lee, in 1982:   “When followers of a particular sect enter into commercial activity as a matter of choice, the limits they accept on their own conduct as a matter of conscience and faith are not to be superimposed on the statutory schemes which are binding on others in that activity,” at least where “[g]ranting an exemption . . . to an employer operates to impose the employer’s religious faith on the employees.” 

Whether or not this was a stand-alone “holding” in Lee, there is no doubt that the statement did—and continues to—fairly reflect the Court’s unbroken line of decisions over many decades.  (The singular exception to the rule is Hosanna-Tabor, which, unlike Hobby Lobby, involved the right of nonprofit, specifically religious organizations to determine the “ministers” who speak on their behalf.) 

And the Lee statement further points to the principal reason for this uniform treatment of religious exemption claims in the commercial sphere—namely, that in such cases it is virtually always the case that conferral of an exemption would require third parties (customers, employees, competitors) to bear significant burdens in the service of another’s religion, something the Court has understandably been loath to sanction.  As I wrote on SCOTUSblog,

Contrary to the views of some, I think it overstates matters to say that such a significant third-party burden invariably renders a permissive religious accommodation unconstitutional.  The Court’s jurisprudence in the area of permissive accommodations is not so unequivocal.  But this much is clear:  Such a significant third-party burden at a minimum raises profound constitutional concerns.  For that reason, as Chip Lupu and Bob Tuttle explain, the Court has regularly construed permissive accommodation statutes – using the avoidance canon either expressly or implicitly – to recognize a compelling government interest in avoiding the imposition of significant third-party harms. 

The Court’s decision in Hobby Lobby is likely to have a profound effect upon how other courts treat state and federal RFRA claims in the commercial sector going forward.  If the Court were to hold that RFRA requires an exemption in these cases—and were to hold, in particular, in the case brought by a very large for-profit employer, that the law substantially burdens plaintiffs’ religious exercise and that the government lacks a compelling interest in denying religious exemptions—that would be a groundbreaking departure from the judiciary’s (and Congress’s) historical practice, one that could pave the way for claims for “myriad exceptions flowing from a wide variety of religious beliefs” (Lee) by commercial enterprises with respect to many other statutes, including nondiscrimination requirements, zoning regulations, taxes, and so on. 

Permalink | Constitutional Law| Corporate Law| Current Affairs| Hobby Lobby| Religion| Supreme Court| Taxation | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Bookmark

Hi, Gordon, et al, I'm looking forward to discussing Hobby Lobby with you this week. It isn't too often that a case involving my two primary interests, corporate law and law and religion intersect, so it should be fun. The big question of corporate conscience I find fascinating. We urge corporations to be socially responsible and to be good corporate citizens, and we praise Coca Cola for its interest in arctic wildlife, but somehow Hobby Lobby is told they aren't behaving like a corporation should when they express a conscientious interest in protecting human life. I may or may not agree with their views about when human life begins, but it seems odd that they are treated as not behaving as a business should when the conscientious views of their owners are injected into the corporation's life.

Permalink | Corporate Law| Hobby Lobby| Religion | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Bookmark

As mentioned in my opening post, I think a key issue in the contraception mandate cases is whether form should trump substance. In my second post, I discussed my article, Using Reverse Veil Piercing to Vindicate the Free Exercise Rights of Incorporated Employers, 16 Green Bag 2d 235 (2013), in which I proposed that courts should use reverse veil piercing to provide a more coherent doctrinal framework for analyzing when substance out to trump form. As I noted in that post, some 44 corporate law professors filed an amicus brief in these cases that, at least in part, was intended to attack my argument.

I responded in A Critique of the Corporate Law Professors’ Amicus Brief in Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood, which is now available in final form at the the Virginia Law Review Online. In it, I argued, as the abstract explains, that:

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) effected numerous changes in the legal regime governing health care and health insurance. Among the ACA’s more controversial provisions is the so-called contraceptive mandate, which requires employer-provided health care insurance plans to provide coverage of all FDA approved contraceptive methods. 

On March 25, 2014, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in the Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood cases, in which the shareholders of two for-profit family-owned corporations argue that requiring them to comply with the contraception mandate violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. 

Forty-four law corporate law professors filed an amicus brief in these cases, arguing that the essence of a corporation is its “separateness” from its shareholders and that, on the facts of these cases, there is no reason to disregard the separateness between shareholders and the corporations they control. The Brief is replete with errors, overstated claims, or red herrings, and misdirection.

Contrary to the Brief’s arguments, basic corporate law principles strongly support the position of Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood. In particular, the doctrine known as reverse veil piercing provides a clear and practical vehicle for disregarding the legal separateness of those corporations from their shareholders and thus granting those shareholders standing to assert their free exercise rights.

Permalink | Health Care| Hobby Lobby| Religion| Supreme Court | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Bookmark

Thank you to Gordon Smith and the organizers of this symposium for allowing me to participate.

Rather than repeat the very fine comments and observations that have already been posted, I'd like to take this opportunity to say something that I have not heard said before:

Although Hobby Lobby and Conestoga have been treated identically by commentators, perhaps there is a means by which they could be distinguished.

As i read Hobby Lobby, an effort is made to claim that the company itself has a religious identity.  In Conestoga, however, that claim isn't really pressed.  I think this may be an important distinction.

For as I see things, a corporation's ability to avail itself of Free Exercise rights should turn largely on its categorization as a(n) (religiously)  expressive association.  Justice O'Connor's reservations notwithstanding, it would seem to me as though corporations can indeed be expressive associations (and some apparently are).  Although Dale calls the expressive / non-expressive dichotomy into question, it does so by making the test even more lenient -- not stricter.  Thus, to the extent that a corporation qualifies as an expressive association, I believe it ought to be able to bring forth a free exercise claim.  (Shameless plug:  I expound upon this in The Naked Private Square, 51 Hous. L. Rev. 1 (2013)).

However, the mere fact that a corporation's shareholders happen to be religious do not, I suggest, transform the corporation itself into a religiously expressive association.

Now, there may be other reasons to find in favor of the free exercise claimants in such cases.  For example, Prof. Bainbridge's arguments on PCV strike me as compelling.  But those arguments are different, I suggest, than the arguments why a genuinely religiously expressive corporation ought to be able to avail itself of the Free Exercise Clause.

-Ron Colombo

Permalink | Corporate Law| Hobby Lobby| Religion | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Bookmark

As mentioned in my opening post, I think a key issue in the contraception mandate cases is whether form should trump substance. If Hobby Lobby were David Green's sole proprietorship, there is no question but that he would be able to assert his RFRA and First Amendment claims. Should that change simply because he incorporated his business?

Unfortunately, whether they have allowed incorporated employers to raise such claims or not, courts have failed to articulate a coherent doctrinal justification for their holdings. 

In my article, Using Reverse Veil Piercing to Vindicate the Free Exercise Rights of Incorporated Employers, 16 Green Bag 2d 235 (2013), I proposed that courts should use reverse veil piercing to provide a more coherent doctrinal framework.

Reverse veil piercing (RVP) is a corporate law doctrine pursuant to which a court disregards the corporation’s separate legal personality, allowing the shareholder to claim benefits otherwise available only to individuals. The thesis of this article is that RVP provides the correct analytical framework for vindicating certain constitutional rights.

Assume that sole proprietors with religious objections to abortion or contraception are protected by the free exercise clause of the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) from being obliged to comply with the government mandate that employers provide employees with health care plans that cover sterilizations, contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs. Further assume that incorporated employers are not so protected. This article analyzes whether the shareholders of such employers can invoke RVP so as to vindicate their rights.

At least one court has recognized the potential for using RVP in the mandate cases, opining that these cases “pose difficult questions of first impression, including whether it is “possible to ‘pierce the veil’ and disregard the corporate form in this context.” The court further opined that that question, among others, merited “more deliberate investigation.” This article undertakes precisely that investigation.

Invoking RVP in the mandate cases would not be outcome determinative. Instead, it would simply provide a coherent doctrinal framework for determining whether the corporation is so intertwined with the religious beliefs of its shareholders that the corporation should be allowed standing to bring the case. Whatever demerits RVP may have, it provides a better solution than the courts’ current practice of deciding the issue by mere fiat.

This proposal met with some considerable hostility from a segment of the corporate law academy, which will be the subject of my next post.

Permalink | Health Care| Hobby Lobby| Religion| Supreme Court | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Bookmark

Permalink | Corporate Law| Health Care| Hobby Lobby| Religion | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Bookmark

Part of my travels this summer included a week-long high school mission trip with my daughter and the rest of her church youth group.  For the past three years, I've accompanied her on these trips, which are sort of organized by the Presbyterian church we attend.  I say "sort of" because all we do is show up.  Then, a larger organization takes over.  This year, we went to The Pittsburgh Project, which describes itself as follows:

The Pittsburgh Project is a nonprofit community development organization with a 25-year track record of developing leaders and serving the city’s most vulnerable residents. Our year-round staff of 51 operates a progressive series of afterschool and summer programs for 450 urban young people, deploys over 2800 people annually to perform free home repairs for Pittsburgh’s elderly homeowners, and spearheads economic development and job training efforts in our Pittsburgh neighborhood.

We were part of the 2800. The Project, which is a permanent, year-round installation, offers "service camps" for youth groups, where students and their chaperones (me) stay in dorm-like (un-airconditioned) bunks, eat sort of marginal food, and go each day to a worksite for a week.  The adults do not observe; we lead work teams of 4-8 students made up from the 20 or so youth groups that show up all week.  It is not easy on either the students or the adults, but the students love it.  There is nondenominational programming in the morning and the evening, and a rec center for free time.  (There's not much free time.)

In other years, we've done mission trips to Tennessee and the Quad Cities (Iowa) area through a different nonprofit, YouthWorks:

YouthWorks believes short term youth mission trips can bring life change to youth, a community and the Church. Within a relatively short period of time, your own life and a stranger’s life can be powerfully changed through the desire to give to a community. Your presence during a mission trip speaks more than a thousand words through your simple love and willingness to serve. YouthWorks believes in stories – in telling Jesus’ story, in listening to other’s life stories and in bringing our stories together to transform hearts; a mission trip is the perfect time to tell those stories.

One of the big differences is that Youthworks sets up in various cities throughout the U.S., sending college students there for the summer to organize a number of rotating projects, which usually include children's day camps, eldercare, and care of adults with special needs, along with physical labor projects. Unlike Pittsburgh Project, they do not have a professional staff of technicians, so most of the rehab projects are clean-up, painting, etc., not drywall, roofing, etc. I would also say that Youthworks emphasizes the religious component with greater success.

So, are these youth mission trips better than summer camp?  Maybe.  Though I loved church camp, I can see that camps minister to the youth, but service camps minister to the youth by empowering them to minister to others.  However, before you get all weapy-eyed, note that these service camps are not cheap.  The Pittsburgh Project trip ran $370 per person for a week, including adults, and you have to bring one (21+) adult per 5 students plus vehicles, which are used every day.  And that does not count getting to/from Pittsburgh.  Based on the accommodations (16 to a room, bring your own bedding), meals (fairly austere, with sack lunches each day, filled with what you didn't eat the day before), the tuition cost must subsidize the work.

I know I am new to this, and that these types of trips abound, from Habitat for Humanity youth trips to numerous, lesser-known organizations.  A quick Google search tells me that organizations that host mission trips for youth both domestic and abroad are everywhere.  And this phenomenon is not just limited to teens; Philanthro Travel or Voluntourism are big trends.  In fact, there is a new book entitled The Voluntourist about a man who set off to save the world and himself "two weeks at a time."

I think youth and adults doing service work is great; I'm a little less sanguine about marketing "vacations with a purpose" as win-wins where you come back refreshed and help someone in the process.

Permalink | Religion | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Bookmark

Here is a highly productive way for business law professors to procrastinate from grading exams:

The National Bureau of Economic Research just circulated a new version of a paper that provides a medieval complement to the law & finance literature and to Gilson's lawyer as transaction cost engineer idea.  The paper by Davide Cantoni and Noam Yuchtman presents evidence that the training of commercial lawyers by new universities contributed to the expansion of economic activity in medieval Germany.  Here is the abstract:

We present new data documenting medieval Europe's "Commercial Revolution'' using information on the establishment of markets in Germany. We use these data to test whether medieval universities played a causal role in expanding economic activity, examining the foundation of Germany's first universities after 1386 following the Papal Schism. We find that the trend rate of market establishment breaks upward in 1386 and that this break is greatest where the distance to a university shrank most. There is no differential pre-1386 trend associated with the reduction in distance to a university, and there is no break in trend in 1386 where university proximity did not change. These results are not affected by excluding cities close to universities or cities belonging to territories that included universities. Universities provided training in newly-rediscovered Roman and Canon law; students with legal training served in positions that reduced the uncertainty of trade in medieval Europe. We argue that training in the law, and the consequent development of legal and administrative institutions, was an important channel linking universities and greater economic activity.

A very interesting read.

Permalink | Economic Development| Europe| Globalization/Trade| Law & Economics| Law & Society| Law Schools/Lawyering| Legal History| Religion| Teaching| Transactional Law | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Bookmark