Category: Issue 3

Article

Remutualization

Erik F. Gerding, Professor of Law and Wolf-Nichol Fellow, University of Colorado Law School

Lynn Stout heartily embraced heterodox economic theories for describing capital markets and a progressive zeal for reforming them. Yet when she came to formulate her policy prescriptions for financial markets, one of the most prominent progressive corporate and financial law scholars of the twentieth century could sometimes take these twin intellectual engines into surprisingly “conservative”…

Mar 2020

Article

Cryptocommunity Currencies

J.S. Nelson, Associate Professor of Law (Business Ethics), Villanova Law School; Dept. of Management & Operations (by courtesy), Villanova School of Business 

What are cryptocurrencies: securities, commodities, or something else? Maybe they are a new form of established currency—a non-sovereign fiat currency. Like other self-governing bodies, the communities that issue cryptocurrencies should be judged on how well they support their currencies. This analysis is not meaningfully different from how we have evaluated traditional sovereign issuers of currency….

Mar 2020

Article

Artificial Agents in Corporate Boardrooms

Sergio Alberto Gramitto Ricci, Lecturer, Department of Business Law and Taxation, Monash Business School, Monash University

Thousands of years ago, Roman businessmen often ran joint businesses through commonly owned, highly intelligent slaves. Roman slaves did not have full legal capacity and were considered property of their co-owners. Now business corporations are looking to delegate decision-making to uberintelligent machines through the use of artificial intelligence in boardrooms. Artificial intelligence in boardrooms could…

Mar 2020

Article

A Democratic Political Economy For the First Amendment

Nelson Tebbe, Jane M.G. Foster Professor of Law, Cornell Law School

Today, the relationship between the First Amendment and distributive justice is fraught. Judges and other constitutional actors have been interpreting freedoms of speech and religion in a manner that unwinds government programs designed to ameliorate disparities of wealth, income, and other primary goods. And the regressive impact of actions grounded in these constitutional freedoms is…

Mar 2020

Article

Defined Contribution Plans and the Challenge of Financial Illiteracy

 Jill E. Fisch, University of Pennsylvania Law School; Annamaria Lusardi, The George Washington University;  & Andrea Hasler, The George Washington University School of Business

Retirement investing in the United States has changed dramatically. The classic defined benefit (DB) plan has largely been replaced by the defined contribution (DC) plan. With the latter, individual employees’ decisions about how much to save for retirement and how to invest those savings determine the benefits available upon retirement.  We analyze data from the…

Mar 2020

Article

Corporate Law and the Myth of Efficient Market Control

 William W. Bratton, Nicholas F. Gallicchio Professor of Law, University of Pennsylvania Law School

Simone M. Sepe, Professor of Law and Finance, James E. Rogers College of Law, University of Arizona; Université Toulouse 1 Capitole; and Toulouse School of Economics

In recent times, there has been an unprecedented shift in power from managers to shareholders, a shift that realizes the long-held theoretical aspiration of market control of the corporation. This Article subjects the market control paradigm to comprehensive economic examination and finds it wanting.  The market control paradigm relies on a narrow economic model that…

Mar 2020

Article

Are Publicly Traded Corporations Disappearing?

Margaret M. Blair, Milton R. Underwood Chair in Free Enterprise, and the FedEx Chair for Research at Vanderbilt University Law School

Corporate law scholars and economists have expressed concern recently about the fact that the number of publicly traded corporations in the United States has declined significantly since a peak in the late 1990s. In this Essay, in honor of the late Professor Lynn Stout, who devoted much of her career to the study of large…

Mar 2020

Article

Lynn Stout Symposium: Introduction

Saule T. Omarova† & Diogo Magalhaes‡

† Beth and Marc Goldberg Professor of Law, Cornell Law School; Director, Jack Clarke Program on the Law and Regulation of Financial Institutions and Markets, Cornell Law School.

‡ Doctor of the Science of Law, Cornell University 2019.

On April 16, 2018, the Cornell Law School community lost one of its brightest stars, Professor Lynn Stout.  Lynn Stout was a brilliant thinker whose extensive body of work possesses that rare blend of in-depth knowledge, thorough and thoughtful analysis, eloquent and agile acuity, and more importantly—the quality of all great “greats”—unique paradigmatic thinking that…

Mar 2020