When used in conjunction with corporations, the term “public” is misleading. Anyone can purchase shares of stock, but public corporations themselves are uninhibited by a sense of societal obligation or strict public oversight. In fact, managers of most large firms are prohibited by law from taking into account the interests of the public in decision making, if doing so hurts shareholders. But this has not always been the case, as until the beginning of the twentieth century, public corporations were deemed to have important civic responsibilities.
With The Failure of Corporate Law, Kent Greenfield hopes to return corporate law to a system in which the public has a greater say in how firms are governed. Greenfield maintains that the laws controlling firms should be much more protective of the public interest and of the corporation’s various stakeholders, such as employees. Only when the law of corporations is evaluated as a branch of public law—as with constitutional law or environmental law—will it be clear what types of changes can be made in corporate governance to improve the common good. Greenfield proposes changes in corporate governance that would enable corporations to meet the progressive goal of creating wealth for society as a whole rather than merely for shareholders and executives.
This wide-ranging book is a comparative study of the civil law, primarily the legal systems of western continental Europe and Latin America. It attempts to account for the distinctive features of civil law systems and hence to contribute to an understanding of the forces that cause law to change. The author contends that the basic differences between civil-law and common-law systems derive from legal history rather than from social, economic, or political developments. Above all, he argues, it was the acceptance of the authority of Justinian's Corpus Juris Civilis that determined the future nature of civil-law systems and gave them their distinctive character.
Mr. Watson outlines the features of Roman law as codified by Justinian that made it adaptable in countries with widely differing political systems, social structures, and local court practices. His learned and lucid exposition encompasses the role and influence of professors of Roman law in medieval universities; the manner and extent to which the case law of various countries drew upon the Corpus Juris; the role of the Institutes as a model for the institutes of local law which were the immediate ancestors of most of the national codes; and the effect of the Corpus Juris on basic features of the civil law, such as the fundamental division between public and private law, with different courts for the two, and the separation of commercial law from the rest of private law.
Scholars may debate his thesis, but none will dispute Alan Watson's command of the sources and his mastery of legal material spanning many centuries and countries. His book will present a challenge to legal historians and students of comparative law, and it will provide Anglo-American lawyers with insight into the nature of civil-law systems.
The traditional definition of torts involves bizarre, idiosyncratic events where a single plaintiff with a physical impairment sues the specific defendant he believes to have wrongfully caused that malady. Yet public attention has focused increasingly on mass personal-injury lawsuits over asbestos, cigarettes, guns, the diet drug fen-phen, breast implants, and, most recently, Vioxx. Richard A. Nagareda’s Mass Torts in a World of Settlement is the first attempt to analyze the lawyer’s role in this world of high-stakes, multibillion-dollar litigation.
These mass settlements, Nagareda argues, have transformed the legal system so acutely that rival teams of lawyers operate as sophisticated governing powers rather than litigators. His controversial solution is the replacement of the existing tort system with a private administrative framework to address both current and future claims. This book is a must-read for concerned citizens, policymakers, lawyers, investors, and executives grappling with the changing face of mass torts.
A leader of a global superpower is betrayed by his mistress, who makes public the sordid details of their secret affair. His wife stands by as he denies the charges. Debates over definitions of moral leadership ensue. Sound familiar? If you guessed Clinton and Lewinsky, try again. This incident involved former Japanese prime minister Sosuke Uno and a geisha.
In Secrets, Sex, and Spectacle, Mark D. West organizes the seemingly random worlds of Japanese and American scandal—from corporate fraud to baseball cheaters, political corruption to celebrity sexcapades—to explore well-ingrained similarities and contrasts in law and society. In Japan and the United States, legal and organizational rules tell us what kind of behavior is considered scandalous. When Japanese and American scandal stories differ, those rules—rules that define what’s public and what’s private, rules that protect injuries to dignity and honor, and rules about sex, to name a few—often help explain the differences. In the cases of Clinton and Uno, the rules help explain why the media didn’t cover Uno’s affair, why Uno’s wife apologized on her husband’s behalf, and why Uno—and not Clinton—resigned.
Secrets, Sex, and Spectacle offers a novel approach to viewing the phenomenon of scandal—one that will be applauded by anyone who has obsessed over (or ridiculed) these public episodes.
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