Bite-Sized Business Law
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Get a breakdown of the top stories in business law from industry leaders on the front lines with Bite-Sized Business Law. Host Amy Martella takes a closer look at the latest corporate happenings through interviews with the attorneys, legal experts, public figures, and scholars behind the news to distill business law’s biggest stories into bite-sized portions.
This is your chance to go further into the world of business law and stay up to date with legal cases and industry trends.
Corporations impact us all, leading changes that extend far beyond business to shape the economy, public policy, technology, and beyond. Looking at the big picture, Amy discusses not only the underlying issues in business ethics and legal cases leading the biggest stories but also sparks thought-provoking discussions on where the law should be headed.
Amy is the Executive Director of the Corporate Law Center at Fordham University School of Law. Her background ranges from big law to government to tech startups, allowing her to offer an insider’s perspective of the issues that shape corporate actions, large and small. Covering crypto regulation to securities fraud, AI’s impact to Elon Musk’s pay package, Bite-Sized Business Law covers it all with guests of varying viewpoints to provide the nuanced analysis needed to tackle complex problems.
Whether you're looking for the latest in legal insight on intellectual property, mergers and acquisitions, business ethics or legal cases in the business law world, you’ll find it here. Enjoying a thoughtful perspective on the news stories of the moment, Bite-Sized Business Law examines big issues and delivers them in small doses.
Bite-Sized Business Law is a project by the Corporate Law Center at Fordham Law. The Center serves as a hub for scholars, professionals, policymakers, and students to engage in the study, discussion, and debate of current issues in corporate law. The Center focuses on aspects of corporate law, corporate compliance, antitrust law, and securities regulation. Through initiatives like the Mergers and Acquisitions seminar and the Securities Litigation and Arbitration Clinic, students actively engage in real-world research and cases, bridging the gap between classroom learning and practical application in the legal field.
Bite-Sized Business Law
Stephen Bainbridge on The Profit Motive
What responsibility do corporations have to society (if any)? How should they balance environmental, social, and governance factors? Here at Bite-Sized Business Law, we’ve already covered corporate social responsibility and environmental social governance (ESG) from a few different perspectives. Today, we unpack a straightforward defense of shareholder primacy, or in other words, the idea that pursuing any corporate aim that does not maximize shareholder value conflicts with the legal and practical purposes of a corporation. Here to unabashedly defend this concept is one of the foremost American experts in corporate governance and the William D. Warren Distinguished Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law, Stephen Bainbridge. Stephen is a business law professor and one of the most cited scholars in corporate governance law. His new book, The Profit Motive, argues that shareholder wealth maximization is not only “required by law, but what the law ought to require.” In this episode, Stephen addresses questions surrounding corporate purpose using historical, legal, economic, and social perspectives and explains why he believes that shareholder primacy is inevitable. To find out how we can reconcile ESG initiatives with shareholder value creation, tune in today!
Key Points From This Episode:
- The role of the Business Roundtable in prompting Stephen to write The Profit Motive.
- Lessons about shareholder primacy from the Dodge v. Ford case of 1919.
- Whether or not the Milton Friedman Doctrine is still relevant in the 21st century.
- The problem with asking corporations to help governments solve social issues.
- Insight into the extent of greenwashing and the challenges of juggling competing pressures.
- How the story of Etsy illustrates the threat of hedge fund activism.
- Public benefit corporations and whether they alleviate the ESG/shareholder primacy tension.
- Why shareholders can’t change the fundamental nature of the businesses they invest in.
- The realities of “shareholder voice”.
- Ways that organizations are struggling to navigate the political polarization of ESG.
- Stephen’s win-win scenario: give directors wide discretion that they use toward the long-term benefit of shareholders.
- Why Leo E. Strine, Jr. is the perfect example of who The Profit Motive was written for.
- How to reconcile broader social interests with corporate interests: be more like Bill Gates!
- Ways that Stephen subscribes to the “think globally, act locally” philosophy.
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode: