Bite-Sized Business Law
Looking for the latest in legal business news?
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
A Corporate Government
Is American democracy starting to look more like corporate governance? In this episode we unpack the ways in which the language and logic of the boardroom are reshaping our political system to understand what happens when citizens are treated like shareholders and politicians act more like CEOs. Legal scholars Sarah Haan (Brooklyn Law School), Sergio Alberto Gramitto Ricci (Hofstra Law School), and Christina Sautter (SMU Dedman School of Law) explore the tangled history and present-day stakes of shareholder participation, corporate power, and regulatory capture. Join us as we trace how corporate governance evolved from a participatory ideal to a system that actively discourages engagement, especially when women became the dominant shareholder class. Together, we explore Prof. Ricci’s ‘Vitruvian Shareholder’ and ‘Total Governance’ frameworks, Prof. Sautter’s deep dive into corporate law’s origins in 19th-century New Jersey, and Prof. Haan’s compelling argument that corporate democracy is shaping political authoritarianism in real time. Tune in for a timely conversation on the hidden mechanics of power and the future of democratic participation in corporations and beyond!
Key Points From This Episode:
- How corporations shape our lives, even if we don’t play the stock market.
- Corporations as participatory systems: should we all be engaging?
- 'The Vitruvian Shareholder’ and balancing profit with values.
- ‘Total Governance’ and why shareholder activism is possible (and necessary).
- Shareholder passivity: how it evolved and why it matters.
- How corporate meetings have been designed to discourage participation.
- Gender, power, and the architecture of apathy.
- From robber barons to Delaware: the origins of regulatory capture.
- History repeating itself: how today’s shareholder laws mirror 1900s politics.
- Reasons that shareholder apathy is becoming increasingly inexcusable.
- How corporate power dynamics spill over into other spheres of civic life.
- The real model for authoritarian elections: corporate America.
- Insight into the dangers of modeling political democracy on corporate rule.
- What is so misleading about the term “shareholder democracy”.
- Founding the Center for Retail Investors & Corporate Inclusion.
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
Sergio Alberto Gramitto Ricci on LinkedIn
Sergio Alberto Gramitto Ricci on X
‘Archeology, Language, and Nature of Business Corporations’
'The Shareholder Democracy Lie'
'Delaware’s SB21 Continues 150 Years of Corporate Power and Regulatory Capture'