The End of Corporate Law

This article examines how corporate law, specifically the rules applicable to the allocation of power among directors, executives, and shareholders, has become ineffective as a means of regulating corporate power. I argue that in the course of the twentieth century corporate law has been used first to legitimate corporate power and then to exempt those exercising it from liability. The article focuses on jurists’ responses to the growth of the publicly held corporation in the early twentieth century, their midcentury attempts to create corporate democracy, and their ultimate turn to markets as the means of regulating corporate power.