The following paragraph is an excerpt from Micro-Symposium on Competing Theories of Corporate Governance, 62 UCLA L. Rev. Disc. 66, which can be found online (here) and is also available via Westlaw.

On Friday, April 11, and Saturday, April 12, 2014, the UCLA School of Law Lowell Milken Institute for Business Law and Policy sponsored a conference on competing theories of corporate governance…. This conference provided a venue for distinguished legal scholars to define the competing models, critique them, and explore their implications for various important legal doctrines. In addition to an oral presentation, each conference participant was invited to contribute a very brief essay of up to 750 words (inclusive of footnotes) on their topic to this micro-symposium being published by the UCLA Law Review’s online journal, Discourse. These essays provide a concise but powerful overview of the current state of corporate governance thinking….

The included essays:

  • Stephen M. Bainbridge, An Abridged Case For Director Primacy
  • George S. Georgiev, Shareholder vs. Investor Primacy in Federal Corporate Governance
  • David Millon, Team Production Theory: A Critical Appreciation
  • Usha Rodrigues, David and Director Primacy
  • Stefan J. Padfield , Citizens United, Concession Theory and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)
  • Christopher M. Bruner, Corporate Governance Theory and Review of Board Decisions
  • Robert T. Miller, The Board Veto and Efficient Takeovers
  • Lisa M. Fairfax, Toward a Theory of Shareholder Leverage
  • Iman Anabtawi, Shadow Directors
  • Michael D. Guttentag, Shareholder Primacy and the Misguided Call for Mandatory Political Spending Disclosure by Public Companies
  • James J. Park, Averages or Anecdotes? Assessing Recent Evidence on Hedge Fund Activism

Shameless self-promotion excerpt:

In extremely truncated form, my argument proceeds as follows. While both director primacy and shareholder primacy differ in terms of who should control corporate decisionmaking, both identify shareholder wealth maximization as the positive and normative goal of corporate governance. In addition, while team production theory tempts advocates of CSR, in the end it also falls short of supporting mandatory CSR. As for the theories of corporate personality, both aggregate theory and real entity theory view the corporate entity as standing in the shoes of natural persons to some meaningful degree (typically the shareholders in the case of aggregate theory and the board of directors in the case of real entity theory), thereby providing corporations a basis for resisting government regulation. Only concession theory, which views the corporation as fundamentally a creature of the state created to serve public ends, can support mandatory CSR as a normative matter. Thus, the advocates of mandatory CSR should use concession theory, with its emphasis on the public roots of corporations, to provide the compelling narrative necessary to move our corporate law beyond its exclusive focus on shareholder wealth maximization.

Stefan J. Padfield , Citizens United, Concession Theory and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), 62 UCLA L. Rev. Disc. 84, 86 (2014).