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The Court’s Hobby Lobby decision, as noted in post-decision commentary (see, e.g., Sarah Hahn‘s guest post earlier this week), apparently relies in part on the fact that shareholders (and, potentially, employees and other relevant constituents of the firm) know that the firm has sincerely held religious beliefs and what those beliefs mean for business operations and legal compliance.  The Court does not directly address this in its opinion.  Rather, the opinion includes various references to owner engagement that imply buisness owner awareness.  The Court states:

  • For-profit corporations, with ownership approval, support a wide variety of charitable causes . . . . (Op. 23, emphasis added)

  • “So long as its owners agree, a for-profit corporation may take costly pollution-control and energy conservation measures that go beyond what the law requires.” (Op. 23, emphasis added)

In making these statements and reasoning through this part of the opinion, the Court relies on state corporate law principles and allusions.

Importantly, the Court also indicates its views on how the policy underlying the RFRA favors an interpretation that includes corporations as persons:

An established body of law specifies the rights and obligations of the people (including shareholders, officers, and employees) who are associated with a corporation in one way or another. When rights, whether constitutional or statutory, are extended to corporations, the purpose is to protect the rights of these people. For example, extending Fourth Amendment protection to corporations protects the  privacy interests of employees and others associated with the company. Protecting corporations from government seizure of their property without just compensation protects all those who have a stake in the corporations’ financial well-being. And protecting the free-exercise rights of corporations like Hobby Lobby, Conestoga, and Mardel protects the religious liberty of the humans who own and control those companies.

(Op. 18, emphasis in original)  Note how the last sentence reduces the protected category of persons under the RFRA to those who “own and control” the firm at issue.  This represents an interesting narrowing of constituency groups from the more inclusive treatment in the first sentence of the paragraph.  The reason for this narrowing may be (likely is) a practical one, evidencing judicial restraint.  The plaintiffs in the Hobby Lobby actions were those who owned or controlled the corporation, and the decision likely will be limited in its application accordingly.

Given these breadcrumbs from the Court’s opinion, should disclosure to shareholders or other constituencies be required, and if so, where would those disclosure rules reside as a matter of positive law?  A blog post may be the wrong place to begin to address this issue (which is admittedly complex and involves, potentially, areas of law somewhat unfamiliar to me).  But indulge me in a thought experiment here for a minute.

Let me start by publicly announcing a forthcoming panel discussion at this year’s AALS Annual Meeting, tentatively titled “The Role of Corporate Personality Theory in Corporate Regulation.” As the organizer of this panel, I am extremely grateful to Stephen Bainbridge, Margaret Blair, Lisa Fairfax, and Elizabeth Pollman for agreeing to participate in what promises to be a thoroughly enjoyable discussion. For those of you who like to plan ahead, the panel is scheduled for Monday, Jan. 5, from 2:10 to 3:10 (part of the Section on Socio-Economics Annual Meeting program).

Given Stephen Bainbridge’s pending participation, I was interested to read a couple of his posts from a few weeks ago wherein he asked (here), “When was the last time anybody said anything new about corporate personhood?” and concluded (here), “I struggle to come up with anything new to say about the issue, when people have been correctly disposing of the legal fiction of corporate personality for at least 126 years!”

While I understand that asserting there is nothing new to say on a topic is not necessarily the same thing as saying it is not worth talking about, I still find myself motivated to explain why I think talking about corporate personality theory continues to constitute valuable scholarly activity (and, yes, I will connect all this to Hobby Lobby).

First of all, some qualifiers: (1) I distinguish corporate personality theory from corporate personhood because a thumbs up on corporate personhood (i.e., acknowledging that corporations can sue and be sued, etc.) still leaves a number of important questions regarding the nature of this “person,” which I believe theories of corporate personality (typically: artificial entity theory, real-entity theory, or aggregate theory) are well-positioned to answer. (2) While theories of corporate governance (typically: shareholder primacy, director primacy, or team-production theory) are distinct from theories of corporate personality, I believe there are at least some legal issues that are profitably analyzed by viewing both sets of theories as constituting a pool from which to choose an answer. With those introductory propositions in place, here are three reasons why I believe corporate personality theory still matters:

Building on Elizabeth Pollman’s list, I have compiled post-opinion posts on Burwell v. Hobby Lobby by corporate law professors.  I imagine this list is incomplete and am happy to update the list.

Stephen Bainbridge (UCLA) (here, here, and here)

Lawrence Cunningham (George Washington) (here and here)

John Fershee (West Virginia)

Kent Greenfield (Boston College)

Sarah Hahn (Idaho)

Joan Heminway (Tennessee)

Lyman Johnson (W&L and St. Thomas-MN)

Elizabeth Pollman (Loyola-Los Angeles)

Brian Quinn (Boston College)

Usha Rodrigues (Georgia)

Anne Tucker (Georgia State)

Thanks to all for the interesting posts.  I am sure there will be more to come, followed by a flurry of articles in the fall and spring cycles.  Looking forward to reading more. 

Earlier this week I asked Professor Lyman Johnson if he would care to share his thoughts on the Hobby Lobby case with us because I had so enjoyed his thoughtful posts on the Conglomerate before the decision was issued (see here and here).  Professor Johnson’s contribution is below.

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             I thank the good folks here at the Business Law Prof Blog for inviting me to share some thoughts about the Supreme Court’s decision in the high-profile Hobby Lobby cases.  The Court held that a closely-held business corporation was a “person” under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), that such a for-profit corporation could indeed “exercise religion” under that Act, and that as applied to closely-held corporations the contraceptive mandate promulgated under the Affordable Care Act violated RFRA.  Two days after the controversial decision, the sky has not fallen, although dire forecasts to that effect still abound.  My post today makes a simple but basic point:  quite apart from the decision’s implications for religious liberty in the corporate realm – no small thing, to be sure – and notwithstanding the still unfolding legal and political fallout, Hobby Lobby immediately became a landmark decision in which the Supreme Court spoke in…

So, the Hobby Lobby decision is out.  I wrote my thoughts here and here after oral arguments, and I think the court got this wrong.  Not the concept, but the execution. 

Rather than try to rehash what is now done, I will pose a different question: How does one reconcile this religious exercise with the profit-seeking mandate that the Delaware court imposes from time to time.  As Chancellor Chandler noted in eBay v. Newmark (more here):

The corporate form in which craigslist operates, however, is not an appropriate vehicle for purely philanthropic ends, at least not when there are other stockholders interested in realizing a return on their investment. 

Note that “purely” is not an entirely accurate modifier here.  Craigslist made a profit and had some ventures that raised money.  They just did not monetize the majority of the endeavors

So what about an entity that operates for purely religious ends? Hobby Lobby and those similarly situated seem to be saying that religion trumps profit (see, e.g., Chik_Fil-A closing on Sundays).  This is not the argument that our business model is stronger because of our choices, which I have argued before should be protected, but this is saying we…

From Anne Tucker (who is off filming academic videos this afternon–whatever that means!):

Today’s Supreme Court decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores Inc. et al. exempted closely held corporations from complying with the contraceptive mandate in the Affordable Care Act.  There is plenty to debate about the opinion—corporations are persons under RFRA and can exercise religion as well as a host of choice quotes from the SCOTUS about “modern corporate law”—and I will leave that fun for another time.  I want to highlight three initial reactions:    

  1. There is no definition of closely held in today’s opinion.  Will we draw lines based on state corporate codes and elections to be S corp?  Will we rely upon the IRS definition of a closely held company?  It is unclear.  There is NOTHING in the opinion that prevents today’s ruling from applying to publically traded, closely held corporations like Wal-Mart.  The line drawing engaged by the SCOTUS in Hobby Lobby is not such a neatly drawn, tight circle, but is a wide net.  I discussed this briefly in a HuffPost Live segment earlier today—here.
  2. This is a statutory, not a constitutional ruling.  On its face.  Of course Congress could amend

…

Over at realclearpolitics.com, a number of leading thinkers, including some leading business law folks such as Richard Epstein and Jonathan Adler, among others, have signed a public statement: Freedom to Marry, Freedom to Dissent: Why We Must Have Both.  Following is a portion of the statement:

The last few years have brought an astonishing moral and political transformation in the American debate over same-sex marriage and gay equality. This has been a triumph not only for LGBT Americans but for the American idea. But the breakthrough has brought with it rapidly rising expectations among some supporters of gay marriage that the debate should now be over. As one advocate recently put it, “It would be enough for me if those people who are so ignorant or intransigent as to still be anti-gay in 2014 would simply shut up.”

The signatories of this statement are grateful to our friends and allies for their enthusiasm. But we are concerned that recent events, including the resignation of the CEO of Mozilla under pressure because of an anti-same-sex- marriage donation he made in 2008, signal an eagerness by some supporters of same-sex marriage to punish rather than to criticize or to persuade

…

In my article, “The Silent Role of Corporate Theory in the Supreme Court’s Campaign Finance Cases,” 15 U. Pa. J. Const. L. 831, I criticized the Supreme Court justices for failing to acknowledge the role of competing conceptualizations of the corporation in their corporate political speech cases.  I noted, however, that former Chief Justice Rehnquist was arguably the lone modern justice to deserve at least some praise in this area.

Justice Rehnquist’s stand-alone dissent in Bellotti provides arguably the sole example in these opinions of a Justice affirmatively adopting a theory of the corporation for purposes of determining the constitutional rights of corporations–though not via the express adoption of one of the traditionally recognized theories. Specifically, Justice Rehnquist relied on Justice Marshall’s Dartmouth College opinion to conclude that: “Since it cannot be disputed that the mere creation of a corporation does not invest it with all the liberties enjoyed by natural persons . . . our inquiry must seek to determine which constitutional protections are ‘incidental to its very existence.”’ Thus, while it may be true that “a corporation’s right of commercial speech . . . might be considered necessarily incidental to the business of a commercial corporation[…