To what extent did English law facilitate trade before the advent of general incorporation and modern securities law? This is the question at the heart of Capitalism before Corporations. It examines the extent to which legal institutions of the Regency period, especially Lord Eldon's Chancellorship, were sympathetic to the needs of merchants and willing to accommodate their changing practices and demands within established legal doctrinal frameworks and contemporary political economic thought. In so doing, this book probes at the heart of modern debates about equity, trusts, insolvency, and the justifiability of corporate privileges. Corporations are an integral part of modern life. We bank with corporations, we usually buy our groceries from them, and they provide us with most news and media. We take it for granted too that most large-scale business, and even much small-scale business, is carried out by corporations. Things were not always so. Televantos considers the Bubble Act of 1720, which criminalised the forming of corporations without a Royal Charter or Act of Parliament, its repeal in 1825, and the subsequent impact. Much of the modernisation of Britain's industry therefore took place before general incorporation was allowed. Unaided by statute, traders had to create business organisations using the basic building blocks of private law: trusts, partnership, and agency.
Recent high-profile corporate scandals--such as those involving Enron in the United States, Yukos in Russia, and Livedoor in Japan--demonstrate challenges to legal regulation of business practices in capitalist economies. Setting forth a new analytic framework for understanding these problems, Law and Capitalism examines such contemporary corporate governance crises in six countries, to shed light on the interaction of legal systems and economic change. This provocative book debunks the simplistic view of law's instrumental function for financial market development and economic growth. Using comparative case studies that address the United States, China, Germany, Japan, Korea, and Russia, Curtis J. Milhaupt and Katharina Pistor argue that a disparate blend of legal and nonlegal mechanisms have supported economic growth around the world. Their groundbreaking findings show that law and markets evolve together in a \"rolling relationship,\" and legal systems, including those of the most successful economies, therefore differ significantly in their organizational characteristics. Innovative and insightful, Law and Capitalism will change the way lawyers, economists, policy makers, and business leaders think about legal regulation in an increasingly global market for capital and corporate governance.
Fiduciary law is important transnationally, particularly in the context of global capitalism. Fiduciary law's characteristic regard for others offers a response to the pursuit of unconstrained self-interest in business and government relations, potentially implicating the exercise of both private and public power. Stakeholders have invoked it not only to address traditional private law matters, but also to enjoin transnational corporations to respect human rights, to combat public corruption, and to constrain national governments to respect the rights of Indigenous Peoples. This book focuses on the processes through which conceptualizations of fiduciary relationships and fiduciary norms may (or may not) settle transnationally - or become unsettled - as actors invoke fiduciary norms to address problems in different domains, including across borders. It identifies complications and challenges of any transnational convergence of fiduciary norms that fiduciary theorists often elide. This book is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core. Worked examples or Exercises
Because the rules of the game – including labor laws, pension laws, corporate laws and tax laws – have been crafted by those at the top.
At the turn of the twentieth century American politics underwent a profound change, as both regulatory minimalism and statist command were rejected in favor of positive government engaged in both regulatory and distributive roles. Through a fresh examination of the judicial, legislative, and political aspects of the antitrust debates in the years from 1890-1916, Martin Sklar shows that the arguments did not arise simply because of competition versus combination, but because of the larger question of the proper relations between government and the market and between state and society.
Treasury Department uses loopholes in tax bill to gift huge corporations another break worth tens of billions.
Between the 1880s and 1920s, a broad coalition of American dissidents, which included rabble-rousing cartoonists, civil liberties lawyers, socialist detectives, union organizers, and revolutionary martyrs, forged a culture of popular radicalism that directly challenged an emergent corporate capitalism. Monopoly capitalists and their allies in government responded by expanding conspiracy laws and promoting conspiracy theories in an effort to destroy this anti-capitalist movement. The result was an escalating class conflict in which each side came to view the other as a criminal conspiracy. In this detailed cultural history, Michael Mark Cohen argues that a legal, ideological, and representational politics of conspiracy contributed to the formation of a genuinely revolutionary mass culture in the United States, starting with the 1886 Haymarket bombing. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources, The Conspiracy of Capital offers a new history of American radicalism and the alliance between the modern business corporation and national security state through a comprehensive reassessment of the role of conspiracy laws and conspiracy theories in American social movements. 30 black & white illustrations
An investigation by USA TODAY, The Arizona Republic and the Center for Public Integrity
Globalization of trade and central banking has propelled private corporations to positions of power and control never before seen in human history. Under
2017 marked the seventy-fifth anniversary of Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, a work acknowledged as one of the most insightful books written in the twentieth century. It retains a contemporary quality, and still invites criticisms, new interpretations, and extensions and across disciplines.This book, in addition to re-examining Schumpeter's seminal work and undertaking a twenty-first-century update of its main themes, brings together leading social scientists to provide contemporary amendments, extensions - or eventually refutations - of key elements of Schumpeter's vision and thesis. Issues covered include a new take on creative destruction, the contours of a theory of innovative enterprise, finance and financialisation, a critique of the secular stagnation thesis, Schumpeter's contributions to a theory of the entrepreneurial state, his conception of socialism and its current relevance for understanding the 'China model' as well as a rekindling of his democracy thesis for our times. Bringing together leading international contributors, this book provides fresh perspectives on ideas that continue to be hugely relevant to contemporary social sciences and a guide for understanding the current tensions among capitalism, the state and democracy. These chapters will be of interest to economists, social scientists and anyone with an interest in modern capitalism.
When companies move money to tax havens, they don't build factories or hire workers.
Georgia’s law unethically constricts the fundamental rights of democracy based on a lie. It’s drawn criticism from politicians and corporations that veers from righteous indignation to incoherence.
Voters have heard that Bernie Sanders is a socialist, but many fail to realize that he is a democratic socialist …
The walk from my home on top of San Francisco’s Nob Hill down to my studio at its bottom is a lesson in class and status in America. As each few blocks take me down another rung on the socioeconomic …
From organizing workers to preventing war, journalist Chris Hedges argues that liberals have surrendered the good fights to corporations and ruling powers. In Death of the Liberal Class, Hedges slams the Democratic Party, churches, unions, the media and academia for failing Americans.
