Anti-Primacy: Sharing Power in American Corporations

Prominent theories of corporate governance frequently adopt primacy as an organizing theme. Shareholder primacy is the oldest and most used of this genre. Director primacy has grown dramatically, presenting in at least two distinct versions. A variety of alternatives have followed—primacy for CEOs, employees, creditors. All of these theories can’t be right. This article asserts that none of them are. The alternative developed here is one of shared power among the three actors named in corporations statutes with judges tasked to keep all players in the game. The debunking part of the article demonstrates how the suggested parties lack legal or economic characteristics necessary for primacy. The prescriptive part of the article suggests that we can better understand the multiple uses of primacy if we recognize that law is not prescribing first principles for governance of firms, but rather providing a structure that works given the economic and business environment in place for modern corporations where there is separation of function and efficiencies of managers as a starting point. Thus the familiar statutory language putting all power in the board must be read against the reality of the discontinuous nature of the board (and shareholder) involvement in governance. Corporate governance documents of the largest American corporations, as discussed in the article, are consistent with this reality, assigning management to officers and using verbs like oversee, review and counsel as the director functions. The last part examines dispute resolution and the role of judges in such a world, with a particular focus on the shareholder/director boundary. At this boundary there are two distinct judicial roles, the traditional role focusing on use of fiduciary duty to check conflict and other director incapacity and the less-recognized role of protecting shareholder self-help. In this more modern context shareholders, because of market and economic developments, are able to effectively participate in governance in a way that wasn’t practical three decades ago, when the key Delaware legal doctrines were taking root. What is particularly interesting here is how courts, commentators and institutional investors act in a way that is consistent with a shared approach to power, as opposed to the primacy of any of the theories initially suggested