From Corporate Law to Corporate Governance
Ronald Gibson nous offre un beau texte intitulé : « From Corporate Law to Corporate Governance » (Law Working Paper No. 324/2016, septembre 2016). L’auteur n’est plus à présenter et le thème qu’il aborde rappelle que le droit des sociétés par actions ne peut être séparé du droit de la gouvernance d’entreprise. Ce lien entre les deux reflète les facteurs économiques et financiers qu’il apparaît fondamentaux de maîtriser aujourd’hui pour bien comprendre les modèles de gouvernance et leurs implications.
In the 1960s and 1970s, corporate law and finance scholars recognized that neither discipline was doing a very good job of explaining how corporations were really structured and performed. For legal scholars, Yale Law School professor and then Stanford Law School dean Bayless Manning confessed that corporate law has “nothing left but our great empty corporation statutes -towering skyscrapers of rusted girders, internally welded together and containing nothing but wind.” Michael Jensen and William Meckling made a similar comment with respect to finance.
The theory of the firm was an “empty box” or a “black box” that provided no theory about “how the conflicting objectives of the individual participants are brought into equilibrium.” The result of Jensen and Meckling’s seminal reframing of corporate law in agency cost terms, and so into something far broader than disputes over statutory language, was that both Manning’s empty skyscrapers and Jensen and Meckling’s empty box began to be filled. The essay proceeds by tracking how corporate law became corporate governance – from legal rules standing alone to legal rules interacting with non-legal processes and institutions – through three somewhat idiosyncratically chosen but nonetheless related examples of how we have come to usefully complicate the inquiry into the structures that bear on corporate decision-making and performance.
À la prochaine…
Ivan Tchotourian