The New Corporate Governance in Theory and Practice

Stephen Bainbridge is the William D. Warren Professor of Law at UCLA, where he currently teaches Business Associations, Unincorporated Business Associations, and Advanced Corporation Law. He previously taught at the University of Illinois Law School, where he received the 'Best Instructor Award' from the Class of 1990. He also taught at the Harvard Law School, La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, and at the Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo. Professor Bainbridge has published several books and over 50 law review articles on a variety of topics, but with a strong emphasis on the law and economics of public corporations. He currently serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of the Journal of Markets and Morality and the Executive Committee of the Federalist Society's Corporations, Securities, & Antitrust Group.

The phenomenon that lies at the heart of this book - which Stephen Bainbridge describes as 'director primacy' - is both real and important. Directors now exercise control over most corporations in a way that directors did not just a few decades ago, and while this director-centered governance structure has been embedded in corporation statutes from the advent of general corporation laws in the 1800s, prior to the 1970s most corporations in the United States combined imperial managers with compliant boards of directors. Bainbridge tells the back story on this 'transformation of corporate governance from managerialism to director primacy,' which is an important aspect of his theory because it supports the view that corporate law has evolved to an efficient state. He offers an updated and comprehensive statement of his theory that will become one of the touchstones of corporate governance debates for many years." D. Gordon Smith Glen L. Farr Professor of Law, Brigham Young University