David Gindis

University of Hertfordshire | UH · Hertfordshire Business School

In 1965, Henry Manne convinced the Association of American Law Schools and the American Economic Association to establish an ad hoc Joint Committee to explore the possibilities of collaborative efforts between economists and legal scholars. This paper examines the origins and activities of this Joint Committee and reveals that its work was far less...

Cooperatives are recognised as important vectors for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals set out in the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development because they promote democracy, ensure fair income distribution, foster social inclusion, and care for the environment. However, the focus of cooperatives on members and local communi...

Contractarians view the corporation as a nexus of contracts, constituted by the express or implied consent of each party to or contracting with it. Strong-form contractarianism takes this claim literally and holds that a corporation can be created and sustained by contract alone, thanks notably to the courts’ supportive gap-filling role. We argue t...

Despite agreement on many points, including our shared insistence that ‘corporation’ and ‘firm’ are different concepts, Jean-Philippe Robé still maintains that they are mutually exclusive: no corporation is a firm, and no firm is a corporation. In contrast, we follow standard nomenclature when we point out that all (business) corporations are firms...

The fear that business corporations have claimed unwarranted constitutional protections which have entrenched corporate power has produced a broad social movement demanding that constitutional rights be restricted to human beings and corporate personhood be abolished. We develop a critique of these proposals organized around the three salient ratio...

Susanna Ripken is an astute and fair-minded observer of today's corporate personality controversy. The premise of her impressive book is that the corporate personhood puzzle is as complicated as it is vexing because corporate personhood is inherently multidimensional, in a way that mirrors the fact that the corporation is at the same time an econom...

The fear that business corporations have claimed unwarranted constitutional protections which have entrenched corporate power has produced a broad social movement demanding that constitutional rights be restricted to human beings and corporate personhood be abolished. We develop a critique of these proposals organized around the three salient ratio...

Massimiliano Vatiero’s "The Theory of Transaction in Institutional Economics: A History" is not a historiographical reconstruction of how various institutionalists came to define the transaction as the legal transfer of property or control rights over resources. Instead, the book expands on Vatiero’s recent proposal for a research agenda in institu...

Jerrold Zimmerman, an Emeritus Professor at the University of Rochester’s Simon School of Business, and Daniel Forrester, a Rochester MBA graduate turned top-level management consultant, are not the first to note the similarities between lawful and unlawful organizations, and their book, "Relentless: The Forensics of Mobsters’ Business Practices,"...

In his recent book on Property, Power and Politics, Jean-Philippe Robé makes a strong case for the need to understand the legal foundations of modern capitalism. He also insists that it is important to distinguish between firms and corporations. We agree. But Robé criticizes our definition of firms in terms of legally recognized capacities on the g...

Contractarians view the corporation as a nexus of contracts, constituted by the express or implied consent of each party to or contracting with it. Strong form contractarianism takes this claim literally and holds that a corporation can be created and sustained by contract alone, thanks notably to the courts' supportive gap-filling role. We argue t...

Jensen and Meckling’s 1976 definition of the firm as a legal fiction which serves as a nexus for contracts between individuals sits well with the Coasean narrative on the firm while at the same time being at odds with it. Available interviews with Jensen shed little light on the origins and meaning of this unusual definition. The article shows how...

This Special Issue revisits the classic question of comparative corporate governance research, namely whether national corporate governance systems are converging. More specifically, it focuses on several 'convergence vectors' which comprise the political, legal, economic and social arrangements that influence or drive the international trajectorie...

The purpose of this symposium is to shed light on the genealogy of the idea of a business corporation, an economic institution which has long been regarded with a mixture of awe and apprehension. Each of the four original contributions addresses the history of some of its key features. In the process, each contributor reveals some of the insights t...

The economic analysis of corporate law applies the concepts and tools of microeconomics to the study of the legal rules, regulations and practices that govern the formation and operation of business corporations, most notably as regards the rights and duties of directors, officers, shareholders, and creditors. The literature has focused mostly on p...

Henry G. Manne described himself as the only full-time missionary for law and economics from the first glimmerings of that subject. This paper deals with the period of Manne's career when he first assumed this role, which coincides with his time at the University of Miami Law School (1974-1980). Prior to Miami, Manne had formulated a vision for law...

Jensen and Meckling’s 1976 definition of the firm as a legal fiction which serves as a nexus for contracts between individuals sits well with the Coasean narrative on the firm while at the same time being at odds with it. Available interviews with Jensen shed little light on the origins and meaning of this unusual definition. The paper shows how th...

Many legal systems have been converging toward a US shareholder-centric model of corporate law and governance. This includes de jure rules relating to derivative enforcement. Despite convergence of the UK system towards the US model, each system continues to diverge as regards levels of shareholder enforcement. This article suggests that this diver...

Many legal systems have been converging toward a US shareholder-centric model of corporate law and governance. This includes de jure rules relating to derivative enforcement. Despite convergence of the UK system towards the US model, each system continues to diverge as regards levels of shareholder enforcement. This article suggests that this diver...

This article is the introductory chapter to a festschrift in honour of Geoff Hodgson. In work spanning four decades, Geoff Hodgson has made many path-breaking contributions to institutional economics, evolutionary economics, economic methodology, the history of economic thought and social theory more broadly. Hodgson’s reputation as a prolific and...

The interview addresses some of the main threads that run through Geoff Hodgson’s work. These include the problems with the neoclassical utility maximization framework, the necessity to include moral motivations in a theory of human behaviour, and the requirement that such a theory be consistent with evidence from evolutionary biology. These requir...

While researchers in business ethics, moral philosophy and jurisprudence have advanced the study of corporate agency, there have been very few attempts to bring together insights from these and other disciplines in the pages of the Journal of Business Ethics. By introducing to an audience of business ethics scholars the work of outstanding authors...

Samuel Bostaph, Andrew Carnegie: An Economic Biography (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015), pp. xii + 125, $75 (hardcover). ISBN: 9780739189832. - David Gindis

Robert Neild (born 1924) has made a major contribution to economics and to peace studies. This paper provides a brief sketch of Neild’s life and work. While noting his research in economic policy and peace studies, this essay devotes more attention to his largely-unnoticed contributions to institutional and evolutionary economics since 1984. These...

The rise of large business corporations in the late nineteenth century compelled many American observers to admit that the nature of the corporation had yet to be understood. Published in this context, Ernst Freund's (1897) little-known The Legal Nature of Corporations was an original attempt to come to terms with a new legal and economic reality....

Robert Neild (born 1924) has made a major contribution to economics and to peace studies. This paper provides a brief sketch of Neild's life and work. While noting his research in economic policy and peace studies, this essay devotes more attention to his largely-unnoticed contributions to institutional and evolutionary economics since 1984. These...

A review of Samuel Bostaph's economic biography of Andrew Carnegie.

Samuel Bostaph, Emeritus Professor of Economics at the University of Dallas, has written an Austrian-flavored biography of Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919), one of the most important figures associated with the rise of big business in America. Contrary to the factual detail pertaining to Carnegie’s rags-to-riches life characteristic of existing volumino...

Social scientists have paid insufficient attention to the role of law in constituting the economic institutions of capitalism. Part of this neglect emanates for inadequate conceptions of the nature of law itself. Spontaneous conceptions of law and property rights that downplay the role of the state are criticized here, because they typically assume...

Social scientists have paid insufficient attention to the role of law in constituting the economic institutions of capitalism. Part of this neglect emanates for inadequate conceptions of the nature of law itself. Spontaneous conceptions of law and property rights that downplay the role of the state are criticized here, because they typically assume...

From the legal point of view, ‘person’ is not co-extensive with ‘human being’. Nor is it synonymous with ‘rational being’ or ‘responsible subject’. Much of the confusion surrounding the issue of the firm's legal personality is due to the tendency to address the matter with only these, all too often conflated, definitions of personhood in mind. On t...

Social scientists have paid insufficient attention to the role of law in constituting the economic institutions of capitalism. Part of this neglect emanates for inadequate conceptions of the nature of law itself. Spontaneous conceptions of law and property rights that downplay the role of the state are criticized here, because they typically assume...

In publications spanning just over three decades, Malcolm Rutherford has been an important contributor to the study of American institutionalism as both a theoretical framework and an intellectual movement. For the last fifteen years or so, Rutherford’s efforts have centered on developing a systematic study of American institutionalism in the inter...

In the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008, the greatest economic disaster since the Great Depression, the cover story of the July 18th 2009 issue of The Economist, entitled “What went wrong with economics,” opened with an unequivocally incriminating statement: “Of all the economic bubbles that have been pricked, few have burst more spectac...

According to the dominant and views of the firm, the firm is a either a fiction or an aggregate. Although legal personality is important in both accounts, everything is said to be achieved by private contract alone and the law's role in creating legal entity status is dismissed. The paper challenges both these aspects by reconsidering an alternativ...

The firm is a real entity and not an imaginary, fictitious or linguistic entity. This implies that the firm as a whole exhibits a sufficient degree of unity or cohesiveness and is durable and persistent through time. The firm is essentially composed of a particular combination of constituents that are bound together by something that acts as an ont...

In this paper, we characterize what we call the "V-network form," a vertical organization distinct from a horizontal network of firms, in which a "hub-firm" organizes and coordinates regular essential operations such as provision, production and distribution between legally independent entities. The hub-firm's economic problem is the provision of i...