ACLE Seminar: Margaret Blair (Vanderbilt University Law School)
The Property Origins of Corporations
- Date
- 13 May 2025
- Time
- 13:00 -14:15
- Location
- Roeterseilandcampus - building A
- Room
- A3.01 and online (see below)
Abstract
For much of the last five decades, legal scholars have debated and interrogated the idea that corporations are contractual in nature, and that it is useful to think of a corporation as a “nexus” of contracts. The emphasis on aspects of corporate law that are like contracts, and that are intended to solve “principal-agent” problems that arise in contractual relationships, has contributed to a neglect of aspects of corporate law that are more about holding property, and that are difficult to replicate via contract. The corporate form emerged in Europe out of feudal rules for holding property, and was originally applied to types of organizations that today we would call “non-profits,” long before it began to be used to organize and hold assets used for business. The property holding role of corporations remains one of its key functions. In recent decades, the property holding and asset partitioning functions have played an increasingly important role in partitioning and manipulating assets in fields such as securitization, tax avoidance, bankruptcy, and even campaign finance.
Practicalities
This event will be a hybrid event. The seminar will take place in Roeterseiland campus (REC) building A, room number A3.01, and will also be streamed online via Zoom.
About the speaker
Margaret Blair is Professor of Law, Emerita, and Milton R. Underwood Chair in Free Enterprise, Emerita, at Vanderbilt University Law School in Nashville TN, USA. Before coming to Vanderbilt, Prof. Blair was a research economist at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, 1989 – 1999, and Visiting Professor of Law and Research Director of the Georgetown-Sloan Project on Business Institutions at Georgetown University Law Center, 2000 – 2004. Blair earned her Ph. D. in Economics at Yale University, in 1989, and worked as a business journalist in Houston, TX, 1973-1982.
About ACLE
The Amsterdam Center for Law and Economics (ACLE) is a joint initiative of the Faculty of Economics and Business and the Faculty of Law at the University of Amsterdam. The objective of the ACLE is to promote high-quality interdisciplinary research at the intersection between law and economics.