The Public's Companies

57 Pages Posted: 27 Apr 2022 Last revised: 22 Mar 2023

Date Written: April 22, 2022

Abstract

This Article uses a series of survey studies to consider how public understandings of public and private companies map into urgent debates over the role of the corporation in American society. Does a social-media company, for example, owe it to its users to follow the free-speech principles embodied in the First Amendment? May corporate managers pursue environmental, social, and governance (ESG) policies that could reduce short-term or long-term profits? How should companies respond to political pushback against their approaches to free expression or ESG? The studies’ results are consistent with understandings that both public and private companies have greater public obligations than they do as a matter of law, including obligations to respect customer and employee speech and political rights. They are also consistent with a view that business decisions by both public and private firms may credit non-shareholder interests—those of employees, the environment, or the community—over shareholder-value maximization. Together, these results point to the potential of public corporate-law understanding to influence contemporary debates by reinforcing, or countering, political actors’ policy agendas.

Keywords: corporate governance, public/private securities regulation, free speech, stakeholder governance

Suggested Citation

Jennings, Andrew, The Public's Companies (April 22, 2022). Fordham Journal of Corporate and Financial Law, Vol. 29, No. 1, 2023, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4083832 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4083832

Andrew Jennings (Contact Author)

Emory University School of Law ( email )

1301 Clifton Road
Atlanta, GA 30322
United States

HOME PAGE: http://andrewkjennings.com

Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?

Paper statistics

Downloads
242
Abstract Views
1,599
Rank
251,482
PlumX Metrics