Kent Greenfield (law professor)

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Kent Greenfield in 2015 Kent Greenfield (cropped).jpg
Kent Greenfield in 2015

Kent Greenfield is an American lawyer, Professor of Law and Law Fund Research Scholar at Boston College, and frequent commentator to The Huffington Post . [1] He is the author of The Myth of Choice: Personal Responsibility in a World of Limits and The Failure of Corporate Law: Fundamental Flaws and Progressive Possibilities, published by University of Chicago Press in 2006, and scholarly articles. [2] He is best known for his "stakeholder" critique of the conventional legal doctrine and theory of corporate law, [3] and for his leadership in a legal battle between law schools and the Pentagon over free speech and gay rights.

Contents

Early life and career

Greenfield spent most of his childhood in Princeton, Kentucky, where his father worked as a Baptist minister and his mother as a school teacher. Greenfield earned an A.B. in economics and history with honors from Brown University in 1984. After graduating, he worked as a corporate policy advisor at Levi Strauss & Co. in San Francisco, and traveled through South America.

Greenfield graduated with honors from the University of Chicago Law School in 1992 where he served as Topics and Comments Editor of the University of Chicago Law Review and became a member of the Order of the Coif. Upon graduation, he briefly practiced at the law firm Covington & Burling in Washington, D.C.

Professional career

Kent Greenfield clerked for Justice David H. Souter of the United States Supreme Court and Judge Levin H. Campbell of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit before joining the law faculty at Boston College in 1995. He was Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Connecticut School of Law in 2002, Visiting Wallace S. Fujiyama Professor at University of Hawai’i William S. Richardson School of Law in 2005, and Visiting Professor of Political Science at Brown University in 2006. From 2007 to 2008, he served as the Distinguished Faculty Fellow at the Center on Corporations, Law and Society, at the Seattle University School of Law. He has also served as chair of the Business Associations Section of the American Association of Law Schools.

In 2002, Greenfield became involved with a number of legal academics who believed the federal government's policy of excluding gay, lesbian, and bisexual people from service in the military under "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" conflicted with law schools' non-discrimination policies. [4] [5] [6] Law schools typically require potential employers to sign pledges that they will not discriminate against students on various grounds. [7] [8] Recruiters from the military services refused to sign those pledges, and under the so-called Solomon Amendment, law schools and their parent universities stood to lose federal funding federal if they failed to permit military recruiters equal access to recruiting facilities. Greenfield founded and served as the president of the Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights (FAIR), an organization of over thirty law schools and other institutions, which was the named plaintiff in a lawsuit to contest the Solomon Amendment. [9] The suit won in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit but was overturned by the Supreme Court on March 6, 2006. Multiple news outlets, including the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and the Wall Street Journal, have covered Kent Greenfield's activism with FAIR. [10] [11] [12]

Scholarship

The Failure of Corporate Law was called "simply the best and most well-reasoned progressive critique of corporate law yet written" by professor Joseph Singer of Harvard Law School. [13] Professor Singer also noted Failure for challenging conventional wisdom and seeking to broaden the scope of corporate management. Greenfield has published journal articles in the Yale Law Journal, [14] the Virginia Law Review, [15] the Boston College Law Review, [16] the George Washington Law Review, [17] the Tulane Law Review, [18] and others. Greenfield has lectured and presented at numerous institutions nationally and internationally, including at Harvard University, Yale University, Brown University, Stanford University, the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, and the London School of Economics.

Greenfield's second book The Myth of Choice, forthcoming in October 2011 from Yale University Press, probes the role of free choice theory in American law, sociology, economics, and political theory. [19] Greenfield uses anecdotes, hard data, and judicial opinions to draw inferences about choice in American society and offer policy recommendations and personal advice. Noah Feldman has written that The Myth of Choice unsettles our beliefs, our judgments, and our values.

Criticism

Greenfield's "stakeholder" critique of the conventional theory of corporate law has been criticized for undercutting economic efficiency. [20] Critics argue that the stakeholder theory of corporate governance would damage the American economy by inducing capital to escape the added costs of accountability to more players than corporate shareholders.

Scholarly publications

Honors and awards

See also

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References

  1. ↑ Greenfield, Kent. "Blogger Page". Huffington Post Archive. Huffington Post. Retrieved 22 June 2011.
  2. ↑ Greenfield, Kent. "SSRN Author Page". Kent Greenfield's Author Page. Social Science Research Network. Retrieved 22 June 2011.
  3. ↑ Greenfield, Kent (4 December 2008). "The Impact of 'Going Private' on Corporate Stakeholders". Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial and Commercial Law. Paper No. 167 (2008). SSRN   1311470.
  4. ↑ J. Fitch, Anita (May 2006). "The Solomon Amendment: a war on campus". CBS. Archived from the original on 2 May 2009. Retrieved 22 June 2011.
  5. ↑ "Summary of FAIR's litigation". law.georgetown.law.edu. Retrieved 16 June 2011.
  6. ↑ Dillon, Sam (20 September 2003). "Law Schools Seek to Regain Ability to Bar Military Recruiters". New York Times. Retrieved 16 June 2011.
  7. ↑ "Boston College Law School Non-Discrimination Policy". Boston College Law School. Archived from the original on 4 September 2011. Retrieved 22 June 2011.
  8. ↑ "Harvard Law School Non-Discrimination Policy". Harvard Law School. Retrieved 22 June 2011.
  9. ↑ Archives (17 November 2003). "Solomon Amendment Raises Questions for Cornell Law". The Cornell Daily Sun. Archived from the original on 22 March 2012. Retrieved 16 June 2011.
  10. ↑ Eliasberg, Kristin (27 November 2005). "The Solomon choice". The Boston Globe. Retrieved 16 June 2011.
  11. ↑ Dillon, Sam (20 September 2003). "Law Schools Seek to Regain Ability to Bar Military Recruiters". New York Times. Retrieved 16 June 2011.
  12. ↑ "Text of the Current Solomon Amendment". Solomon Amendment. Georgetown Law School. Retrieved 22 June 2011.
  13. ↑ Singer, Joseph. "The University of Chicago Press Books". The Failure of Corporate Law: FUNDAMENTAL FLAWS AND PROGRESSIVE POSSIBILITIES. The University of Chicago Press.
  14. ↑ Greenfield, Kent (December 1997). "The Unjustified Absence of Federal Fraud Protection in the Labor Market". Yale Law Journal. 107 (3): 715–789. doi:10.2307/797253. JSTOR   797253. SSRN   41900.
  15. ↑ Greenfield, Kent (November 2001). "Ultra Vires Lives! A Stakeholder Analysis of Corporate Illegality (With Notes on How Corporate Law Could Reinforce International Law Norms)". Virginia Law Review. 87 (7): 1279–1379. doi:10.2307/1073851. JSTOR   1073851. SSRN   253770.
  16. ↑ Greenfield, Kent (March 1998). "The Place of Workers in Corporate Law". The Boston College Law Review. 39: 283–327. SSRN   281621.
  17. ↑ Greenfield, Kent; Peter C. Kostant (November 2003). "An Experimental Test of Fairness Under Agency and Profit Constraints (With Notes on Implications for Corporate Governance)". George Washington Law Review. 71: 983–1024. SSRN   385262.
  18. ↑ Greenfield, Kent (June 2002). "September 11 and the End of History for Corporate Law". Tulane Law Review. 76: 1409–1429.
  19. ↑ Greenfield, Kent. "yalepress.edu". The Myth of Choice. Yale University Press. Retrieved 16 June 2011.
  20. ↑ Dent, George W. (28 March 2009). "Stakeholder Governance: A Bad Idea Getting Worse". Case Western Reserve University School of Law. 48. SSRN   1368947.
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