W&L Law’s Lyman Johnson on Corporate Personhood, Gender and Securities Law

Professor Lyman P. Q. Johnson, the Robert O. Bently Professor of Law at Washington and Lee University, recently published two articles, “Gender and Securities Law in the Supreme Court ” in the Women’s Rights Law Reporter, Vol. 33, 2012, and “Law and Legal Theory in the History of Corporate Responsibility: Corporate Personhood” in 35 Seattle University Law Review 1521 (2012).

“Gender and Securities Law in the Supreme Court,” which Johnson co-wrote with Michelle M. Harner (University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law) and Jason A. Cantone (University of Nebraska at Lincoln),  investigates whether female justices on the United States Supreme Court voted differently than, or otherwise influenced, male justices on securities law issues decided by that court over the four decades spanning the years 1971-2010. To the authors’ knowledge, no prior empirical study has examined gender and judging in the securities area on any court, and only one study has assessed that topic in the related field of corporate law. Download from SSRN.

In “Law and Legal Theory in the History of Corporate Responsibility: Corporate Personhood,” Johnson argues that the decades-long debates about and quest for corporate responsibility, continuing today, drew on and significantly benefited from the emergence of a distinct corporate person that, as a meaningful social-legal actor distinguishable from its constituents would, in some fashion, behave in a socially responsible manner. Thus, emergence of corporate personhood both necessitated and facilitated discussions about corporate responsibility. Download from SSRN.

Call for Papers: Climate Change

This October, the Washington and Lee University School of Law’s Law and History Center, in partnership with Virginia Sea Grant, will host a symposium on Climate Change in the Former Colonies: Challenges of Property and History. Dr. Jill Fraley, the Director of the Law and History Center, is overseeing the symposium details.

Recognizing the unique impact that the colonial legal experience continues to have on Eastern states, the symposium will focus on the application of legal historical research to contemporary problems and opportunities in the areas of policy-making, property rights, and hazard resilience in coastal communities. Panel presentations and potential topics include:

• How the colonial legal experience affects modern property rights and our responsiveness to climate change
• Historical and modern property doctrines—particularly nuisance, zoning, and eminent domain—and their relation to current climate change challenges and policies
• Changing notions of acceptable land use and natural resources
• Environmental hazard resilience policies and opportunities for their enhancement via legal strategies

For details, see the Symposium’s Call for Papers page.