Then and Now: Professor Berle and the Unpredictable Shareholder

This article is published in a special symposium edition on the work of Adolf Berle, which includes papers from a conference, In Berle’s Footsteps, held in November 2009 to celebrate the launch of the Adolf A. Berle, Jr. Center on Corporations, Law and Society.

Shareholders, and the relationship between shareholders and management, lay at the heart of Professor Berle’s scholarship. The goal of this Article is to compare the image of shareholders emerging from The Modern Corporation and Private Property and the Berle/Dodd debate with a range of contemporary visions of the shareholder that underpin some international regulatory responses to recent financial debacles, from Enron to the current global financial crisis. As the Article discusses, these recent developments in the era of financial crises, including the US shareholder empowerment debate, have prompted a re-evaluation of the traditional image of the shareholder and the role of the shareholder in the modern corporation that emerged in Professor Berle’s work.