Washington and Lee law professor Christopher Bruner has published an article titled “Is the Corporate Director’s Duty of Care a ‘Fiduciary’ Duty? Does It Matter?” in the Wake Forest Law Review. From the abstract:
While reference to “fiduciary duties” (plural) is routinely employed in the United States as a convenient short-hand for a corporate director’s duties of care and loyalty, other common-law countries generally treat loyalty as the sole “fiduciary duty.” This contrast prompts some important questions about the doctrinal structure for duty of care analysis adopted in Delaware, the principal jurisdiction of incorporation for U.S. public companies. Specifically, has the evolution of Delaware’s convoluted and problematic framework for evaluating disinterested board conduct been facilitated by styling care a “fiduciary” duty? If so, then how should Delaware lawmakers and judges respond moving forward?
In this Essay I argue that styling care a “fiduciary” duty has impacted Delaware’s duty of care analysis in ways that are not uniformly positive. Historically, loyalty has been aggressively enforced, while care has hardly been enforced at all – the former approach aiming to deter conflicts of interest through probing analysis of “entire fairness,” while the latter aims to promote entrepreneurial risk-taking through a hands-off judicial posture embodied in the business judgment rule. Conflation of these differing concepts as “fiduciary duties,” however, has facilitated a tendency toward over-enforcement of care, periodically threatening to impair entrepreneurial risk-taking until arrested by a countervailing legislative or judicial response. Additionally, their conflation threatens to erode the duty of loyalty by fueling the contractarian argument that the sole utility of such “fiduciary duties” is to fill contractual gaps, and that corporations therefore ought to possess latitude to “opt out” of loyalty to the degree already permitted with respect to care.
Prof. Bruner’s new article is available for download from SSRN. In addition, Prof. Bruner has also published a book review of Directors’ Duties and Shareholder Litigation in the Wake of the Financial Crisis by Joan Loughrey (ed). The review appears in the Cambridge Law Journal and is available for download for the journal’s website.
