Incorporating the public interest
Tags: Corporations, Liability, Safety, Thoughts on Lawyering, Tort Reform
Via Instapundit, UCLA Professor Stephen Bainbridge has a post where he advocates that those interested in serving the public interest should become corporate lawyers.
Help businesses grow, so that they can create jobs and provide goods and services that make people’s lives better.
I take a lot of shots at corporations but there is something to what he says. People are well served when corporations do good work; Corporations have proven effective in producing goods and wealth and increasing the quality of life the world over. But that only happens when they behave ethically. Bainbridge’s assertion only works when it is coupled with the kind of lawyering evident in one of the comments:
At Law Day at Northwestern a decade ago, corporate lawyer Marcus Cole (now a professor at Stanford) said that he practiced public interest law every day. If his corporate client was doing the right thing, he helped him do it, thus creating better lives for employees and customers. And if his corporate client was doing the wrong thing, he told him to stop it and do the right thing, thus also serving the public interest.
The problem is, it is frequently possible for a business to be highly profitable by doing the wrong thing. If you keep your company doing the right thing, obeying the law, making safe products, then you will make money and avoid liability. But you can be much more profitable in the short term by abandoning any one of those precepts. And all the better if you can get tort reform installed, because then short-term unethical profit maximization is legally shielded.
This goes to the second aspect of Bainbridge’s theory, that by being a corporate lawyer you help prevent statism. There are essentially two avenues to this goal, obstruction and elimination of need. The former involves throwing every legal challenge you can in the way of government regulation and intrusion, the latter means reducing the need for the same. I honestly have little problem with either of these, but this only works as long as there exists a civil justice system to serve as a check to behavior not in the public interest. Tort reform is essentially an attempt to either eliminate this check, or limited as much as possible. I want to fight statism as much as possible, but to eliminate all checks on such a powerful aspect of society is sheer lunacy.
