Attorneys, faculty and students gathered on campus and online for the 2026 Fall Business Forum in late September, with academic legal experts from around the country gathering to discuss recent scholarship and issues related to corporate governance.
Under the theme, “Who Governs? Corporate Power and the Limits of Accountability,” legal scholars from around the country undertook topics such as the role of “shame culture” in curtailing corporate misconduct; attacks on shareholder rights and reforms; artificial intelligence and ethics; and challenges facing Black social enterprises in Northeast Portland.
Associate Professor Angela Aneiros, who assembled this year’s forum on behalf of the business law faculty, said that the programming emerged from her own scholarship, which looks at how corporate governance works as a “mechanism of accountability: where existing fiduciary doctrine constrains corporate power effectively, where it falls short, and what institutions, whether insurance markets, social movements, or interstate competition for corporate charters, might close the resulting gap.”
These are particularly pressing questions today, she explains, because of the rapid changes occurring in the legal landscape, many of which have begun to undermine the democratic vision of corporate law, where “shareholders govern, boards answer to investors, and markets discipline misconduct.”
Below are recaps of the day’s panels and presentations.
Shareholder Voice and Democratic Legitimacy
Sergio Alberto Gramitto Ricci, Associate Professor of Law, Hofstra University School of Law, presented a just-published paper that established a “guilt-shame model” of corporate governance: a structure in which law and public opinion jointly constrain management behavior.
“This work is related to broader concepts that philosophers and anthropologists know well but that we don’t necessarily consider,” he said. “Homer wrote that sanction arises from what people say you did… Anthropologist Ruth Benedicts describes a Japanese concept of jicho, in which self-respect is a weightiness that forecasts public verdict before acting.” Together, corporate law and public opinion can work to prevent harmful conduct before it happens.
Christina M. Sautter, Associate Dean for Research and Professor of Law, Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law, discussed corporate disenfranchisement by applying lessons from the parable of the “leopard paradigm” from the classic Italian novel The Leopard. “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” The ability of most shareholders to engage at all is under constant attack. “When reforms happen and smaller shareholders gain more power, the response is to adapt and adopt,” as evidenced by actions such as the Securities and Exchange Commission’s recent proposal to rescind Exchange Act Rule 14a-8, leaving determinations about the role of shareholder proposals to state law and company governing documents.
AI’s Regulatory Blind Spots
Abbey Stemler, Associate Professor of Business Law & Ethics and Weimer Faculty Fellow, Indiana University Kelley School of Business, showed how AI-driven pricing hides on platforms like Instacart, where a Consumer Reports test found shoppers were offered the same basket at five different prices. Prices for the same five items, delivered to the same condominium complex, varied up to 16.7%. She proposed requiring these “walled intermediaries” to make prices visible without an account and easy to share.
Agnieszka McPeak, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Program Innovation, and Professor of Law, Gonzaga University School of Law, argued that, with no national AI law, lawyers’ existing duties of competence, confidentiality, and candor already govern their use of AI, and that they should use it to augment their judgment, not automate it.
Law, Race, and the Limits of Market Freedom
Carliss Chatman, Professor of Law, SMU Dedman School of Law, read Plessy v. Ferguson and Lochner v. New York as two contract cases: one let the state change what a Black passenger’s paid ticket meant, while the other barred the state from limiting an employer’s bargain. That asymmetry, she argued, persists in modern civil rights doctrine.
Angela Addae, Assistant Professor, University of Oregon School of Law, shared research on the Black organizational landscape in Portland, and the nature of many local businesses as social enterprises that serve community needs. This structural “third way” that blends capitalism and cooperation does not always function well in a society that separates business from nonprofits, and in trying to achieve both these organizations instead encounter barriers to each.
Disclosure and Its Discontents
Karen Woody, Professor of Law, Washington and Lee University School of Law, offered a three-part taxonomy of materiality (substantive, regulatory, and procedural) and argued that ESG information satisfies all three.
Nicole G. Iannarone, Associate Professor of Law, Drexel University Kline School of Law, presenting work with Gina-Gail S. Fletcher of Duke Law School, challenged the view that mandatory shareholder arbitration favors companies, arguing that confidential, non-precedential rulings may instead raise the cost of resolving disputes.
