Addressing the Tension between Directors' Duties and Shareholder Rights - A Tale of Two Regimes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There is a basic tension inherent in the regulation of corporations between the role to be played by boards and that to be played by shareholders. Boards have the statutory responsibility to manage the business and affairs of the corporation, and owe an express duty to act in the best interests of the corporation. Shareholders, however, are the ultimate ‘owners’ of the corporation, and have the ability to elect and remove directors. Canadian courts and securities regulators have long struggled with this tension in determining the roles to be played by each in transactions that pose the potential for conflicts between and among boards and shareholders, such as transactions involving controlling shareholders or contested change of control transactions. For a number of reasons the Canadian regulatory regime has developed a shareholder-centric model, which tends to foster an emphasis on process and shareholder rights, and stands in sharp contrast to the American regime and its nuanced approach to director duties. We suggest that the way in which the Canadian regulatory regime has developed has displaced important corporate law concepts, negatively impacting the role to be played by boards and leading to shortcomings that have manifested themselves in a number of recent high-profile cases. Our suggestion is a fundamental reconsideration of policy orientation.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.018 | 0.023 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.066 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.015 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".