Adjacent canonical authorities

The eight-phase timeline highlights the works that define each cycle of the state-competition debate. Other canonical sources supply adjacent pieces of the framework that a complete reading of the field requires.

• Frank H. Easterbrook & Daniel R. Fischel, The Economic Structure of Corporate Law (Harvard Univ. Press 1991), publisher — the canonical contractarian / nexus-of-contracts baseline.
• Victor Brudney, Corporate Governance, Agency Costs, and the Rhetoric of Contract, 85 Colum. L. Rev. 1403 (1985), JSTOR, and Melvin Aron Eisenberg, The Structure of Corporation Law, 89 Colum. L. Rev. 1461 (1989), Berkeley LawCat (PDF), JSTOR — the anti-contractarian / mandatory-law counterweight.
• Jonathan R. Macey & Geoffrey P. Miller, Toward an Interest-Group Theory of Delaware Corporate Law, 65 Tex. L. Rev. 469 (1987), Yale Law School repository (PDF) — the Delaware political-economy account (bar, judiciary, legislature, franchise-tax incentives).
• Michael Klausner, Corporations, Corporate Law, and Networks of Contracts, 81 Va. L. Rev. 757 (1995), JSTOR — the network-effects account explaining Delaware persistence even when substantive differences are modest.
• William W. Bratton, Corporate Law’s Race to Nowhere in Particular, 44 U. Toronto L.J. 401 (1994), Miami repository — the canonical critique of the race metaphor.
• Margaret M. Blair & Lynn A. Stout, A Team Production Theory of Corporate Law, 85 Va. L. Rev. 247 (1999), Vanderbilt repository — the team-production counter-model to shareholder-primacy / director-primacy frames.
• John C. Coffee, Jr., The Future of Corporate Federalism: State Competition and the New Trend Toward De Facto Federal Minimum Standards, 8 Cardozo L. Rev. 759 (1987), Cardozo repository — anticipates Roe’s vertical-federalism turn.
• Michael C. Jensen & William H. Meckling, Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs and Ownership Structure, 3 J. Fin. Econ. 305 (1976), SSRN — the agency-cost formalization underlying every later reference to the Berle-Means problem.
• Henry G. Manne, Mergers and the Market for Corporate Control, 73 J. Pol. Econ. 110 (1965), publisher (DOI) — the market-discipline foundation Winter’s 1977 product-market argument later operationalized.
• William T. Allen, Jack B. Jacobs & Leo E. Strine, Jr., Function Over Form: A Reassessment of Standards of Review in Delaware Corporation Law, 56 Bus. Law. 1287 (2001) — the standards-of-review architecture (business judgment / enhanced scrutiny / entire fairness) that converts state-competition debate into boardroom doctrine.