Democratizing Public
Benefit
Joseph Pileri,
Georgetown University Law Center
The
burgeoning fields of social enterprise and impact investing involve businesses
operating for the creating of some “public benefit.” On the one hand, new
corporate forms like the benefit corporation allow for-profit enterprises to
pursue profit alongside the creation of a public benefit. Impact investing, on the other, refers to
transactions that have an explicit goal of furthering some public benefit. The
intended benefit can be on a specific set of beneficiaries or on the public as
a whole. How a public benefit is created and measured is very much still in
question. Efforts to define these so far fail to include the participation of
stakeholders and intended beneficiaries in the pursuit of this public benefit.
Many argue that
economic justice requires that economic activity be democratized in addition to
distributive measures. Stakeholders must
participate in economic production. In the case of both benefit corporations
and impact investing, however, such decisions are left to traditional corporate
governance mechanisms – boards of directors, company officers, and shareholders
– or to the parties to the transaction. In this paper, I suggest a model in which stakeholders and beneficiaries
are directly involved in the decision-making process of these companies and
deals.
Another Reason to Revisit the 1980
Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act:
Congress’s Approval of a “Unique” Jurisdictional Agreement Created
“Divisive Controversy” and “Ill-Will”
Nicole B.
Friederichs, Suffolk University Law School
On the first
day of hearings before the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs in
1980, Maine’s Attorney General described the proposed jurisdictional agreement
between the State and the Maine Indian tribes, as one that would “avoid … the
types of divisive [sic] controversy that has so marked tribal/State relations
in the Western States and has resulted in so much litigation and ill-will.”
Since the adoption of that agreement, Maine and the four tribes located within
its territorial boundaries have litigated the Maine Indian Claims Settlement
Act (MICSA) over ten times and their relationship is poor. This article builds
upon research sponsored by the Maine Indian Tribal State Commission (MITSC),
and conducted by Suffolk’s Indigenous Peoples Rights Clinic; namely archival
research on the drafting of MICSA, the federal law enacted to settle land
claims brought by the Passamaquoddy Tribe and Penobscot Nation. One of the
primary findings was that the principle of inherent tribal sovereignty was
rarely relied upon during the drafting of MICSA. Instead, the Tribes was
described by some as sub-divisions of the State. This article argues that this
disregard of inherent tribal sovereignty is a reason why there has been such
“divisive controversy” since MICSA’s adoption.