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Margaret Blair testifies before House Science & Technology Committee
Release Date: May 23, 2008
Margaret Blair, an economist who specializes in corporate law, corporate finance and corporate governance at Vanderbilt, testified before the House Science and Technology Committee on May 22, 2008, as a member of a panel that addressed the topic "American Decline or Renewal? Globalizing Jobs and Technology."
Read Professor Blair's Congressional Testimony
Dr. Blair's testimony addressed the fidiciary obligations of directors, focusing specifically on "a claim often made by the financial press and by members of what a Delaware Court judge has recently called the 'corporate governance industry. ...the claim that corporate directors have a legal duty to 'maximize shareholder value.' What I hope you will take from my testimony today is that this claim is, at best, a misleading overstatement," she said in her opening remarks.
Other members of the panel included Ralph Gomory, former senior vice president for science and technology at IBM and the recently retired president of the Sloan Foundation, and Bruce Scott, the Paul Whiton Cherington Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School.
