Corporate Prophet: An Introduction to Susan Stabile's A Catholic Vision of the Corporation

Publication Title

Seattle Journal for Social Justice

Document Type

Article

Abstract

Public trust in business has waned as large-scale failures of corporate accountability and governance have rocked domestic and international marketplaces in the past several years. Efforts to bolster trust and improve corporate governance have received substantial public attention and have stemmed from many sources, including new regulatory initiatives and enhanced attention to governance by both public and private corporations in an attempt to stave off further regulation. At the same time, corporate law scholars have seized upon this milieu in order to reinvigorate scholarly debates about the roles and purposes of corporations in society.

Professor Susan Stabile, a scholar of considerable note in both corporate and employee benefits law, has tackled this issue from a new perspective. In the article that follows, Professor Stabile asserts that a communitarian vision of the corporation that emphasizes the corporation's social responsibilities is one that is authentically Catholic. She draws upon Catholic Social Thought to defend her description of this vision of the corporation and to argue that it is the normative vision required to cure what ails corporate law and governance today.