The Contrarian
Stephen Bainbridge vs. Lucian Bebchuk: an intellectual battle

“Yes, accountability is important, but there are countervailing advantages to authority that people like Lucian Bebchuk don’t give credence to,” says Stephen Bainbridge, a corporate law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who’s waged an intellectual battle against Bebchuk in law reviews and on his well-read blog. “He’s too caught up with this image of American businessmen and women as rapacious people who must be controlled by activist shareholders.”

A graduate of Western Maryland College, Bainbridge, 48, got a master’s in biophysical inorganic chemistry at University of Virginia before checking in to UVA law school in 1982. “After a series of unfortunate lab accidents, my research adviser suggested I might be better off in a field that didn’t involve potentially explosive chemicals,” he says. Unlike Bebchuk, Bainbridge spent a two-year stint in practice, at Arnold & Porter LLP’s Washington office. There, he worked on a team supporting a Business Roundtable lobbying effort. In 1988, he joined the faculty at the University of Illinois College of Law. He moved to UCLA in 1996. “As I started doing my own research, I began to understand that the issue Berle and Means raised in the 1930s — that the separation between ownership and control is a problem we need to fix — is really the thing that makes the American corporation, which I regard as the greatest economic engine in our history, possible.”

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