The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu The leading online blog in the fields of corporate governance and financial regulation. Thu, 27 Aug 2026 15:43:45 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.5.10 https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/cropped-photography-4-e1706898544564-1-32x32.png Deprogramming Corporations – The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu 32 32 Deprogramming Corporations https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2026/08/26/deprogramming-corporations/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=deprogramming-corporations https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2026/08/26/deprogramming-corporations/#respond Wed, 26 Aug 2026 11:31:30 +0000 https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/?p=183494?d=20260825223208EDT Posted by Mariana Pargendler (Harvard Law School), on Wednesday, August 26, 2026
Editor's Note:

Mariana Pargendler is the Beneficial Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. This post is based on her working paper.

The 2024 and 2025 reforms of Delaware corporate law passed with unprecedented speed, and Texas and Nevada now compete in an overt race to laxity. Whatever one makes of these developments, most of the existing contestation focuses on the effects on agency costs and shareholder value. That is the vocabulary prevailing frameworks make available, and it is a weak hand to play when stock prices are rising. In a new essay, Deprogramming Corporations, I examine how this impoverished vocabulary is a product of the dominant lenses I call “programming”: prevailing analytical frameworks that artificially narrow corporate law’s scope in ways that misdescribe real-world developments and foreclose normative contestation.

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