Meinhard v. Salmon found a heightened duty of loyalty among joint adventurers: the duty of finest loyalty. Famously, Chief Judge (and later, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court) Cardozo wrote that trustees are held to “not honesty alone, but the punctilio of an honor the most sensitive.” Professor Christine Hurt comments on the missing history surrounding the relationship of Meinhard and Salmon and the condition of the United States at the time the underlying transactions took place. Professor Dalia Mitchell, rewriting the Meinhard opinion as Justice Mitchell, reaches the same conclusion but through vulnerability theory and the feminist widening the lens method. In doing so, she considered the history, context, and persons affected by the outcome in a way unique to the rewritten opinion. The original opinion is critiqued for essentially providing the utmost care or no duty whatsoever with nothing in between. Notably, the initial decision only takes the contractual relationship between Meinhard and Salmon into account. Under vulnerability theory, the opinion should consider the overall context of joint adventurers’ relationships to reach more equitable decisions.

Using a communal approach that employs diverse feminist perspectives, co-authors Anne Choike, Martha Albertson Fineman, and Cheryl L. Wade argue that feminism offers corporate law a vitally important analytical tool to advance the creation of a more just legal framework governing corporations and their stakeholders. Choike, Fineman, and Wade highlight feminist corporate law literature that uses various feminist and feminist-inspired approaches to illuminate how using such perspectives can facilitate critical examination of corporate law concepts (including corporate personhood, limited liability, board diversity, firm ownership, and theories of the firm). Choike, Fineman and Wade argue that each type of feminism offers unique tools to analyze corporate law. Liberal feminism’s focus on gender identity, among other intersectional identity characteristics, reveals corporate law’s inequitable substance and operation. Relational feminism’s attention to gendered values and ethical frameworks highlights their impact upon the role and function of the corporation. Dominance feminism’s focus on power enables critique of implicitly gendered privileges that corporate law confers upon corporate actors. Feminism-inspired universal theories like vulnerability theory transcend gender to consider how institutional relationships in corporate law, such as principal/agent and worker/owner, may be unequal. Professional practitioners, scholars, and students can benefit from this chapter.

The plaintiff, John Walkovsky, was struck by a taxi owned by Seon Cab Corporation while walking in New York City. Seon Cab Corp. was one of the ten cab companies owned by a group of shareholders, including William Carlton. The case highlights the harms visited on innocent parties by limited liability and shareholders’ focus on profit. A feminist rewrite would examine the costs visited upon vulnerable groups such as tort victims with limited access to the legal system, children who are likely to be more severely injured if harmed by corporate activity or by the loss of a parent so injured, and immigrants and lower-income Americans who may not have health insurance to cover the physical harms caused by corporate business. Intentional undercapitalization of corporations and an adherence to minimum insurance requirements externalizes the costs of doing business onto the rest of society. This externalization of costs is particularly harmful when it causes physical injury or death to portions of the population who cannot absorb the costs ducked by the corporation. A feminist perspective could consider the interests of these vulnerable populations in designing a limited liability doctrine that encourages entrepreneurial risk-taking while balancing it against the cost of significant corporate externalities.

In this chapter, we explain the methodological frame and normative hypothesis of Resilient Property, drawing on wicked problem theory, vulnerability theory and equilibrium theory. Structuring methods drawn from wicked problem theory and “method assemblage” are adopted to support fuller analyses of the complex array of relations and practices, individual and institutional vulnerabilities that are at stake when homeless squatters occupy empty property. Resilient Property draws insights from “vulnerability theory”: adopting Fineman’s general approach to vulnerability and resilience; and building on her insights concerning institutional vulnerability, including the vulnerability of the state. This provides a central anchor for our analyses of state responses to squatting: that a necessary implication of recognizing that the state itself is a vulnerable institution is that we recognize the need for states (and governments) to act in ways that build their own resilience, to shore up their authority and legitimacy in the face of conflict or crises. This underpins our focus on “equilibrium” in Resilient Property: recognizing that states are not neutral arbiters in relation to competing claims to land but are required to negotiate their “other-regarding” responsibilities – adjudicating and allocating resilience to individuals and institutions – against the backdrop of their own “self-regarding” need for resilience. Through this approach, Resilient Property enables us to develop a realistic, contextualized, conceptualization of state action with regard to complex property problems.

The conclusions reached in Chapter 8 centre on the formulation of liberal autonomy in our wildlife laws and policies. Throughout the book it was demonstrated that autonomy has been created and maintained by a dominant neo-liberal and capitalist paradigm because it serves and furthers that paradigm. This relationship between autonomy and neo-liberalism creates a hierarchy that serves western notions of power and control. The law is a tool that has been used to this end. Further, these themes dictate our relationship with wildlife because the law as an institution creates and maintains these themes in wildlife governance. Instead, the research suggests that we need a broader and more inclusive view of the relationship, which extends outside of the dominant paradigm. The conclusions foreground a possible move away from the promotion of autonomy as the basis of our laws and policies and a move towards a response to vulnerability that builds resilience. This can be achieved with further focus on inclusive collaborative governance, traditional ecological knowledge, compassion, emotion and other forms of knowledge and an acknowledgement of the intrinsic value of wildlife and the environment as a whole.