In February, Cathy Hwang presented "Purpose and Nonprofit Enterprise" as part of the Center for Business Law faculty speaker series at the School of Law. Hwang is a professor of law at the University of Virginia School of Law. She teaches, researches and writes about mergers and acquisitions, corporate contracts and corporate governance. Her work has been published in the Columbia Law Review, California Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Virginia Law Review, Northwestern University Law Review and Cornell Law Review, among others.
Hwang’s lecture focused on why nonprofit businesses survive and thrive across a vast number of industries. She offered a novel “purposeful enterprise” theory to explain the success of nonprofit enterprises, which suggests that that organizational purpose can serve as a substitute for shareholder monitoring and policing, by controlling managerial agency costs and aligning employee incentives. The information presented was part of a larger research project with Dorothy S. Lund of Columbia Law School.
In discussing the lecture, Eric Chaffee said, “Nonprofit enterprises are business entities that are commonly overlooked by business law scholars.” He continued, “Professor Hwang is a thought-leader in the business law field. The fact that she is exploring these entities in her scholarship is important and will make a big contribution to the existing literature. The Center for Business Law was lucky to welcome her to campus considering the importance of her research.”
The Center for Business Law at Case Western, which is co-directed by professors Juliet P. Kostritsky and Eric C. Chaffee, is an initiative to prepare future leaders to understand business issues facing business entities, engage in research on the role and impact of government in the regulation of business and to foster public debate regarding the role of government in the regulation of businesses. It is part of the robust business law curriculum at the School of Law.