RESEARCH
Boston University Law Review (Forthcoming, 2026)
Risky Business
Corporate law scholarship and doctrine have largely operated on the assumption that corporate shareholders are interested in financial goals, while corporate stakeholders, such as employees, consumers, and local communities, are interested in social and environmental goals, like diversity and inclusion and climate change. Because of this assumption, the law largely requires a corporation to disclose information it considers to be “financially material,” to shareholders—that is, significant enough to impact the company’s financial position, including factors it considers to be financially risky. Financial materiality is so embedded in corporate law doctrine that even if an issue is about social and environmental concerns, financial materiality is still the exclusive lens through which the law examines shareholders’ interests in the issue. Corporate law generally has no mandatory rules for corporations that are for the exclusive benefit of stakeholders.
118 Northwestern Law Review
Racial Targets
It is common scholarly and popular wisdom that racial quotas are illegal. However, the reality is that since 2020’s racial reckoning, many of the largest companies have been touting specific, albeit voluntary, goals to hire or promote people of color, which this Article refers to as “racial targets.” The Article addresses this phenomenon and shows that companies can defend racial targets as distinct from racial quotas, which involve a rigid number or proportion of opportunities reserved exclusively for minority groups. The political implications of the legal defensibility of racial targets are significant in this moment in American history, where race relations have become polarized and the conservative, pro-business U.S. Supreme Court may weigh in on the legality of voluntary goals set by some of the largest companies in the country. Large companies have historically been granted discretion to choose their strategies for paving the way toward equal employment opportunity for people of color. The Article grapples with whether this corporate-discretion ideal would inform the legal posture of racial targets.
109 Virginia Law Review
Disclosing Corporate Diversity
Disclosures can be used to increase diversity in corporate America in terms of race, gender, sexual orientation, and disability. Scholars and policymakers have underappreciated this possibility because diversity is often omitted from the larger Corporate Social Responsibility (“CSR”) or Environmental Social and Governance (“ESG”) disclosures context, even though as this Article empirically shows, public companies often make diversity disclosures in that context. Diversity disclosures are important not only for shareholders’ interests in transparency, but also for the benefit of other stakeholders, including employees, customers, and the communities in which companies operate, who want to know whether companies are diverse to determine where to work, what brands to buy, and what companies value. The literature has yet to explore the significance of diversity disclosures for the benefit of all these stakeholders.
UCLA Law Review Discourse
When Donor Meets Purpose
This Essay addresses a gap in law and the Restatement of the Law Charitable Nonprofit Organizations regarding the relationship between a charitable nonprofit’s donors and its purpose. I argue that charitable nonprofits can align their purposes with the personal or professional identities of their donors, and it may be in the best interest of some charities to do so. Charities whose purposes are to address racial or economic inequality should seriously consider aligning their donor identity with their purpose as a way of improving their legitimacy in the communities they serve, and to reach previously untapped sources of funding.
122 Columbia Law Review
Disclosures for Equity
This Article addresses how to increase funding to nonprofit organizations that are led by minorities or serve communities of color, and how to hold corporations and private foundations who make public commitments to fund these organizations accountable for those commitments. The Article makes two policy recommendations to address these problems, while engaging with Supreme Court jurisprudence on mandatory disclosures to ensure that the proposals are narrowly tailored to institutional donors and include an opt-out provision so as not to chill the constitutional protection of the freedom of association. The first is for charities to publicly disclose their institutional donors in Schedule B of Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Form 990. The second is to modify IRS Form 990 to include information on the race and ethnicity of top managers, boards of directors, and the communities an organization serves. These disclosures are crucial for determining organizations that are minority-led or that serve communities of color, and the institutional donors who donate to them annually. The Article addresses the benefits and tradeoffs of disclosure, and how to use nudges—watchdog organizations, certifications, and the public to use disclosures to increase funding to minority-led and serving nonprofit charities.
357 Ohio State Law Journal
Nonprofit Board Composition
This Article addresses a critical gap in the literature and current debates about the composition of nonprofit boards. The law of fiduciary duties and nonprofit governance best practices do not provide sufficient guidance on how to compose boards to empower the communities they serve. And even as the corporate sector is seizing on current important moments to debate the inclusion of employees and racial and ethnic minorities on corporate boards, nonprofit boards are largely left out of these debates. The Article introduces the concept of board capital, which originated from the for-profit management literature, but has gained a stronghold in the nonprofit boards’ literature, to provide guidance on how to compose boards of nonprofit organizations that serve vulnerable, often minority communities. Board capital comprises financial, social, and human capital and highlights the importance of having board directors who as a group, possess the skills, knowledge, and professional and personal experiences to not only provide legal and finance expertise, and funding, but also provide strategic advice informed by knowledge of the client population.
90 Fordham Law Review
Racial Allies
Racial allies are White individuals and institutions who actively work to dismantle systems of racial inequality and the consequences of poverty that disproportionately impact communities of color and are willing to both confer and share power with members of subjugated groups. There is no other sector of the legal profession that professes to be racial allies more than the public interest law sector. Yet, these institutions that address structural racism and disproportionately serve communities of color appear not to share power with racial and ethnic minorities. The public interest law sector has been at the forefront of economic and racial justice both historically and in modern times, including as abolitionist lawyers, civil rights lawyers, lawyers challenging economic inequality, the eviction crisis, and immigration. Probably because of their perceived roles as racial allies, there has been scholarly and practitioner neglect to examine their allyship.
47 Law and Social Inquiry 635
Negotiating Status: Pro Bono Partners and Counsels in Large Law Firms
Law firm pro bono work provides access to justice to low-income people and other vulnerable populations. The professionals that manage pro bono programs are at the forefront of that process. The limited available research on these professionals do not often distinguish lawyers from other managers or theorize about their status vis-à-vis other law firm lawyers. Yet the status of lawyers who are also managers of pro bono programs influences both their identities and the management and provision of legal services and advocacy. Drawing on original demographic and interview data, this article shows how law firm pro bono partners and counsels navigate their ambiguous roles and negotiate their status as lawyers and managers. I find that pro bono partners and counsels navigate their ambiguous roles by striving to be perceived as “real” lawyers, reframe their roles as business generators, conform to the billing culture, and establish a common identity. They also negotiate their titles and office spaces to raise their profiles. Gender inequality influences the negotiation of office spaces and the approval of pro bono matters. These findings have implications for lawyers who manage pro bono programs and the legitimacy of pro bono work.
69 UCLA Law Review Discourse 178
Corporate Accountability and Worker Empowerment
This Review proceeds in two parts. Part I describes the role and critical importance of lawyers in all the campaigns. Part I then summarizes key features of each campaign to showcase their uniqueness. While not the focus of the book, corporate accountability is woven into the fabric of most of the campaigns described in An Equal Place. Part II analyzes Cummings’s contributions to scholarly research on the role of corporations in labor abuses. As a lens for this analysis, Part II uses the campaign contesting garment sweatshops described in the book to depict the tension between profit maximization—for retailers and manufacturers—and workers’ rights. Part II then goes beyond the history described in An Equal Place to address how the COVID-19 pandemic and the Great Resignation might influence the garment industry in California. The Review ends on a hopeful note, describing how current societal conditions can serve as catalysts to pressure companies to comply with California’s Garment Worker Protection Act. This new law firmly establishes a minimum wage requirement and joint liability for retailers and manufacturers in California for the first time.
21 California Law Review Online 1
The Racial Reckoning of Public Interest Law
This essay contends that segments of public interest law often get a pass on questions of race because it is a field of law that is genuinely concerned with marginalized communities. But the historical record, the dearth of empirical data on race, the homogeneity of the legal profession, and the recognition that no one is necessarily immune from racial biases all demand that the public interest bar reckon with its racial character. The racial oversights of public interest law can manifest themselves in hiring, staffing, organizational mission, leadership, and the actual delivery of legal services. We argue that a racial accounting is particularly important for public interest organizations that are not explicitly organized around racial justice. Public interest lawyers are the presumed and actual allies of racial minorities, which could make detection of racial biases more elusive. Although counterintuitive, we maintain that actualizing an anti-racist society will be impossible without looking within the ranks and practices of attorneys who hold themselves out as racial allies.
55 Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 357
The Relational Costs of Free Legal Services
At the same time that government funding for civil legal services has decreased, large law firms have increasingly invested substantial financial resources into pro bono legal services. Although these investments have expanded the availability of free legal representation, they have caused other problems that can be broadly grouped into two categories. The first is that nonprofit legal services organizations (“NLSOs”) face undue costs when they collaborate with law firms. The second is that the increasing involvement of law firms tends to produce a mismatch between the needs of the poor and the kinds of matters that receive free legal representation. Scholars have primarily explained these problems by examining law firm motivations for engaging in pro bono work but have yet to explore the structure of pro bono relationships between firms and NLSOs and its effects on legal services.
91 University of Colorado Law Review 1035
Solving the Pro Bono Mismatch
The pro bono interests of law firm lawyers tend to differ from the actual legal needs of the poor. This difference results in the mismatch problem or the incongruence between the interests of firm lawyers and the needs of the poor. Today, the mismatch problem has resulted in law firm lawyers' increased demand of immigration matters while legal needs are greatest in housing and family law. This leaves nonprofit legal services organizations scrambling to find pro bono representation for poor clients or otherwise relying on very limited resources to represent poor clients. The literature on the mismatch problem is lacking in important ways. First, there is a lack of understanding about how the interests of individual lawyers factor into the selection of pro bono matters. Second, there is no understanding about how law firm culture impacts the choice of pro bono work for firms and individual lawyers. Third, the literature does not include how the political climate impacts the choice of pro bono work within firms. Finally, the literature is devoid of normative suggestions to remedy the problem. Through an interview-based empirical exploration, this research explains how individual lawyers impact the choice of pro bono work, how law firm culture impacts pro bono choices, and how the political climate directly shapes what lawyers choose to do for pro bono legal representation.
25 International Journal of the Legal Profession 67
The Journey: Moving Racial Diversification Forward from Mere Commitment to Shared Value in Elite Law Firms
This article uses interview data, diversity reports and descriptive statistical data spanning thirteen years to examine how and why law firms cultivate, and maintain, racial diversity among their employees. The Article argues that elite law firms are committed to maintaining racial diversity because of its importance to their corporate identity. Firms believe that racial diversity is important to maintaining their status and legitimacy with stakeholders such as clients and law students. It argues that firms do not value racial diversity as an end in itself or as an important component of their organizational identity. The Article proposes that racial diversity can become a shared value if law firms imbibe the role of diversity champions, and what I refer to as “intentional diversity.” Diversity champions commit to integrating racial minorities into their firms, while “intentional diversity” is a personal decision made by individual firm members, beyond champions, to integrate and include racial minorities in law firms.
9 Northeastern University Law Review 259
Making the Best of a Bad Beginning: Young New York Lawyers Confronting the Great Recession
This article investigates inequality, among other things, in lawyers’ careers as a result of the 2007-2009 recession. The Article uses both qualitative and quantitative data to examine the differences in the experiences of lawyers from a range of practice settings: large law firms; midsize firms; in-house corporate positions; federal, state, and local government; and nonprofit legal services organizations (“NLSOs”). The Article demonstrates that many NLSO lawyers had difficulty launching their careers, because law firms paid their deferred associates to work in NLSOs for between six months to more than one year. This phenomenon created career inequality. Deferred associates provided free labor to otherwise cash-strapped organizations, which had the consequence of shutting out some public interest minded lawyers from public interest legal practice, or forcing them to postpone their careers.