Michigan Law Review Volume 118 Issue 4 2020 The Essential Roles of Agency Law Gabriel Rauterberg University of Michigan Law School,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/mlr Part of the Agency Commons, and the Public Law and Legal Theory Commons Recommended Citation Gabriel Rauterberg, The Essential Roles of Agency Law, 118 MICH. L. REV. 609 (2020). Available at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/mlr/vol118/iss4/3 https://doi.org/10.36644/mlr.118.4.essential This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Michigan Law Review at University of Michigan Law School Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Michigan Law Review by an authorized editor of University of Michigan Law School Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. THE ESSENTIAL ROLES OF AGENCY LAW Gabriel Rauterberg* This Article suggests a fundamental shift in how we think about agency. The essential function of agency law lies not only in enabling the delegation of au- thority, as is widely suggested, but as significantly in its effect on creditors’ rights through asset partitioning. There is an increasing temptation in legal scholarship to treat agency law as a sideshow confined to the first day of cor- porations class. This is because much of what agency law does in commerce could simply be accomplished through standard-form contracts that provide default terms for the relationships among firms, their managers, and third parties. Even agency’s much-vaunted fiduciary duties can easily be altered or waived by contract—and often are.