5 THE CHICAGO SCHOOL’S COASEAN INCOHERENCE

This comment traces the divergent legal academic interpretations of the Chicago School's Ronald Coase and where their influence lands--revealing the law’s inconsistent conception of just what a corporation is or should be. By following Alyssa Battistoni's investigation of the origin of the "externality," we can see the late 60s and early 1970s as a pivotal era. People were waking up to the collective costs of industrialization and pushing back against corporate power. Against this democratic wave, the writings of the Chicago School worked to separate one human person into her different roles in the economy—consumer, worker, shareholder. They used the law to solidify the divergent interests of these roles, even as they preached the gospel of shareholder democracy and personal choice. The law and economics movement helped to argue for limiting the choices and political power of shareholders over corporations, simultaneously as they insisted that profit maximizing was for the shareholders. This comment argues for the resurrection of pre-neoliberal legal conceptions of the corporation as a moral entity and a locus for political change in our fight against the climate crisis.