At the risk of understatement, I have run up big debts in numerous quarters to bring this work to fruition. I hope that in time I can repay those debts. In the meantime, my deepest gratitude will have to suffice. This book is the product of a long-term project that directly builds upon a series of articles written over the last few years, notably: The Enduring Ambivalence of Corporate Law, 59 Ala. L. Rev. 1385 (2008), where I developed the argument that U.S. corporate law remains fundamentally ambivalent regarding the role of shareholders in corporate governance and the consistency of their interests and incentives with the public good; Managing Corporate Federalism: The Least-Bad Approach to the Shareholder Bylaw Debate, 36 Del. J. Corp. L. 1 (2011), where I applied this argument to the debate regarding the scope of the shareholders’ authority to enact, amend, and repeal corporate bylaws; Power and Purpose in the “Anglo-American” Corporation, 50 Va. J. Int’l L. 579 (2010), where I developed the U.K.–U.S. comparative argument linking their differing degrees of shareholder-centrism to differences in the degrees of extra-corporate social welfare protection available to employees in each country; and Corporate Governance Reform in a Time of Crisis, 36 J. Corp. L. 309 (2011), where I applied this comparative argument to the debate regarding U.K. and U.S. corporate governance reforms in the wake of the global financial and economic crisis that arose in 2007.