The Pharma Barons: Corporate Law's Dangerous New Race to the Bottom in the Pharmaceutical Industry

Authors

Eugene McCarthy, University of Illinois

Abstract

In this Article, I argue that drug companies have created a highly profitable but dangerous business model by employing the same legal tactics as the nineteenth-century “robber barons,” the group of financiers who orchestrated corporate law’s infamous race to the bottom. Like these historical financiers, drug company executives have captured the legal apparatus and regulatory bodies that oversee them. In so doing, they have transformed the law from a system of governance into a set of enabling doctrines. The pharmaceutical industry has turned legislation intended to protect the public into a legal justification for marketing ineffective and unsafe prescription drugs. Like the nineteenth-century robber barons who transformed American corporate law into a tool for maximizing wealth and limiting liability, modern-day “pharma barons” have corrupted the laws that govern the pharmaceutical industry. The law now operates in the service of the pharma barons and allows them to profit at the public’s expense.

Recommended Citation

Eugene McCarthy, The Pharma Barons: Corporate Law's Dangerous New Race to the Bottom in the Pharmaceutical Industry, 8 Mich. Bus. & Entrepreneurial L. Rev. 29 (2018).
Available at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/mbelr/vol8/iss1/3