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Non-Profits and Self-Regulation: A Case Study

Edward Balleisen, Duke University, Department of History, has published "Private Cops on the Fraud Beat: The Limits of American Business Self-Regulation, 1895?1932." Here is the abstract.

From the late 1890s through the 1920s, a new set of nonprofit, business-funded organizations spearheaded an American campaign against commercial duplicity. These new organizations shaped the legal terrain of fraud, built massive public-education campaigns, and created a private law-enforcement capacity to rival that of the federal government. Largely born out of a desire among business elites to fend off proposals for extensive regulatory oversight of commercial speech, the antifraud crusade grew into a social movement that was influenced by prevailing ideas about social hygiene and emerging techniques of private governance. This initiative highlighted some enduring strengths of business self-regulation, such as agility in responding to regulatory problems; it also revealed a weakness, which was the tendency to overlook deceptive marketing when practiced by firms that were members of the business establishment.

Download the paper from SSRN here.

Full post as published by Law & Humanities Blog on June 16, 2009 (boomark / email).