I’ve been studying corporate law, and find that it’s a fascinating problem in democracy. Corporate law is a question of how to align incentives and produce ethical behavior in a snake-pit of greed. Thus, I find it to be both more advanced, and more applicable to problems of regulating public integrity than most of our other attempts.

Case in point. In recent years, people have suggested restrictions on lobbyists, including rules that staffers leaving Congress can’t take corporate lobbying jobs for a certain amount of time, and great concern over the public-private revolving door.

Both of these practices have benefits. Staffers are people that have been trained in government. It seems insane to prevent people from working in their trained occupation. (Similar to the mistake we made in Iraq in banning the people who knew how to make government work from actually running a new government.) Rather, such people make government run better, because lobbyists are making private institutions pay for some of the public cost of educating our public officials. That’s a benefit for taxpayers.

Similarly, the public-private revolving door is a good thing, because the government can’t make wise policy decisions about industry unless the people inside it have some experience with how industry works.

Of course, both these positive public influences produce bias, and the whole point of democracy is that corporations shouldn’t have undue influence. So we need another way to correct the bias. The way to do it is to take a play from corporate governance: the business judgment rule.

The business judgment rule is a legal duty that the directors of a corporation have to act in good faith and in honest pursuit of the legitimate purposes of the corporation. The Delaware Supreme court has said that the question is whether the directors informed themselves prior to making a business decision of all the material information reasonably available to them.

_There is no protection for directors that have made an unintelligent or unadvised judgment. _

So, why not have the same rule for our political leaders, who, after all, can be seen as sitting on the corporate board of America? They should be held liable when they don’t pursue the legitimate purpose of democracy. Democracy is about hearing all sides of an argument, both the corporate side and the others, and in the end, doing what’s best for all of society.