Directors of nonprofit organizations owe fiduciary duties to their organization, but the content of these duties -- and how and when courts should enforce these duties -- has long been debated among scholars and courts. This debate emerges in several areas, including the level of deference to be shown by courts to nonprofit directors (the business judgment rule), who should be allowed to sue to enforce duties (standing), and the type of relief available to prevailing plaintiffs (remedies). Existing literature debates these legal rules in isolation and in abstraction, generally failing to consider how the rules interact with each other and ignoring the empirical reality of the nonprofit sector.Because for-profit and nonprofit corporations evolved from a common ancestor, courts generally apply the corporation law principles developed in the context of for-profit corporations to nonprofit corporations as well. But for-profit and nonprofit corporations often differ in key ways, including sources of income, constituencies, and other institutional characteristics. These differences make rote application of corporation law principles to nonprofit corporations a conceptually questionable endeavor. Rather than setting nonprofit rules through strained analogies to for-profit concepts of ownership and profit-maximization, we propose an employing an analysis of institutional features that can operate in a whole range of governance contexts, including the nonprofit sector. This approach rigorously considers opportunities for voice and exit, impact range, homogeneity, and comparative competence between boards and courts, and it does so among different types of nonprofit actors, like directors, members, employees, donors, customers, and beneficiaries. Using this institutional analysis with for-profit corporation law as the baseline, we compare emerging legal rules in the nonprofit sector against existing empirical literature. We find that, with one exception, institutional characteristics vis-a-vis nonprofit actors are reasonably comparable to their for-profit counterparts, and we therefore place the applicable legal regime with respect to those actors on a more conceptually sound footing. In contrast, beneficiaries of a nonprofit organization tend to lack opportunities for exit or voice, face risk of considerable deprivation, and often differ considerably in relevant aspects from the individuals who manage the organization. We argue that the law should take into account the limited power of beneficiaries in nonprofit governance structures, and we analyze options for reform.

中文翻译：

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法院、选区和非营利部门信托义务的执行

非营利组织的董事对其组织负有信托义务，但这些义务的内容——以及法院应如何以及何时执行这些义务——长期以来一直在学者和法院之间争论不休。这场辩论出现在几个领域，包括法院对非营利董事的尊重程度（商业判断规则），应该允许他们起诉以执行职责（地位），以及适用于胜诉原告的救济类型（补救措施）。现有文献孤立和抽象地讨论这些法律规则，通常没有考虑规则如何相互作用，而忽略了非营利部门的经验现实。 因为营利性和非营利性公司是从共同的祖先进化而来的，法院通常也将在营利性公司的背景下制定的公司法原则也适用于非营利性公司。但营利性和非营利性公司通常在关键方面存在差异，包括收入来源、选民和其他机构特征。这些差异使得将公司法原则死记硬背地应用于非营利公司在概念上是有问题的。我们不是通过对所有权和利润最大化的营利性概念的严格类比来制定非营利性规则，而是建议对可以在包括非营利部门在内的整个治理环境中运作的制度特征进行分析。这种方法严格考虑了发言权和退出机会、影响范围、同质性以及董事会和法院之间的比较能力，它在不同类型的非营利参与者之间这样做，例如董事、成员、员工、捐助者、客户和受益人。使用这种以营利性公司法为基准的制度分析，我们将非营利部门中新兴的法律规则与现有的实证文献进行了比较。我们发现，除了一个例外，针对非营利行为者的制度特征与营利性同行相比具有合理的可比性，因此我们将适用于这些行为者的适用法律制度置于概念上更合理的基础上。相比之下，非营利组织的受益人往往缺乏退出机会或发言权，面临着相当大的剥夺风险，并且往往在相关方面与管理该组织的个人存在很大差异。