The Domains of Loyalty: Relationships Between Fiduciary Obligation and Intrinsic Motivation

Recent scholarly inquiry into fiduciary law predominantly focuses on whether the subject is a coherent field and not a piecemeal assortment of doctrinal detail. This Article looks to the future and to relationships between the formal domain of fiduciary law and other factors that shape conduct. These include intrinsic motivation, markets for professional services, and forces like the operation of reputation. The Article demonstrates that looking across domains, from the legal to the extralegal, casts in sharp relief the reasons why fiduciary law is distinctive.

These stem from the specific qualities of relationships to which fiduciary law applies, as well as the mandatory nature of the distinctively fiduciary duty of loyalty that backstops parties who rely on the trustworthiness of others. The Article also engages with implications to be drawn from extensive behavioral research on intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. The Article argues that fiduciary law can operate to reinforce loyal conduct motivated by nonlegal factors by “crowding in” loyalty, not crowding it out. Elaborating further, the Article uses concrete examples to examine how factors beyond the law that shape conduct likely vary in significance along dimensions of variation among fiduciary relationships.