This chapter chronicles an unnoticed aspect of the intellectual history of the “contractarian” paradigm, the descriptive claim that firms are best characterized as nexus of contracts. Although the paradigm’s rise in the 1980s in the corporate world is well known, little has been said about its success in rewriting both theory and doctrine in charitable and not-for-profit law. The contract paradigm has reshaped the questions that not-for-profit scholarship attempts to answers, and it is tightly linked to developments in not-for-profit doctrine and practice. Key examples include the growth of donor standing—the notion that not-for-profits have a fiduciary duty to their donors, and that donors may bring suit for breaches—and the growing obsession with “donor intent” throughout the not-for-profit sphere. I contrast contractarianism with an institutionalist “public trust” conception of charities, which was the prevailing intellectual paradigm for most of the 20th century.

By examining musical theatre icons and their major collaborations starting from Oklahoma! (1943) and ending with Waitress (2016), this chapter chronicles the evolution of the American musical, as practitioners assembled creative teams in response to shifting economics and the rise of mediated popular culture on television and the internet. Film studios and corporations such as Disney now develop and produce their own musicals, bringing new resources and structures that both support and expand the collaborative creation of musical theatre. At the same time, regional theatres and not-for-profit venues developed new models of their own for participating in musical theatre collaboration. Whether conceived in consultation with a corporate producer or tested through a low-budget laboratory process, what's inside twenty-first-century American musicals remains the product of creative, collaborative relationships.

The chapter explains why the charity sector matters and, in particular, why the accumulation of assets by charities is such a weighty issue. It defines what is meant by ‘charity’ and articulates how charities form a subset of the non-profit sector. It also defines the meaning of accumulation. Having done so, the chapter articulates the questions that the book seeks to answer and the methodology adopted to do so. Those questions being: what legal constraints apply to accumulation by charities and do those constraints address the key ethical and efficiency implications raised by accumulation? To the extent that existing legal constraints do not address the key implications raised by accumulation, how could they be reformed to better address those issues?