There is a burgeoning literature that treats fiduciary obligations as a unitary subject and, accordingly, posits various unified field theories that explain all of fiduciary duties and relationships.
I am skeptical of the idea that law is amenable to unified theories. "Physicists have long sought a unified field theory, which would provide a single set of simple laws that explain the four interactions or forces that affect matter--i.e., the strong, electromagnetic, weak, and gravitational forces. To date, they have failed, which provides a strong cautionary tale for anyone seeking a unified field theory of social interactions among fallible humans, whose behavior is far harder to predict than is that of, say, an electron." Stephen M. Bainbridge, Executive Compensation: Who Decides?, 83 Tex. L. Rev. 1615, 1628 (2005).
Even director primacy, after all, has domains in which it works as an explanatory/justificatory theory and those in which is does not.
Instead, it seems to me, that lawyers ought to look not for grand theories that explain everything but for situation specific mini-theories that explain something.
Justice Felix Frankfurter may have this point in mind when he wrote that:
But to say that a man is a fiduciary only begins analysis; it gives direction to further inquiry. To whom is he a fiduciary? What obligations does he owe as a fiduciary? In what respect has he failed to discharge these obligations? And what are the consequences of his deviation from duty?
Sec. & Exch. Comm'n v. Chenery Corp., 318 U.S. 80, 85–86, 63 S. Ct. 454, 458, 87 L. Ed. 626 (1943).
