Business Commons^™

Mutual Fund Stewardship And The Empty Voting Problem, Jill E. Fisch

All Faculty Scholarship

When Roberta Karmel wrote the articles that are the subject of this symposium, she was skeptical of both the potential value of shareholder voting and the emerging involvement of institutional investors in corporate governance. In the ensuing years, both the increased role and engagement of institutional investors and the heightened importance of shareholder voting offer new reasons to take Professor Karmel’s concerns seriously. Institutional investors have taken on a broader range of issues ranging from diversity and political spending to climate change and human capital management, and their ability to influence corporate policy on these issues has become more significant. …

Mootness Fees, Matthew D. Cain, Jill E. Fisch, Steven Davidoff Solomon, Randall Thomas

All Faculty Scholarship

In response to a sharp increase in litigation challenging mergers, the Delaware Chancery Court issued the 2016 Trulia decision, which substantively reduced the attractiveness of Delaware as a forum for these suits. In this Article, we empirically assess the response of plaintiffs’ attorneys to these developments. Specifically, we document a troubling trend—the flight of merger litigation to federal court where these cases are overwhelmingly resolved through voluntary dismissals that provide no benefit to the plaintiff class but generate a payment to plaintiffs’ counsel in the form of a mootness fee. In 2018, for example, 77% of deals with litigation were …

Rethinking Corporate Governance For A Bondholder Financed, Systemically Risky World, Steven L. Schwarcz

Faculty Scholarship

This Article makes two arguments that, combined, demonstrate an important synergy: first, including bondholders in corporate governance could help to reduce systemic risk because bondholders are more risk averse than shareholders; second, corporate governance should include bondholders because bonds now dwarf equity as a source of corporate financing and bond prices are increasingly tied to firm performance.

Standing Voting Instructions: Empowering The Excluded Retail Investor, Jill E. Fisch

All Faculty Scholarship

Despite the increasing importance of shareholder voting, regulators have paid little attention to the rights of retail investors who own approximately 30% of publicly traded companies but who vote less than 30% of their shares. A substantial factor contributing to this low turnout is the antiquated mechanism by which retail investors vote. The federal proxy voting rules place primary responsibility for facilitating retail voting in the hands of custodial brokers who have limited incentives to develop workable procedures, and current regulatory restrictions impede market-based innovation that incorporate technological innovations.

One of the most promising such innovations is standing voting instructions …

Disciplining Corporate Boards And Debtholders Through Targeted Proxy Access, Michelle M. Harner

Indiana Law Journal

Corporate directors committed to a failed business strategy or unduly influenced by the company’s debtholders need a dissenting voice—they need shareholder nominees on the board. This Article examines the biases, conflicts, and external factors that impact board decisions, particularly when a company faces financial distress. It challenges the conventional wisdom that debt disciplines management, and it sug-gests that, in certain circumstances, the company would benefit from having the shareholders’ perspective more actively represented on the board. To that end, the Article proposes a bylaw that would give shareholders the ability to nominate direc-tors upon the occurrence of predefined events. Such …

Institutional Investors In Corporate Governance, Edward B. Rock

All Faculty Scholarship

This chapter of the Oxford Handbook on Corporate Law and Governance examines the role of institutional investors in corporate governance and the role of regulation in encouraging institutional investors to become active stewards. I approach these topics through asking what lessons we can draw from the U.S. experience for the E.U.’s 2014 proposed amendments to the Shareholder Rights Directive.

I begin by defining the institutional investor category, and summarizing the growth of institutional investors’ equity holdings over time. I then briefly survey how institutional investors themselves are governed and how they organize share voting. This leads me to two central …

The Long Road Back: Business Roundtable And The Future Of Sec Rulemaking, Jill E. Fisch

All Faculty Scholarship

The Securities and Exchange Commission has suffered a number of recent setbacks in areas ranging from enforcement policy to rulemaking. The DC Circuit’s 2011 Business Roundtable decision is one of the most serious, particularly in light of the heavy rulemaking obligations imposed on the SEC by Dodd-Frank and the JOBS Act. The effectiveness of the SEC in future rulemaking and the ability of its rules to survive legal challenge are currently under scrutiny.

This article critically evaluates the Business Roundtable decision in the context of the applicable statutory and structural constraints on SEC rulemaking. Toward that end, the essay questions …

The Destructive Ambiguity Of Federal Proxy Access, Jill E. Fisch

All Faculty Scholarship

After almost seventy years of debate, on August 25, 2010, the SEC adopted a federal proxy access rule. This Article examines the new rule and concludes that, despite the prolonged rule-making effort, the new rule is ambiguous in its application and unlikely to increase shareholder input into the composition of corporate boards. More troubling is the SEC’s ambiguous justification for its rule which is neither grounded in state law nor premised on a normative vision of the appropriate role of shareholder nominations in corporate governance. Although the federal proxy access rule drew an unprecedented number of comment letters and is …

The New Section 1202 Tax-Free Business Sale: Congress Rewards Small Businesses That Survived The Great Recession, Beckett G. Cantley

Fordham Journal of Corporate & Financial Law

On September 27, 2010, President Barack Obama signed the Creating Small Business Jobs Act of 2010 (“SBJA”) that contains a temporary amendment to Internal Revenue Code (“IRC”) § 1202. The amendment permits original shareholders of eligible corporation stock to sell the stock without being taxed on the sale. The temporary amendment initially only applied to certain stock acquired after the enactment of the SBJA and before January 1, 2011, but the amendment was extended on December 17, 2010 for another year ending January 1, 2012. With the impending sunset of the 15% capital gains rate at the end of 2012, …

Corporate Governance And Accountability, Renee M. Jones

Renee Jones

This book chapter on Corporate Governance and Accountability is a contribution to the book CORPORATE GOVERNANCE - SYNTHESIS OF THEORY, RESEARCH, AND PRACTICE (Wiley, forthcoming 2010), edited by Ronald Anderson and H. Kent Baker. This chapter describes the sources of corporate governance standards for American corporations and analyzes the accountability mechanisms designed to ensure that corporate officials act faithfully in their management of corporate affairs. The chapter focuses on the financial reporting system under the U.S. securities laws which forms the foundation of the accountability system, and discusses structures and rules designed to ensure the integrity of financial reporting. The …

Then And Now: Professor Berle And The Unpredictable Shareholder, Jennifer G. Hill

Seattle University Law Review

Shareholders, and the relationship between shareholders and management, lay at the heart of Professor Berle’s scholarship. The goal of this Article is to compare the image of shareholders emerging from The Modern Corporation and Private Property and the Berle/Dodd debate with a range of contemporary visions of the shareholder that underpin some international regulatory responses to recent financial debacles, from Enron to the current global financial crisis. As the Article dis- cusses, these recent developments in the era of financial crises have prompted a reevaluation of the traditional image of the shareholder—and the role of the shareholder in the modern …

The Future Of Shareholder Democracy, Lisa Fairfax

All Faculty Scholarship

This Article seeks to ascertain the impact of the Securities and Exchange Commission's rejection in 2007 of a proxy access rule, a rule that would have required corporations to include shareholder-nominated candidates on the ballot. On the one hand, the SEC's rejection appears to be a stunning blow to the shareholders' rights campaign because many shareholders' rights advocates have long considered access to the corporate ballot as the "holy grail" of their campaign for increased shareholder power. On the other hand, some corporate experts maintain that characterizing proxy access as the indispensable ingredient for sufficient shareholder influence fails to appreciate …

Shareholders, Unicorns And Stilts: An Analysis Of Shareholder Property Rights, Benedict Sheehy

Benedict Sheehy

Abstract: Shareholders rights advocates argue that shareholders have the right to control the corporation. This article examines the basis for the claims. It begins with an analysis of rights, then moves to an analysis of legal rights, which is followed by an analysis of property rights as a species of legal rights. The article then examines the historical context, rationale and development of shareholder rights which leads to the analysis of current shareholders’ rights. The article concludes with some comments and suggestions concerning future development of corporate governance thinking.