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Articles 1 - 21 of 21
Full-Text Articles in Law
Outcome Report Of Roundtable On Human Rights Impact Assessments (Hrias) Of Large-Scale Foreign Investments, Columbia Center On Sustainable Investment
Outcome Report Of Roundtable On Human Rights Impact Assessments (Hrias) Of Large-Scale Foreign Investments, Columbia Center On Sustainable Investment
Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications
CCSI, the Sciences Po Law School Clinic, and the Columbia Law School Human Rights Institute recently published an outcome document of a one-day roundtable focused on the opportunities and challenges presented by human rights impact assessments (HRIAs) of large-scale foreign investments. The roundtable, which was held in April 2014 at Columbia University, provided an opportunity for collaborative reflection on the development of HRIAs, as well as on ways to enhance HRIAs as a framework and tool for both human rights advocacy and human rights risk management in respect of foreign investments.
By sharing the outcomes of the roundtable, this document …
Toward A Constitutional Review Of The Poison Pill, Lucian A. Bebchuk, Robert J. Jackson Jr.
Toward A Constitutional Review Of The Poison Pill, Lucian A. Bebchuk, Robert J. Jackson Jr.
Ira M. Millstein Center for Global Markets and Corporate Ownership
We argue that the state-law rules governing poison pills are vulnerable to challenges based on preemption by the Williams Act. Such challenges, we show, could well have a major impact on the corporate law landscape.
The Williams Act established a federal regime regulating unsolicited tender offers, but states subsequently developed a body of state antitakeover laws that impose additional impediments to such offers. In a series of well-known cases during the 1970s and 1980s, the federal courts, including the Supreme Court, held some of these state antitakeover laws preempted by the Williams Act. To date, however, federal courts and commentators …
Changes In Ownership: Beyond The Berle-Means Paradigm, Ira M. Millstein Center For Global Markets And Corporate Ownership
Changes In Ownership: Beyond The Berle-Means Paradigm, Ira M. Millstein Center For Global Markets And Corporate Ownership
Ira M. Millstein Center for Global Markets and Corporate Ownership
The “Changes in Ownership: Beyond the Berle-Means Paradigm” Symposium, held April 2013, explored whether, and how, the recent explosion of new ownership models alters the paradigm of dispersed ownership developed by Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means three generations ago. That model indicated that public corporations were owned by dispersed shareholders whose separate ownership positions were too small to justify extensive monitoring of managerial performance. This view of the distribution of ownership in U.S. corporations has been foundational for both much academic work and for much of corporate law and governance, which have been aimed at addressing the monitoring shortfall.
The …
Fee-Shifting Bylaw And Charter Provisions: Can They Apply In Federal Court? – The Case For Preemption, John C. Coffee Jr.
Fee-Shifting Bylaw And Charter Provisions: Can They Apply In Federal Court? – The Case For Preemption, John C. Coffee Jr.
Faculty Scholarship
In the first months after a decision of the Delaware Supreme Court upholding a fee-shifting bylaw under which the unsuccessful plaintiff shareholder was required to reimburse all defendants for their legal and other expenses in the litigation, some 24 public companies adopted a similar provision – either by means of a board-adopted bylaw or by placing such a provision in their certificate of incorporation (in the case of companies undergoing an IPO). In effect, private ordering is introducing a one-sided version of the “loser pays” rules. Indeed, as drafted, these provisions typically require a plaintiff who is not completely successful …
The Case For An Unbiased Takeover Law (With An Application To The European Union), Luca Enriques, Ronald J. Gilson, Alessio M. Pacces
The Case For An Unbiased Takeover Law (With An Application To The European Union), Luca Enriques, Ronald J. Gilson, Alessio M. Pacces
Faculty Scholarship
Takeover regulation should neither hamper nor promote takeovers, but instead allow individual companies to decide the contestability of their control. Based on this premise, we advocate a takeover law exclusively made of default and menu rules supporting an effective choice of the takeover regime at the company level. For political economy reasons, we argue that different default rules should apply to newly public companies and companies that are already public when the new regime is introduced. Newly public companies should be governed by default rules that favor the interests of (minority) shareholders over those of management and controlling shareholders, because …
Irredeemably Inefficient Acts: A Threat To Markets, Firms, And The Fisc, Alex Raskolnikov
Irredeemably Inefficient Acts: A Threat To Markets, Firms, And The Fisc, Alex Raskolnikov
Faculty Scholarship
This Article defines and explores irredeemably inefficient acts – a conceptually distinct and empirically important category of socially undesirable conduct. Though inefficient behavior is, no doubt, pervasive, the standard view holds that inefficient conduct may be converted into efficient behavior by forcing actors to internalize the external harms of their decisions. For some acts, however such conversion is impossible. These acts are not just inefficient forms of otherwise socially beneficial activities – they are not just contingently inefficient. Rather, they are inefficient at their core; they reduce social welfare no matter what the regulator does. These irredeemably inefficient (or just …
Ongoing Issues In Russian Corporate Governance, Merritt B. Fox
Ongoing Issues In Russian Corporate Governance, Merritt B. Fox
Faculty Scholarship
This Article concerns Russian corporate governance today. It starts by arguing that there are fundamental differences between the policy questions raised by SOEs and those raised by non-SOEs and that the analysis needs to separate out these two kinds of corporations. The Article then goes on to consider several ongoing issues relating to non-SOEs. To start, it suggests the need for a set of rules, backed by reliably applied stiff sanctions, requiring disclosure of all situations where a person, by himself or as a member of a coordinated group, is the beneficial owner of sufficient shares to be able to …
Corporate Headhunting, Daniel C. Richman
Corporate Headhunting, Daniel C. Richman
Faculty Scholarship
A wide range of commentators – including some pretty sophisticated ones – have raked through the ruins of the 2008 financial collapse, confident that there are significant criminal prosecutions to bring against individuals and that the Justice Department should be faulted for its failure to bring them. Their confidence that blockbuster criminal cases could have been made rests on shaky grounds. So, too, does their faith that the hunting of heads is a socially productive response to the collapse. If anything, a focus on headhunting will only distract from, and reduce the pressure for, efforts to explain the collapse and …
The Nordic Model Of Corporate Governance: The Role Of Ownership, Ronald J. Gilson
The Nordic Model Of Corporate Governance: The Role Of Ownership, Ronald J. Gilson
Faculty Scholarship
It is commonplace to credit the invention of the public corporation as an important engine of economic growth. The creation of a long-lived vehicle that gave investors both tradable shares and limited liability allowed talented managers to raise capital to fund enterprise. Writing in 1926, the Economist magazine heralded this role:
The economic historian of the future may assign to the nameless inventor of the principle of limited liability, as applied to trading corporations, a place of honor with Watt and Stephenson, and other pioneers of the Industrial Revolution. The genius of these men produced the means by which man’s …
Incorporating By Reference: Knowing Law In The Electronic Age, Peter L. Strauss
Incorporating By Reference: Knowing Law In The Electronic Age, Peter L. Strauss
Faculty Scholarship
Last October, the Office of the Federal Register published a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (78 Fed. Reg. 60,784 (Oct. 2, 2013)) to revise its regulations governing the practice of "incorporation by Reference," which permits federal agencies to create binding regulatory obligations just by referring to standards that have been developed by private nongovernmental organizations, standards development organizations (SDOs) such as the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) or the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). This rulemaking should be of substantial interest to the occupational safety community. While its comment period has closed, comments remain open until May 12, 2014, on …
Merger Control Procedures And Institutions: A Comparison Of The Eu And Us Practice, William E. Kovacic, Petros C. Mavroidis, Damien J. Neven
Merger Control Procedures And Institutions: A Comparison Of The Eu And Us Practice, William E. Kovacic, Petros C. Mavroidis, Damien J. Neven
Faculty Scholarship
The objective of this paper is to discuss and compare the role that different constituencies play in US and EU procedures for merger control. We describe the main constituencies (both internal and external) involved in merger control in both jurisdictions and discuss how a typical merger case would be handled under these procedures. At each stage, we consider how the procedure unfolds, which parties are involved, and how they can affect the procedure. Our discussion reveals a very different ecology. EU and US procedures differ in terms of their basic design and in terms of the procedures that are naturally …
Time To Amend The Delaware Takeover Law, Stephen M. Shapiro, Dorothy S. Lund
Time To Amend The Delaware Takeover Law, Stephen M. Shapiro, Dorothy S. Lund
Faculty Scholarship
As Professor Subramanian demonstrates with cogent statistical evidence, now is the time for the courts to put Section 203 in the dock and examine its constitutional merits. Better still, the Delaware legislature should clean house and amend this provision's criteria. In practical effect, it forbids a competitive tender offer, injuring shareholders who benefit from tender offer premiums, and the national economy, which benefits from the gravitation of industrial resources to their highest-valued uses.
Following the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Edgar v. MITE Corp., which invalidated an Illinois takeover statute, the federal district court in Delaware routinely enjoined application of …
Finding Order In The Morass: The Three Real Justifications For Piercing The Corporate Veil, Jonathan Macey, Joshua Mitts
Finding Order In The Morass: The Three Real Justifications For Piercing The Corporate Veil, Jonathan Macey, Joshua Mitts
Faculty Scholarship
Few doctrines are more shrouded in mystery or litigated more often than piercing the corporate veil. We develop a new theoretical framework that posits that veil piercing is done to achieve three discrete public policy goals, each of which is consistent with economic efficiency: (1) achieving the purpose of an existing statute or regulation; (2) preventing shareholders from obtaining credit by misrepresentation; and (3) promoting the bankruptcy values of achieving the orderly, efficient resolution of a bankrupt's estate. We analyze the facts of veil-piercing cases to show how the outcomes are explained by our taxonomy. We demonstrate that a supposed …
Systemic Harms And Shareholder Value, John Armour, Jeffrey N. Gordon
Systemic Harms And Shareholder Value, John Armour, Jeffrey N. Gordon
Faculty Scholarship
The financial crisis has demonstrated serious flaws in the corporate governance of systemically important financial firms. In particular, the norm that managers should seek to maximize shareholder value, as measured by the stock price, proves to be a faulty guide for managerial action in systemically important firms. This is not only because the failure of such firms will have spillovers that defy the cost-internalization of the tort system, but also because these spillovers will harm their own majoritarian shareholders. The interests of diversified shareholders fundamentally diverge from the interests of managers and other controllers because the failure of a systemically …
Value Creation By Business Lawyers In The 21st Century, Ronald J. Gilson
Value Creation By Business Lawyers In The 21st Century, Ronald J. Gilson
Faculty Scholarship
It’s a delight to be here. When I started working on Value Creation by Business Lawyers – or when I was in law school – we could have held today’s meeting in a telephone booth. There was nothing even remotely in the curriculum. Victor Brudney and Marvin Chirlestien’s Corporate Finance book was still in mimeograph form – note the dated technology reference. David Herwitz’s Business Planning book had been around for a while, but it was strictly legal. And that exhausted it. What I take the greatest pleasure from is the fact that a number of years later, enough to …
Social Entrepreneurship And Uncorporations, Jesse Finrock, Eric L. Talley
Social Entrepreneurship And Uncorporations, Jesse Finrock, Eric L. Talley
Faculty Scholarship
Larry Ribstein’s pioneering analysis of alternative business forms during the late twentieth century highlighted the contractarian freedom that these forms provided. The rise of the LLC model was of particular interest to Ribstein, who assessed how this model brought greater freedom to those who held duties and obligations within the corporate structure. This Article takes up Ribstein’s mantle by assessing the development the alternative “social enterprise” business forms manifested in benefit corporations (BC) and flexible purpose corporations (FPC). Both forms allow an incorporated entity to articulate and pursue a social benefit alongside the maximization of shareholder returns. Despite its utility, …
Assessing The Optimism Of Payday Loan Borrowers, Ronald J. Mann
Assessing The Optimism Of Payday Loan Borrowers, Ronald J. Mann
Faculty Scholarship
This Article compares the results from a survey administered to payday loan borrowers at the time of their loans to subsequent borrowing and repayment behavior. It thus presents the first direct evidence of the accuracy of payday loan borrowers’ understanding of how the product will be used. The data show, among other things, that about 60 percent of borrowers accurately predict how long it will take them finally to repay their payday loans. The evidence directly contradicts the oft-stated view that substantially all extended use of payday loans is the product of lender misrepresentation or borrower self-deception about how the …
Protecting Reliance, Victor P. Goldberg
Protecting Reliance, Victor P. Goldberg
Faculty Scholarship
Reliance plays a central role in contract law and scholarship. One party relies on the other's promised performance, its statements, or its anticipated entry into a formal agreement. Saying that reliance is important, however, says nothing about what we should do about it. The focus of this Essay is on the many ways that parties choose to protect reliance. The relationship between what parties do and what contract doctrine cares about is tenuous at best. Contract performance takes place over time, and the nature of the parties 'future obligations can be deferred to take into account changing circumstances. Reliance matters …
Toward A Constitutional Review Of The Poison Pill Essay, Lucian A. Bebchuk, Robert J. Jackson Jr.
Toward A Constitutional Review Of The Poison Pill Essay, Lucian A. Bebchuk, Robert J. Jackson Jr.
Faculty Scholarship
We argue that the state-law rules governing poison pills are vulnerable to challenges based on preemption by the Williams Act. Such challenges, we show, could well have a major impact on the corporate law landscape.
The Williams Act established a federal regime regulating unsolicited tender offers, but states subsequently developed a body of state antitakeover laws that impose additional impediments to such offers. In a series of well-known cases during the 1970s and 1980s, the federal courts, including the Supreme Court, held some of these state antitakeover laws preempted by the Williams Act. To date, however, federal courts and commentators …
Extraterritorial Financial Regulation: Why E.T. Can't Come Home, John C. Coffee Jr.
Extraterritorial Financial Regulation: Why E.T. Can't Come Home, John C. Coffee Jr.
Faculty Scholarship
This Essay begins with a deliberately off-putting title: extraterritorial financial regulation. Old-time "conflict of laws" scholars would call this an oxymoron, pointing to recent Supreme Court decisions – most notably, Morrison v. National Australia Bank Ltd. and Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co. – that have applied a strong presumption against extraterritoriality to curb the reach of U.S. law. Even those international law scholars who are sympathetic to the regulation of multinational financial institutions might prefer to avoid this term and talk instead of "global financial regulation" because they conceptualize international financial regulation as implemented through networks of cooperating multinational …
Corporate Governance And Executive Compensation: Evidence From Japan, Robert J. Jackson Jr., Curtis J. Milhaupt
Corporate Governance And Executive Compensation: Evidence From Japan, Robert J. Jackson Jr., Curtis J. Milhaupt
Faculty Scholarship
Lawmakers around the world are now urging corporations to adopt governance and executive pay standards drawn largely from the American corporate law context. Yet little is known about how corporate governance actually influences executive compensation decisions outside of the United States-and whether adoption of these standards is likely to be desirable for investors abroad.
In this Article, we take advantage of a recent change in Japanese law to provide the first direct empirical evidence on executive pay in Japan. The evidence provides striking detail on the amount and structure of Japanese executive compensation. The data point to a previously unappreciated …