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Full-Text Articles in Law
Tender Offers And The Sale Of Control: An Analogue To Determine The Validity Of Target Management Defense Measures, Stuart R. Cohn
Tender Offers And The Sale Of Control: An Analogue To Determine The Validity Of Target Management Defense Measures, Stuart R. Cohn
Stuart R. Cohn
The hostile tender offer phenomenon has spawned wholesale defensive measures adopted by target company management. In recent years, confrontations like those of Occidental Petroleum-Mead Corporation and American Express-McGraw-Hill have resulted in target management causing the eventual withdrawal of the tender offer by employing a variety of defensive measures known colloquially as “scorched earth” tactics. The “urge to merge” among major corporations will continue to produce unsolicited, nonnegotiated tender offers at varying scales of size. Consequently, strategies and techniques have been created at a pace faster than the process of litigation, causing a discernible lag between the ingenuity of corporate management …
Stock Appreciation Rights And The Sec: A Case Of Questionable Rulemaking, Stuart R. Cohn
Stock Appreciation Rights And The Sec: A Case Of Questionable Rulemaking, Stuart R. Cohn
Stuart R. Cohn
A stock appreciation rights (SARs) program is a form of deferred incentive compensation. Grantees are awarded SAR-units representing an equal number of the grantor’s equity shares currently being traded in public markets. SARs provide grantees the benefit of stock ownership without equity interest, investment, or risk of loss. Stock appreciation rights programs offer various advantages over other forms of executive compensation and have grown rapidly in number. These advantages include the availability of benefits without the requirement of monetary payments, the utilization of SARs as an interest-free form of financing the purchase of stock under tandem stock option programs, the …
Demise Of The Director's Duty Of Care: Judicial Avoidance Of Standards And Sanctions Through The Business Judgment Rule, Stuart R. Cohn
Demise Of The Director's Duty Of Care: Judicial Avoidance Of Standards And Sanctions Through The Business Judgment Rule, Stuart R. Cohn
Stuart R. Cohn
Courts love the so-called business judgment rule. It dispenses quickly and easily with derivative actions against corporate directors and officers, and other challenges to corporate conduct. Unfortunately, the business judgment rule has come to mask its underlying premise, i.e. that there must have been a business judgment made. This article examines the dominance of the business judgment rule over the underlying requirement of the duty of care and suggests reform measures that will bring the duty of care back to its appropriate role in determining the merits of management decision-making processes.
E-Commerce, Cyber, And Electronic Payment System Risks: Lessons From Paypal, Lawrence J. Trautman
E-Commerce, Cyber, And Electronic Payment System Risks: Lessons From Paypal, Lawrence J. Trautman
Lawrence J. Trautman Sr.
By now, almost without exception, every business has an internet presence, and is likely engaged in e-commerce. What are the major risks perceived by those engaged in e-commerce and electronic payment systems? What potential risks, if they become reality, may cause substantial increases in operating costs or threaten the very survival of the enterprise? This article utilizes the relevant annual report disclosures from eBay (parent of PayPal), along with other eBay and PayPal documents, as a potentially powerful teaching device. Most of the descriptive language to follow is excerpted directly from eBay’s regulatory filings. My additions include weaving these materials …
Managing Cyberthreat, Lawrence J. Trautman
Managing Cyberthreat, Lawrence J. Trautman
Lawrence J. Trautman Sr.
Cyber security is an important strategic and governance issue. However, because most corporate CEOs and directors have no formal engineering or information technology training, it is understandable that their lack of actual cybersecurity knowledge is problematic. Particularly among smaller companies having limited resources, knowledge regarding what their enterprise should actually be doing about cybersecurity can’t be all that good. My goal in this article is to explore the unusually complex subject of cybersecurity in a highly readable manner. First, an examination of recent threats is provided. Next, governmental policy initiatives are discussed. Third, some basic tools that can be used …
The Institutional Appetite For Quack Corporate Governance, Alicia J. Davis
The Institutional Appetite For Quack Corporate Governance, Alicia J. Davis
Alicia Davis
This Article offers evidence that higher quality internal corporate governance is associated with higher levels of ownership by institutional investors. This finding is consistent with the idea that institutions have greater reason than individual investors to prefer well-governed firms, but surprising given the substantial empirical evidence that casts doubt on the efficacy of internal governance mechanisms. The study described in this Article also finds that higher quality external governance is associated with lower proportions of ownership by certain types of institutional investors, also a somewhat surprising result given available empirical evidence on the positive relationship between external governance and firm …
Re-Envisioning Investors’ Anti-Director Rights Index: Theory, Criticism, And Implications, Sang Yop Kang
Re-Envisioning Investors’ Anti-Director Rights Index: Theory, Criticism, And Implications, Sang Yop Kang
Sang Yop Kang
‘Law and Finance’ theory – which offers analytical frameworks to measure the protection of public investors and the quality of corporate governance – has dominated the comparative corporate governance scholarship in the last decade. So far, many proponents and critics have had debates on the relevance of the theory and the implications of the theory’s empirical studies. Several important points in relation to shareholder protection, however, have been highly neglected in these debates. In particular, the significance of one-share-one-vote (OSOV) rule has been inappropriately underestimated. In response, this Article explores (1) why OSOV is an utmost critical component in corporate …
Stock-Market Law And The Accuracy Of Public Companies’ Stock Prices, Kevin S. Haeberle
Stock-Market Law And The Accuracy Of Public Companies’ Stock Prices, Kevin S. Haeberle
Faculty Publications
The social benefits of more accurate stock prices—that is, stock-market prices that more accurately reflect the future cash flows that companies are likely to produce—are well established. But it is also thought that market forces alone will lead to only a sub-optimal level of stock-price accuracy—a level that fails to obtain the maximum net social benefits, or wealth, that would result from a higher level. One of the principal aims of federal securities law has therefore been to increase the extent to which the stock prices of the most important companies in our economy (public companies) contain information about firms’ …