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Full-Text Articles in Law

Revitalizing Sec Rule 14a-8’S Ordinary Business Exclusion: Preventing Shareholder Micromanagement By Proposal, Stephen M. Bainbridge Nov 2016

Revitalizing Sec Rule 14a-8’S Ordinary Business Exclusion: Preventing Shareholder Micromanagement By Proposal, Stephen M. Bainbridge

Fordham Law Review

Who decides what products a company should sell, what prices it should charge, and so on? Is it the board of directors, the top management team, or the shareholders? In large corporations, of course, the answer is the top management team operating under the supervision of the board. As for the shareholders, they traditionally have had no role in these sort of operational decisions. In recent years, however, shareholders have increasingly used SEC Exchange Act Rule 14a-8 (the so-called “Shareholder Proposal Rule”) to not just manage but even micromanage corporate decisions. The Rule permits a qualifying shareholder of a public …


Keeping Shareholder Activism Alive: A Comparative Approach To Outlawing Dead Hand Proxy Puts In Delaware, Danielle A. Rapaccioli May 2016

Keeping Shareholder Activism Alive: A Comparative Approach To Outlawing Dead Hand Proxy Puts In Delaware, Danielle A. Rapaccioli

Fordham Law Review

Current trends in shareholder activism have brought to light the competing interests of management and stockholders. With a rise in shareholder activism, firms are continuing to include change in control provisions, known as proxy puts, in their debt agreements to counter activist success. Recent litigation regarding the use of these provisions has created a debate as to whether these provisions are valid under Delaware law. Moreover, companies and lending institutions have morphed these provisions into a more restrictive form, known as “dead hand proxy puts.” The controversy analyzed in this Note arises out of the use of dead hand proxy …


Up The Chute, Down The Ladder: Shifting Priorities Through Structured Dismissals In Bankruptcy, Bethany K. Smith May 2016

Up The Chute, Down The Ladder: Shifting Priorities Through Structured Dismissals In Bankruptcy, Bethany K. Smith

Fordham Law Review

In a structured dismissal of a Chapter 11 bankruptcy case, a bankruptcy court approves case dismissal alongside a stakeholder agreement as to the manner in which the estate is to be dealt with once the case has been dismissed. Such orders are controversial in that they are not explicitly authorized through the U.S. Bankruptcy Code (“the Code”) and are especially controversial where the accompanying agreement seeks to distribute estate property in contravention of the priority scheme laid out in § 507 of the Code. Where the agreement violates this so-called waterfall payment method, bankruptcy courts are faced with difficult questions: …


The Conscious Parallelism Of Wolf Packs: Applying The Antitrust Conspiracy Framework To Section 13(D) Activist Group Formation, William R. Tevlin Apr 2016

The Conscious Parallelism Of Wolf Packs: Applying The Antitrust Conspiracy Framework To Section 13(D) Activist Group Formation, William R. Tevlin

Fordham Law Review

Section 13(d) of the Williams Act requires all persons and groups that acquire 5 percent or more of an issuer’s outstanding stock to disclose their holdings to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Whether a group is formed under section 13(d) often is unclear. The legal precedent is ambiguous; courts give more weight to certain forms of circumstantial evidence than others without explaining why. With the substantial increase of hedge fund activism—in particular, the wolf pack tactic—further clarity or uniformity is necessary. A “wolf pack” is a loose association of hedge funds that employs parallel activist strategies toward a target corporation …