Law Commons^™

The Specter Of The Giant Three, Scott Hirst, Lucian Bebchuk

Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines the large, steady, and continuing growth of the Big Three index fund managers — BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street Global Advisors. We show that there is a real prospect that index funds will continue to grow, and that voting in most significant public companies will come to be dominated by the future “Giant Three.”

We begin by analyzing the drivers of the rise of the Big Three, including the structural factors that are leading to the heavy concentration of the index funds sector. We then provide empirical evidence about the past growth and current status of the …

Hedge Fund Activism, Poison Pills, And The Jurisprudence Of Threat, William W. Bratton

All Faculty Scholarship

This chapter reviews the single high profile case in which twentieth century antitakeover law has come to bear on management defense against a twenty-first century activist challenge—the Delaware Court of Chancery’s decision to sustain a low-threshold poison pill deployed against an activist in Third Point LLC v. Ruprecht. The decision implicated an important policy question: whether a twentieth century doctrine keyed to hostile takeovers and control transfers appropriately can be brought to bear in a twenty-first century governance context in which the challenger eschews control transfer and instead makes aggressive use of the shareholder franchise. Resolution of the question …

Corporate Darwinism: Disciplining Managers In A World With Weak Shareholder Litigation, Randall S. Thomas, James D. Cox

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Because representative shareholder litigation has been constrained by numerous legal developments, the corporate governance system has developed new mechanisms as alternative means to address managerial agency costs. We posit that recent significant governance developments in the corporate world are the natural consequence of the ineffectiveness and inefficiency of shareholder suits to address certain genre of managerial agency costs. We thus argue that corporate governance responses evolve to fill voids caused by the inability of shareholder suits to monitor and discipline corporate managers.

We further claim that these new governance responses are themselves becoming stronger due in part to the rising …

Shareholder Voting In An Age Of Intermediary Capitalism, Paul H. Edelman, Randall S. Thomas, Robert B. Thompson

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Shareholder voting is a key part of contemporary American corporate governance. As numerous contemporary battles between corporate management and shareholders illustrate, voting has never been more important. Yet, traditional theory about shareholder voting, rooted in concepts of residual ownership and a principal/agent relationship, does not reflect recent fundamental changes as to who shareholders are and their incentives to vote (or not vote). In the first section of the article, we address this deficiency directly by developing a new theory of corporate voting that offers three strong and complementary reasons for shareholder voting. In the middle section, we apply our theory …

Selectica Resets The Trigger On The Poison Pill: Where Should The Delaware Courts Go Next?, Paul H. Edelman, Randall S. Thomas

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Since their invention in 1982, shareholder rights plans have been the subject of intense controversy. Rights plans, or as they are known more pejoratively “poison pills,” enable a target board to “poison” a takeover attempt by making it prohibitively expensive for a bidder to acquire more than a certain percentage of the target company’s stock (until recently 15-20%). Not surprisingly, some commentators view rights plans as an inappropriate means of shifting power from shareholders to the board of directors.

In this Article, we critically examine Delaware law on the use of shareholder rights plans and propose a new approach to …

Arrow's Theorem And The Exclusive Shareholder Franchise, Grant M. Hayden, Matthew T. Bodie

All Faculty Scholarship

In this essay, we contest one of the main arguments for restricting corporate board voting to shareholders. In justifying the limitation of the franchise to shareholders, scholars have repeatedly turned to social choice theory—specifically, Arrow’s theorem—to justify the exclusive shareholder franchise. Citing to the theorem, corporate law commentators have argued that lumping different groups of stakeholders together into the electorate would result in a lack of consensus and, ultimately, the lack of coherence that attends intransitive social choices, perhaps even leading the corporation to self-destruct. We contend that this argument is misguided. First, we argue that scholars have greatly overestimated …

Corporate Voting And The Takeover Debate, Paul H. Edelman, Randall S. Thomas

Vanderbilt Law Review

Shareholder voting is the key to the outcome of hostile takeovers. The most obvious example arises when an acquirer tries to unseat a corporate board in a proxy contest for corporate control. But shareholder votes are needed in almost all other takeover settings as well. For instance, when a bidder announces a hostile tender offer, a resistant target company's board of directors will normally use its poison pill antitakeover defense, or a combination of a poison pill and a classified board, to stop its shareholders from selling their shares to the bidder, forcing the bidder to engage in at least …

Corporate Voting And The Takeover Debate, Randall Thomas, Paul H. Edelman

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

For many years academics have debated whether it is better to permit hostile acquirers to use tender offers to gain control over unwilling target companies, or to force them to use corporate elections of boards of directors in these efforts. The Delaware courts have expressed a strong preference for shareholder voting as a change of control device in hostile acquisitions. To force acquirers to accept their preferences, the Delaware courts have developed a jurisprudence permitting the effective classified board (ECB), a poison pill combined with a classified board, to protect target company management from removal by a hostile tender offer …

Corporations - Right Of Minority Stockholders To Interfere In Corporate Management

Michigan Law Review

In determining the relationship between the majority and minority stockholders of a corporation, the courts are faced with the problem of striking a correct balance between the rights of the plaintiff stockholder, who alleges that he is being oppressed by the majority, and the rights of the majority, acting through the regular corporate machinery, who allege that the corporation is being harassed by a troublesome minority. It is necessary to protect the minority from the machinations of those in control; it is likewise necessary to protect the corporation, as controlled by the majority, from the blackmailer who holds a few …

Equitable Limitations On Statutory Or Charter Powers Given To Majority Stockholders, Norman D. Lattin

Michigan Law Review

The object of this paper is to examine certain fundamental corporate changes which statutes or articles frequently authorize majority stockholders, or a certain proportion of all, to bring about, and to ascertain whether courts have looked simply to the literal wording of the authority and have sanctioned the action if in accord with the statute or whether they have implied equitable restrictions in spite of apparently unlimited authority in the statute or articles. How far, for example, have courts gone in the direction of the business man's idea that the corporation, after all, is a democratic affair, and that the …

Corporations - Injunctive Relief Against Corporate Action Which Requires Unanimous Approval

Michigan Law Review

A bill for an injunction to prevent the submission, at a stockholders' meeting, of a corporate by-law providing for extra dividends on stock owned by officers and employees, was maintained, on the ground that the proposed move was illegal and unauthorized by statute. Scott v. P. Lorillard Co. (N. J. Eq. 1931) 154 Atl. 515.

Corporations-Preparation Of Stockholders' List-Statutory Provision

Michigan Law Review

On a petition challenging the legality of an election of directors at a special meeting, one of the contentions was that calling this meeting on five days' notice violated section 29 of the Delaware General Corporation Act, as amended by 36 Del. Laws, c. 135, sec. 15, which provided that a list of stockholders entitled to vote be made by the officer in charge, ten days before every election. Held, this is not grounds for avoiding the election; the provisions of the statute are directory only, and where a by-law of the corporation required five days' notice for special …