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Full-Text Articles in Law
A Proposed Sec Cyber Data Disclosure Advisory Commission, Lawrence J. Trautman, Neal Newman
A Proposed Sec Cyber Data Disclosure Advisory Commission, Lawrence J. Trautman, Neal Newman
Faculty Scholarship
Constant cyber threats result in: intellectual property loss; data disruption; ransomware attacks; theft of valuable company intellectual property and sensitive customer information. During March 2022, The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued a proposed rule addressing Cybersecurity Risk Management, Strategy, Governance, and Incident Disclosure, which requires: 1. Current reporting about material cybersecurity incidents; 2. Periodic disclosures about a registrant’s policies and procedures to identify and manage cybersecurity risks; 3. Management’s role in implementing cybersecurity policies and procedures; 4. Board of directors’ cybersecurity expertise, if any, and its oversight of cybersecurity risk; 5. Registrants to provide updates about previously reported cybersecurity …
Delaware's Global Competitiveness, William J. Moon
Delaware's Global Competitiveness, William J. Moon
Faculty Scholarship
For about a hundred years, Delaware has been the leading jurisdiction for corporate law in the United States. The state, which deliberately embarked on a mission to build a haven for corporate law in the early twentieth century, now supplies corporate charters to over two thirds of Fortune 500 companies and a growing share of closely held companies. But Delaware’s domestic dominance masks the important and yet underexamined issue of whether Delaware maintains its competitive edge globally.
This Article examines Delaware’s global competitiveness, documenting Delaware’s surprising weakness competing in the emerging international market for corporate charters. It does so principally …
More Meaningful Ethics, Veronica Root Martinez
More Meaningful Ethics, Veronica Root Martinez
Faculty Scholarship
Firms have exponentially increased their investment in the creation and implementation of ethics and compliance programs over the past fifteen years. The convergence of more robust corporate enforcement actions and more sophisticated industry standards and practices surrounding compliance efforts has created a booming compliance industry with commonly accepted standards and responsibilities. Within these efforts is a formal acknowledgment by the government, industry leaders, and academics that ethics has a role to play in helping to prevent misconduct within firms and that compliance without concern for ethics is insufficient. The reality, however, is that within firms’ efforts to implement effective ethics …
Criminally Bad Management, Samuel W. Buell
Criminally Bad Management, Samuel W. Buell
Faculty Scholarship
Because of their leverage over employees, corporate managers are prime targets for incentives to control corporate crime, even when managers do not themselves commit crimes. Moreover, the collective actions of corporate management — producing what is sometimes referred to as corporate culture — can be the cause of corporate crime, not just a locus of the failure to control it. Because civil liability and private compensation arrangements have limited effects on management behavior — and because the problem is, after all, crime — criminal law is often expected to intervene. This handbook chapter offers a functional explanation for corporate criminal …
Delaware's Retreat: Exploring Developing Fissures And Tectonic Shifts In Delaware Corporate Law, James D. Cox, Randall S. Thomas
Delaware's Retreat: Exploring Developing Fissures And Tectonic Shifts In Delaware Corporate Law, James D. Cox, Randall S. Thomas
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
From Corporate Law To Corporate Governance, Ronald J. Gilson
From Corporate Law To Corporate Governance, Ronald J. Gilson
Faculty Scholarship
In the 1960s and 1970s, corporate law and finance scholars gave up on their traditional approaches. Corporate law had become “towering skyscrapers of rusted girders, internally welded together and containing nothing but wind.” In finance, the theory of the firm was recognized as an “empty box.” This essay tracks how corporate law was reborn as corporate governance through three examples of how we have usefully complicated the inquiry into corporate behavior. Part I frames the first complication, defining governance broadly as the company’s operating system, a braided framework of legal and non-legal elements. Part II adds a second complication by …
The Role Of Social Enterprise And Hybrid Organizations, Ofer Eldar
The Role Of Social Enterprise And Hybrid Organizations, Ofer Eldar
Faculty Scholarship
Recent years have brought remarkable growth in hybrid organizations that combine profit-seeking and social missions. Despite popular enthusiasm for such organizations, legal reforms to facilitate their formation and growth—particularly, legal forms for hybrid firms—have largely been ineffective. This shortcoming stems in large part from the lack of a theory that identifies the structural and functional elements that make some types of hybrid organizations more effective than others. In pursuit of such a theory, this Article focuses on a large class of hybrid organizations that has been effective in addressing development problems, such as increasing access to capital and improving employment …
The Responsibility Gap In Corporate Crime, Samuel W. Buell
The Responsibility Gap In Corporate Crime, Samuel W. Buell
Faculty Scholarship
In many cases of criminality within large corporations, senior management does not commit the operative offense — or conspire or assist in it — but nonetheless bears serious responsibility for the crime. That responsibility can derive from, among other things, management’s role in cultivating corporate culture, in failing to police effectively within the firm, and in accepting lavish compensation for taking the firm’s reins. Criminal law does not include any doctrinal means for transposing that form of responsibility into punishment. Arguments for expanding doctrine — including broadening of the presently narrow “responsible corporate officer” doctrine — so as to authorize …
Corporate Officers As Agents, Deborah A. Demott
Corporate Officers As Agents, Deborah A. Demott
Faculty Scholarship
Although officers are crucial to corporate operations, scholarly and theoretical accounts tend to slight officers and amalgamate them with directors into a single category, "managers." This essay anchors officers within the common law of agency-as does black-letter law-which crisply differentiates officers from directors. Understanding that agency is central of the legal account of officers' positions and responsibilities is crucial to seeing why, like directors, officers are fiduciaries, but distinctively so, not as instances of generic "corporate fiduciaries." Officers, like directors, owe duties of loyalty, but also particularized duties of care, competence, and diligence. Additionally, officers' duties of performance encompass two …
Controlling Systemic Risk Through Corporate Governance, Steven L. Schwarcz
Controlling Systemic Risk Through Corporate Governance, Steven L. Schwarcz
Faculty Scholarship
Most of the regulatory measures to control excessive risk taking by systemically important firms are designed to reduce moral hazard and to align the interests of managers and investors. These measures may be flawed because they are based on questionable assumptions. Excessive corporate risk taking is, at its core, a corporate governance problem. Shareholder primacy requires managers to view the consequences of their firm’s risk taking only from the standpoint of the firm and its shareholders, ignoring harm to the public. In governing, managers of systemically important firms should also consider public harm. This proposal engages the long-standing debate whether …
Regulatory Competition And The Market For Corporate Law, Ofer Eldar, Lorenzo Magnolfi
Regulatory Competition And The Market For Corporate Law, Ofer Eldar, Lorenzo Magnolfi
Faculty Scholarship
This article develops an empirical model of firms’ choice of corporate laws under inertia. Delaware dominates the incorporation market, though recently Nevada, a state whose laws are highly protective of managers, has acquired a sizable market share. Using a novel database of incorporation decisions from 1995- 2013, we show that most firms dislike protectionist laws, such as anti-takeover statutes and liability protections for officers, and that Nevada’s rise is due to the preferences of small firms.Our estimates indicate that despite inertia, Delaware would lose significant market share and revenues if it adopted protectionist laws. Our findings support the hypothesis that …
Modern-Day Monitorships, Veronica Root
Modern-Day Monitorships, Veronica Root
Faculty Scholarship
When a sexual abuse scandal rocked Penn State, when Apple was found to have engaged in anticompetitive behavior, and when servicers like Bank of America improperly foreclosed upon hundreds of thousands of homeowners, each organization entered into a "Modern-Day Monitorship”. Modern-day monitorships are utilized in an array of contexts to assist in widely varying remediation efforts. This is because they provide outsiders with a unique source of information about the efficacy of the tarnished organization's efforts to resolve misconduct. Yet, despite their use in high profile and serious matters of organizational wrongdoing, they are not an outgrowth of careful study …
Tax And Corporate Governance: The Influence Of Tax On Managerial Agency Costs, David M. Schizer
Tax And Corporate Governance: The Influence Of Tax On Managerial Agency Costs, David M. Schizer
Faculty Scholarship
This chapter examines the influence of tax on managerial agency costs, with particular emphasis on public companies in the United States. Focusing on “C-corporations,” this chapter first considers why tax is an imperfect vehicle for mitigating managerial agency costs. It then discusses how tax influences the compensation of managers, both in ways policy makers intended, and in ways they did not. The chapter also considers how tax affects management decisions about capital structure, hedging, and acquisitions. In addition, this chapter explores the tax system’s influence on the ability and incentives of shareholders to monitor management. This chapter then concludes with …
Majority Control And Minority Protection, Zohar Goshen, Assaf Hamdani
Majority Control And Minority Protection, Zohar Goshen, Assaf Hamdani
Faculty Scholarship
This chapter examines legal issues concerning majority control and minority protection in firms with concentrated ownership governance structures, with particular emphasis on the tradeoff between the goals of protecting minority shareholders and allowing controllers to pursue their vision and how corporate law should balance these conflicting goals. Focusing primarily on Delaware corporate law, it suggests that holding a control block allows majority shareholders to pursue their idiosyncratic vision in the manner they see fit, even against minority investors’ objections. Idiosyncratic vision refers to the subjective value that entrepreneurs attach to their business idea or vision, and this chapter considers its …
Convergence And Persistence In Corporate Law And Governance, Jeffrey N. Gordon
Convergence And Persistence In Corporate Law And Governance, Jeffrey N. Gordon
Faculty Scholarship
This chapter discusses the question of “convergence or persistence” in corporate law and governance. It first considers efforts to measure convergence directly by focusing on the evolution of law-on-the-books governance provisions before analyzing capital market evidence on convergence, with particular emphasis on capital market indicators such as the decline in “cross-listings” onto US stock exchanges by firms from jurisdictions with weaker investor protection and the increase in initial public offerings (IPOs) on emerging market stock markets. The chapter proceeds by reviewing evidence of divergence, especially “divergence within convergence,” and the failure of the European Union to produce more convergent corporate …
The Governance Structure Of Shadow Banking, Steven L. Schwarcz
The Governance Structure Of Shadow Banking, Steven L. Schwarcz
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
The (Misunderstood) Genius Of American Corporate Law, Robert B. Ahdieh
The (Misunderstood) Genius Of American Corporate Law, Robert B. Ahdieh
Faculty Scholarship
In this Reply, I respond to comments by Bill Bratton, Larry Cunningham, and Todd Henderson on my recent paper - Trapped in a Metaphor: The Limited Implications of Federalism for Corporate Governance. I begin by reiterating my basic thesis - that state competition should be understood to have little consequence for corporate governance, if (as charter competition's advocates assume) capital-market-driven managerial competition is also at work. I then consider some of the thoughtful critiques of this claim, before suggesting ways in which the comments highlight just the kind of comparative institutional analysis my paper counsels. Rather than a stark choice …
Trapped In A Metaphor: The Limited Implications Of Federalism For Corporate Governance, Robert B. Ahdieh
Trapped In A Metaphor: The Limited Implications Of Federalism For Corporate Governance, Robert B. Ahdieh
Faculty Scholarship
Trapped in a metaphor articulated at the founding of modern corporate law, the study of corporate governance has - for some thirty years - been asking the wrong questions. Rather than a singular race among states, whether to the bottom or the top, the synthesis of William Cary and Ralph Winter’s famous exchange is better understood as two competitions, each serving distinct normative ends. Managerial competition advances the project that has motivated corporate law since Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means - effective regulation of the separation of ownership and control. State competition, by contrast, does not promote a race to …
Classified Boards And Firm Value, Michael D. Frakes
Classified Boards And Firm Value, Michael D. Frakes
Faculty Scholarship
Classified boards constitute one of the most potent takeover defenses for U.S. firms today. However, as with takeover defenses more generally, economic theory offers an ambiguous prediction as to the effect that classified boards have on bottom-line firm value. A resolution of this ambiguity will require sound and convincing empirical methodology. In an effort to address limitations in the existing empirical literature, this article approaches the relationship between corporate governance and firm value while taking various measures to account for unobserved sources of heterogeneity across firms. Using the instrumental variables model developed by Hausman and Taylor, I find evidence of …