Law Commons^™

Fairness Opinions And Spac Reform, Andrew F. Tuch

Scholarship@WashULaw

Under the emerging regulatory framework for special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs), mergers of SPACs, known as de-SPACs, must be “fair” to public (or unaffiliated) SPAC shareholders, and transaction participants face heightened liability risk for disclosure errors. This framework is a product of the SEC’s reform proposal for SPACs (SPAC Reform Proposal) and recent decisions of the Delaware Court of Chancery. In this environment, third-party fairness opinions have been regarded as a de facto requirement for de-SPACs.

Cleaning Corporate Governance, Jens Frankenreiter, Cathy Hwang, Yaron Nili, Eric Talley

Scholarship@WashULaw

Although empirical scholarship dominates the field of law and finance, much of it shares a common vulnerability: an abiding faith in the accuracy and integrity of a small, specialized collection of corporate governance data. In this paper, we unveil a novel collection of three decades’ worth of corporate charters for thousands of public companies, which shows that this faith is misplaced.

We make three principal contributions to the literature. First, we label our corpus for a variety of firm- and state-level governance features. Doing so reveals significant infirmities within the most well-known corporate governance datasets, including an error rate exceeding …

The Foundations Of Anglo-American Corporate Fiduciary Law, Andrew F. Tuch

Scholarship@WashULaw

How does legal doctrine form, why does it change, and why do doctrines with a common starting point, in legal systems with a shared heritage, diverge? This essay reviews and critiques a book by David Kershaw that addresses these questions. The book charts the evolution of corporate fiduciary law in the United Kingdom and United States and, comparing the two systems, explains how and why the respective legal regimes evolved as they did. Kershaw weighs in on contested U.S. scholarly debates, confronting the common claim that doctrinal change is less the product of internal logic or strict precedent than a …