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Full-Text Articles in Law

The Sec At 70: Time For Retirement?, Adam C. Pritchard Jan 2005

The Sec At 70: Time For Retirement?, Adam C. Pritchard

Articles

As one grows older, birthdays gradually shift from being celebratory events to more reflective occasions. One's 40th birthday is commemorated rather differently from one's 2lst, which is, in turn, celebrated quite differently from one's first. After a certain point, the individual birthdays become less important and it is the milestone years to whch we pay particular attention. Sadly for entities like the Securities and Exchange Commission, it is only the milestone years (the ones ending in five or zero, for some reason), that draw any attention at all. No one held a conference to celebrate the SEC's 67th anniversary. Clearly …


Should Issuers Be On The Hook For Laddering? An Empirical Analysis Of The Ipo Market Manipulation Litigation, Adam C. Pritchard, Stephen J. Choi Jan 2004

Should Issuers Be On The Hook For Laddering? An Empirical Analysis Of The Ipo Market Manipulation Litigation, Adam C. Pritchard, Stephen J. Choi

Articles

On December 6, 2000, the Wall Street Journal ran a front-page story exposing abuses in the market for initial public offerings (IPOs). The story revealed "tie-in" agreements between investment banks and initial investors seeking to participate in "hot" offerings. Under those agreements, initial investors would commit to buy additional shares of the offering company's stock in secondary market trading in return for allocations of shares in the IPO. As the Wall Street Journal related, those "[c]ommitments to buy in the after-market lock in demand for additional stock at levels above the IPO price. As such, they provide the rocket fuel …


Tender Offers By Controlling Shareholders: The Specter Of Coercion And Fair Price, Adam C. Pritchard Jan 2004

Tender Offers By Controlling Shareholders: The Specter Of Coercion And Fair Price, Adam C. Pritchard

Articles

Taking your company private has never been so appealing. The collapse of the tech bubble has left many companies whose stock prices bordered on the stratospheric now trading at small fractions of their historical highs. The spate of accounting scandals that followed the bursting of the bubble has taken some of the shine off the aura of being a public company-the glare of the spotlight from stock analysts and the business press looks much less inviting, notwithstanding the monitoring benefits that the spotlight purports to confer. Moreover, the regulatory backlash against those accounting scandals has made the costs of being …


A Control-Based Approach To Shareholder Liability For Corporate Torts, Nina A. Mendelson Jan 2002

A Control-Based Approach To Shareholder Liability For Corporate Torts, Nina A. Mendelson

Articles

Some commentators defend limited shareholder liability for torts and statutory violations as efficient, even though it encourages corporations to overinvest in and to externalize the costs of risky activity. Others propose pro rata unlimited shareholder liability for corporate torts. Both approaches, however, fail to account fully for qualitative differences among shareholders. Controlling shareholders, in particular, may have lower information costs, greater influence over managerial decisionmaking, and greater ability to benefit from corporate activity. This Article develops a control-based approach to shareholder liability. It first explores several differences among shareholders. For example, a controlling shareholder can more easily curb managerial risk …


Markets As Monitors: A Proposal To Replace Class Actions With Exchanges As Securities Fraud Enforcers, Adam C. Pritchard Jan 1999

Markets As Monitors: A Proposal To Replace Class Actions With Exchanges As Securities Fraud Enforcers, Adam C. Pritchard

Articles

Fraud in the securities markets has been a focus of legislative reform in recent years. Corporations-especially those in the high-technology industry-have complained that they are being unfairly targeted by plaintiffs' lawyers in class action securities fraud lawsuits. The corporations' complaints led to the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 ("Reform Act"). The Reform Act attempted to reduce meritless litigation against corporate issuers by erecting a series of procedural barriers to the filing of securities class actions. Plaintiffs' attorneys warned that the Reform Act and the resulting decrease in securities class actions would leave corporate fraud unchecked and deprive defrauded …


United States V. O'Hagan: Agency Law And Justice Powell's Legacy For The Law Of Insider Trading, Adam C. Pritchard Jan 1998

United States V. O'Hagan: Agency Law And Justice Powell's Legacy For The Law Of Insider Trading, Adam C. Pritchard

Articles

The law of insider trading is judicially created; no statutory provision explicitly prohibits trading on the basis of material, non-public information. The Supreme Court's insider trading jurisprudence was forged, in large part, by Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr. His opinions for the Court in United States v. Chiarella and SEC v. Dirks were, until recently, the Supreme Court's only pronouncements on the law of insider trading. Those decisions established the elements of the classical theory of insider trading under § 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (the "Exchange Act"). Under this theory, corporate insiders and their tippees who …


The Securities Litigation Uniform Standards Act Of 1998: The Sun Sets On California's Blue Sky Laws, David M. Lavine, Adam C. Pritchard Jan 1998

The Securities Litigation Uniform Standards Act Of 1998: The Sun Sets On California's Blue Sky Laws, David M. Lavine, Adam C. Pritchard

Articles

It is often said that California sets the pace for changes in America's tastes. Trends established in California often find their way into the heartland, having a profound effect on our nation's cultural scene. Nouvelle cuisine, the dialect of the Valley Girl and rollerblading all have their genesis on the West Coast. The most recent trend to emerge from California, instead of catching on in the rest of the country, has been stopped dead in its tracks by a legislative rebuke from Washington, D.C. California's latest, albeit short-lived, contribution to the nation was a migration of securities fraud class actions …


Harvey's Silence (Symposium: Letters To The Commission), James J. White Jan 1995

Harvey's Silence (Symposium: Letters To The Commission), James J. White

Articles

Harvey Miller has a reputation as a leading bankruptcy lawyer, and he deserves it. As his criticism shows, he understands why and how the Code changed the Act in 1978 and how the drafters of Chapter 11 erred. Better than all but a handful of other lawyers, Harvey Miller knows how to manipulate Chapter 11 to serve his clients' interests. He understands both the legal and practical intricacies of Chapter 11. Were I the CEO of a large and troubled company, I would hire Harvey Miller and gladly pay him twice what most other bankruptcy lawyers would charge. In short, …


Section 338 And Its Foolish Consistency Rules - The Hobgoblin Of Little Minds, Douglas A. Kahn Jan 1994

Section 338 And Its Foolish Consistency Rules - The Hobgoblin Of Little Minds, Douglas A. Kahn

Articles

The purposes of this Article are to examine whether there is any longer a reason for concern because a target corporation can choose selected assets for nonrecognition and to what extent the 1994 regulations properly deal with potentially abusive circumventions of tax goals. Before examining the current status of the consistency requirements, the historical background that led to the adoption of Section 338 and the operation of the section is discussed. The historical background includes: the judicially created Kimbell-Diamond rule, the codification and modification of that rule by the old version of Section 334(b)(2), the operation of the old version …


Absolute Priority And New Value, James J. White Jan 1991

Absolute Priority And New Value, James J. White

Articles

This paper is based on a lecture given on December 6, 1990 ast the Second Annual Robert E. Krinock Lecture. The absolute priority rule is a specific application of the broader doctrine that reorganization plans must be "fair and equitable." Both have their origins in the railroad reorganization cases of the early 20th century. The general doctrine is now codified in section 1129(b)(2) of the Bankruptcy Code and the rule is codified in subsection 1129(b)(2)(B)(ii) which provides that the debtor must pay a nonconsenting class of unsecured creditors in full or "the holder of any claim or interest that is …


Should General Utilities Be Reinstated To Provide Partial Integration Of Corporate And Personal Income—Is Half A Loaf Better Than None?, Douglas A. Kahn Jan 1988

Should General Utilities Be Reinstated To Provide Partial Integration Of Corporate And Personal Income—Is Half A Loaf Better Than None?, Douglas A. Kahn

Articles

The General Utilities doctrine is the name given to the now largely defunct tax rule that a corporation does not recognize a gain or a loss on making a liquidating or nonliquidating distribution of an appreciated or depreciated asset to its shareholders. The roots of the doctrine, can be traced to a regulation promulgated in 1919 that denied realization of gain or loss to a corporation when making a liquidating distribution of an asset in kind. No regulatory provision existed which specified the extent to which realization would or would not be triggered by a nonliquidating distribution such as a …


The Bildisco Case And The Congressional Response, James J. White Jan 1984

The Bildisco Case And The Congressional Response, James J. White

Articles

Section 365 of the Bankruptcy Reform Act authorizes one in bankruptcy to "assume or reject any executory contract ...of the debtor." The most frequent use of the section arises when a lessee goes into Chapter 11 and decides either to reject its real estate lease with its lessor or, if the lease is at a favorable rental rate, to assume it and assign it to another. A less frequent but more controversial use of section 365 is to reject one's collective bargaining agreement with his employees.


Stock Redemptions: The Standards For Qualifying As A Purchase Under Section 302(B)., Douglas A. Kahn Jan 1981

Stock Redemptions: The Standards For Qualifying As A Purchase Under Section 302(B)., Douglas A. Kahn

Articles

This Article discusses the requirements of section 302(b) for characterizing a stock redemption as a purchase rather than as a dividend equivalent. The focus is primarily on two issues: (1) whether the election authorized by section 302(c)(2) to waive family attribution rules should be available to an entity such as a trust or estate; and (2) the determination of the standards to be applied in resolving whether a redemption is "not essentially equivalent to a dividend" so that section 302(b)(1) is applicable.


Mandatory Buy-Out Agreements For Stock Of Closely Held Corporations, Douglas A. Kahn Nov 1969

Mandatory Buy-Out Agreements For Stock Of Closely Held Corporations, Douglas A. Kahn

Articles

A buy-out of a shareholder's stock is a sale of his stock holdings in a specific corporation pursuatnt to a pre-existing contract. In recent years such arrangements have, deservedly, become an increasingly popular planning device for shareholders in closely held corporations; they make it possible to limit the class of potential shareholders, provide liquidity for the estate of a deceased shareholder, and establish a value for stock which has no active market. There are two popular categories of buy-out plans. If the prospective purchaser of a decedent's shares is the corporation that issued them, the plan is called an "entity …


Corporations, Shareholders' Right To Have A Dividend Declared And Paid Out Of Surplus, Horace Lafayette Wilgus Jan 1919

Corporations, Shareholders' Right To Have A Dividend Declared And Paid Out Of Surplus, Horace Lafayette Wilgus

Articles

In Dodge v. Ford Motor Co. (Mich. 1919), 170, N. W. 668, the questions were not new, and with one exception, the decision was not unusual, but the sums involved were enormos. The Motor Company was incorporated in 1903, under the general manufacturing incorporating act of Michigan (P. A. 232, 1903), for the manufacture and sale of automobiles, motors and devices incident to their construction and operation, with an authorized Capital Stock of $150,000-$100,000 then paid up, $49,000 in cash, $40,000 in letters patent issued and applied for, and $11,000 in machinery and contracts. In 1908 the stock was increased …


Right Of Joint Adventurers Holding All The Stock Of A Corporation To A Dissolution And Accounting In Equity, Horace Lafayette Wilgus Jan 1910

Right Of Joint Adventurers Holding All The Stock Of A Corporation To A Dissolution And Accounting In Equity, Horace Lafayette Wilgus

Articles

The case of Jackson v. Hooper, in the New Jersey Court of Errors and Appeals, decided February 28, 1910, by Judge DILL, (42 N. Y. Law Journal, March 8, 1910), overruling Vice Chancellor HOWELL, of the Court of Chancery (74 AtL. 130) presents interesting and unusual points in corporation and partnership law, and the jurisdiction of courts of equity over corporate affairs.


Corporation Liens On Stock, Edson R. Sunderland Jan 1910

Corporation Liens On Stock, Edson R. Sunderland

Articles

At common law a corporation had no lien upon its stock for assessments unpaid or for debts due it from its shareholders.6 There are therefore but four possible methods by which liens could be created in favor of the corporation upon the stock which it issues, (i) by statute, (2) by charter, (3) by by-law, (4) by contract.


Purchase Of Shares Of Corporation By A Director From A Shareholder, Horace Lafayette Wilgus Jan 1910

Purchase Of Shares Of Corporation By A Director From A Shareholder, Horace Lafayette Wilgus

Articles

It is generally laid down in the encyclopedias and text books, and affirmed in many court opinions that "the doctrine that officers and directors [of corporations] are trustees of the stockholders, applies only in respect to their acts relating to the property or business of the corporation. It does not extend to their private dealings with stockholders or others, though in such dealings they take advantage of knowledge gained through their official position."1 Much of this doctrine is based upon the language of Chief Justice SHAW in Smith v. Hurd2 decided in 1847. He said: "There is no legal privity, …


The Northern Securities Decision, Horace Lafayette Wilgus Jan 1904

The Northern Securities Decision, Horace Lafayette Wilgus

Articles

March 14 the Supreme Court of the United States decided one of the most important cases that has been before it for a number of years. The litigation referred to is the Northern Securities case. The question involved was whether the control of the Great Northern and Northern Pacific railway companies through the ownership of the majority of the stock of each of those companies by the Securities company violated the national anti-trust act. The majority of the Supreme Court held it did, but four of the judges dissented.


Northwestern Railway Situation, Horace Lafayette Wilgus Jan 1903

Northwestern Railway Situation, Horace Lafayette Wilgus

Articles

What promises to be the most important corporate litigation that has or is likely to come before the Supreme Court for many years is involved in the various suits against the Northern Securities Company. To understand its full significance, it is desirable to recall something of the railroad history of the western states.


United States Steel Bond Conversion, Horace Lafayette Wilgus Jan 1903

United States Steel Bond Conversion, Horace Lafayette Wilgus

Articles

The litigation growing out of the plan of the United States Steel Corporation to retire $200,000,000 of its preferred stock by issuing bonds therefor has involved many interesting questions under the New Jersey law.