Law Commons^™

Gen Y More Black Corporate Directors, Chaz Brooks

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Corporate diversity has been in the spotlight for decades. Recent efforts have followed years of legal scholarship, arguments on the business rationale for greater diversity, and more recently, the racial unrest during the summer of 2020. Called by some, a “racial reckoning,” the summer of 2020 catalyzed many corporate declarations on the importance of diversity, and more to the point of this article, the necessity of righting the economic disadvantages of Black Americans. This article looks specifically at one intervention by a corporate player following summer 2020, Nasdaq’s volley to increase corporate diversity through required disclosure. This article reviews the …

Interest Rates, Venture Capital, And Financial Stability, Hilary J. Allen

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Following several prominent bank failures and as central banks continue to tighten interest rates to fight inflation, there is increasing interest in the relationship between monetary policy and financial stability. This Article illuminates one path through which the prolonged period of low interest rates from 2009-2021 has impacted financial stability: it traces how yield-seeking behavior in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis and Covid pandemic led to a bubble in the venture capital industry, which in turn spawned a crypto bubble as well as a run on the VC-favored Silicon Valley Bank. This Article uses this narrative to illustrate …

Comments On Federal Trade Commission Non-Compete Ban Proposed Rule, Matter No. P201200, Chaz D. Brooks

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Within signed law professors and law students submitted this letter to the Federal Trade Commission, writing in their individual capacities, not as agents of their affiliated institutions, in support of the Federal Trade Commission’s proposed rule to ban most non-compete clauses (the “Proposal”) as an unfair method of competition.

This letter offers comments in response to areas where the FTC has requested public comment. To make our views clear, this letter contains the following sections: I. Summary of the Proposal; II. The Commission Should Consider Expanding Its Definition of Non-Compete Clauses to Prevent Employers from Requiring Workers to Quit Before …

Regulatory Managerialism Inaction: A Case Study Of Bank Regulation And Climate Change, Hilary J. Allen

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In November of 2029, Hurricane Penelope struck New York City as a category two storm. Work had started on a wall to protect Manhattan from rising sea levels and storm surges, but the work was incomplete, and significant damage to Manhattan real estate was sustained. While almost all that real estate was insured, insurance companies were compromised by the sheer magnitude of the losses. Even with significant federal subsidies, they were unable to meet their full commitments on insurance policies. Some commercial real estate firms, who had never really recovered from the shift to remote working during the Covid pandemic, …

Regulatory Innovation And Permission To Fail: The Case Of Suptech, Hilary J. Allen

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The recent U.S. Supreme Court decision West Virginia v. EPA has cast a pall over the discretion of administrative agencies at a very inopportune time. The private sector is currently adopting new technologies at a rapid pace, and as regulated industries become more technologically complex, administrative agencies must innovate technological tools of their own in order to keep up. Agencies will increasingly struggle to do their jobs without that innovation, but the private sector is afforded something that is both critical to the innovation process, and often denied to administrative agencies: “permission to fail.” Without some grace for the inevitable …

Platform-Enabled Crimes: Pluralizing Accountability When Social Media Companies Enable Perpetrators To Commit Atrocities, Rebecca Hamilton

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Online intermediaries are omnipresent. Each day across the globe, the corporations running these platforms execute policies and practices that serve their profit model, typically by sustaining user engagement. Sometimes, these seemingly banal business activities enable principal perpetrators to commit crimes. Online intermediaries, however, are almost never held to account for their complicity in the resulting harms. This Article introduces the concept of platformenabled crimes into the legal literature to highlight the ways in which the ordinary business activities of online intermediaries enable the commission of crime. It then focuses on a subset of platform-enabled crimes—those in which a social media …

Contracting For Process, David Snyder

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This article introduces the concept of contracting for process and considers when it is likely to be the best contract design. Contracting for process is in widespread use, but it often goes unnoticed. Some characteristics of contracting for process suit it particularly well to situations of uncertainty, including the radical uncertainty that results from fundamental disruptions such as COVID-19. Parties can employ this design for both contracts made or renegotiated during a crisis and for contracts made in ordinary times. The concept articulated here, however, is not confined to contexts of uncertainty or complexity; it can be used to achieve …

Who Is The Client? Rethinking Professional Responsibility For Benefit Corporations, Joseph Pileri

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A growing social enterprise movement has led companies to increasingly opt into the benefit corporation form, and those companies are hiring lawyers. Benefit corporations challenge the notion that corporate law’s primary focus is on furthering shareholder interests. While many have written about the benefit corporation with respect to corporate fiduciary law, this Article is the first to explore the form’s ethical implications for lawyers. Ethical obligations necessarily reflect substantive law governing client organizations; changes to the corporate form presented by benefit corporation legislation should reverberate in legal ethics. The legal profession, however, has not addressed how to lawyer to a …

Uncharted Waters? Legal Ethics And The Benefit Corporation, Joseph Pileri

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Corporate law norms are reflected in lawyers’ ethical duties. The enactment of benefit corporation legislation across the country signals a legislative acknowledgment that corporate law can serve as a public, rather than a merely private, ordering mechanism. Benefit corporations expressly adopt a public benefit as a legal purpose of the enterprise. While many have written about this important development with respect to corporate fiduciary law, this essay is the first to explore the professional and ethical responsibility of lawyers representing benefit corporations. In the last century, as scholars and courts drove an understanding of corporate law that elevated the interests …

International Financial Regulatory Standards And Human Rights: Connecting The Dots, Daniel D. Bradlow, Motoko Aizawa, Margaret Wachenfeld

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This paper’s hypothesis is that the international standard setting bodies (SSBs) could improve the quality of their international standards by incorporating a human rights analysis. It focuses on five SSBs and seven of their international standards and its findings include the following: First, the standards all implicate the right of non-discrimination, and the rights to information, privacy and an effective remedy. Second, they each raises economic, social and cultural rights issues, including the obligation to allocate ‘maximum available resources’ to the progressive realization of economic, social and cultural rights; the human rights responsibilities of private actors exercising delegated regulatory authority, …

Why Delaware Courts Should Abolish The Schnell Doctrine, Mary Siegel

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

Overlapping Financial Investor Ownership, Market Power, And Antitrust Enforcement: My Qualified Agreement With Professor Elhauge, Jonathan Baker

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As is well known among financial economists but not previously recognized within the antitrust community, large and diversified institutional investors such as BlackRock, Fidelity, State Street, and Vanguard collectively own roughly two-thirds of the shares of publicly traded U.S. firms overall, up from about one-third in 1980. Recent economic research involving airlines and banking raises the possibility that overlapping ownership of horizontal rivals by diversified financial institutions facilitates anticompetitive conduct throughout the economy, and that the problem has been growing for decades, unnoticed until now. This response to an article by Professor Einer Elhauge, explains why it may be more …

Publicly-Traded Llcs: The New Kid On The Exchange, Mary Siegel

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

The Problems And Promise Of "Enhanced Business Judgement", Mary Siegel

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

Pre-Crime Restraints: The Explosion Of Targeted, Non-Custodial Prevention, Jennifer Daskal

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This Article exposes the ways in which noncustodial pre-crime restraints have proliferated over the past decade, focusing in particular on three notable examples — terrorism-related financial sanctions, the No Fly List, and the array of residential, employment, and related restrictions imposed on sex offenders. Because such restraints do not involve physical incapacitation, they are rarely deemed to infringe core liberty interests. Because they are preventive, not punitive, criminal law procedural protections do not apply. They have exploded largely unchecked — subject to little more than bare rationality review and negligible procedural protections — and without any coherent theory as to …

Non-Party Interests In Closing Opinion Letters, Heather Hughes

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INTRODUCTION: What do transactional lawyers do when they issue third-party opinion letters in financial transactions? This descriptive question turns out to be quite complex'-so complex that the normative question of what lawyers should do when they issue opinions, as well as the practical question of what they could do, are difficult to answer. This Symposium Article reflects upon third-party closing opinions as a central aspect of business law practice that can be opaque to outsiders. The ideas expressed here are exploratory. In the spirit of reflecting on what transactional lawyers do, this contribution considers deal lawyer strategies as potential tools …

Citizens Derided: Corporate Politics In The Roberts Court, Jamin B. Raskin

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No abstract provided.

The Illusion Of Enhanced Review Of Board Actions, Mary Siegel

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No abstract provided.

An Appraisal Of The Model Business Corporation Act's Appraisal Rights Provisios, Mary Siegel

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

The Dangers Of Equitable Remedies, Mary Siegel

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Introduction: "While Delaware jurisprudence is renowned for its clarity and sophistication, one area of its corporate case law is, by design, uncharacteristically ambiguous: equitable remedies. One Delaware judge summarized his equitable powers as follows: " [T]his court will use its 'broad discretion to tailor [a remedy] to suit the situationas it exists.' As Delaware has long recognized, 'the Court of Chancery [has] the inherent powers of equity to adapt its relief to the particular rights and liabilities of each party." The most well known of the equitable remedies is the Schnell doctrine, which allows the court to invalidate conduct that …

Climate Change, Corporate Strategy, And Corporate Law Duties, Perry E. Wallace

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Although greenhouse-gas management now ranks among the world’s great challenges, this status did not obtain instantly—or easily. Today, however, reservations about the validity of global warming as a major threat are fading. They are fading, appropriately, as rapidly as some ice sheets and glaciers are melting. Indeed, the steady flow of new, compelling evidence joins an already considerable base of scientific, economic, and other certainties about the subject.

The result of this evolution in climate-change certainty has been major change of global dimensions. In notable ways, the structures and the functions of governmental, economic, and social institutions around the world …

Going Private: Three Doctrines Gone Astray, Mary Siegel

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Introduction: "Much attention has been devoted to the seeming inconsistency in the Delaware Supreme Court's holdings that predicate the choice of monitor governing a going-private transaction based on the form of the transaction. Weinberger v. UOP, Inc.' is the beacon of going private law, requiring controlling shareholders in a conflict-of-interest long-form merger to prove the entire fairness of that transaction. Kahn v. Lynch Communication Systems, Inc. reinforced Weinbergds holding by requiring the entire fairness monitor in long-form mergers even where the controlling shareholders have provided a method to immunize their controlling influence. Against this stalwart adherence to the entire fairness …

A Survival Guide For Small Businesses: Avoiding The Pitfalls In International Dispute Resolution, Susan Franck

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

In the past decade, the number of small, entrepreneurial businesses participating in the global economy has tripled. With this increase comes a rise in the number of cross-border commercial disputes. The unwary small business, not familiar with international transactions, may commit errors that adversely affect their ability to do and stay in business. This article focuses on analyzing which methods small businesses should use in constructing their dispute resolution provisions and how to avoid errors in drafting and negotiation.

The Corporate Attorney-Client Privilege: Loss Of Predictability Does Not Justify Crying Wolfinbarger, Paul Rice

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

The Legal Architecture Of Virtual Stores, Walter Effross

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

INTRODUCTION: A major "selling point" of the World Wide Web is its ability to offer a "virtual storefront" to anyone, from an individual to a multinational corporation, with a product to market. Commercially available software packages enable even those computer users who are not versed in the intricacies of programming to create customized Web sites quickly, and at a relatively low cost. The swift development of this technology and a cultural shift towards encouraging on-line commerce have led to dramatic growth in the demographics and dollar amounts of the on-line marketplace, which in turn offers a challenging new context for …

Contemporary Empirical Merger Analysis, Jonathan Baker

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

Mergers And Acquisitions In The European Community And The United States: A Movement Toward A Uniform Enforcement Body, David Snyder

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No abstract provided.

Fringe Firms And Incentives To Innovate, Jonathan Baker

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No abstract provided.

Corporate Mergers: Redefining The Role Of Target Directors, Mary Siegel, Jennifer J. Johnson

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

Tender Offer Defensive Tactics: A Proposal For Reform, Mary Siegel

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.