Law Commons^™

Reply: Clawback To The Future, Miriam A. Cherry, Jarrod Wong

All Faculty Scholarship

In an earlier article also available on Scholarship Commons, Clawbacks: Prospective Contract Measures in an Era of Excessive Executive Compensation and Ponzi Schemes, Minnesota Law Review, Vol. 94, p. 368, 2009, Professors Miriam Cherry and Jarrod Wong set out an initial description and analysis of contractual clawback provisions. In this Reply, Profs. Cherry and Wong address three aspects of Michael Macchiarola's Response: its application of the clawback doctrine to the recoupment of executive compensation; the criticism that the clawbacks doctrine introduces latent subjectivity into contractual analysis; and the apparent operational difficulties in implementing clawbacks.

Personal Jurisdiction Over Foreign Directors In Cross-Border Securities Litigation, Hannah L. Buxbaum

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Corporate War Crimes: Prosecuting Pillage Of Natural Resources, James G. Stewart

All Faculty Publications

Pillage means theft during war. Although the prohibition against pillage dates to antiquity, pillaging is a modern war crime that can be enforced before international and domestic criminal courts. Following World War II, several businessmen were convicted for the pillage of natural resources. And yet modern commercial actors are seldom held accountable for their role in the illegal exploitation of natural resources from modern conflict zones, even though pillage is prosecuted as a matter of course in other contexts. This book offers a doctrinal road-map of the law governing pillage as applied to the illegal exploitation of natural resources by …

In Defence Of The Sphere Of Influence: Why The Wgsr Should Not Follow Professor Ruggie's Advice On Defining The Scope Of Social Responsibility, Stepan Wood

All Faculty Publications

The Working Group on Social Responsibility (WGSR) of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) will meet in Copenhagen from May 17 to 21, 2010 for what is likely to be its last meeting to work on ISO 26000, an international guide on social responsibility. One of the central challenges for the WGSR is to define the scope of an organization’s responsibility for human rights abuses committed by third parties. ISO 26000, approved by a large majority in a recent "Draft International Standard" ballot, answers this question largely in terms of an organization’s degree of control or influence over others’ conduct. …

Judicial Independence And Company Law In The Shanghai People's Courts, 1992-2008, Nicholas C. Howson

Book Chapters

This chapter draws on a detailed study of corporate law adjudication in Shanghai from 1992 to 2008. The purpose of the study was to better understand the demonstrated technical competence, institutional autonomy, and political independence of one court system in the People's Republic of China ("PRC") in a sector outside of the criminal law. The study consisted of a detailed examination and comparison of full-length corporate law opinions for more than 200 reported cases, a 2003 Shanghai High Court opinion on the 1994 Company Law (describing a decade of corporate case outcomes), a 2007 report on cases implementing the Company …

The Development Of Modern Corporate Governance In China And India, Nicholas C. Howson, Vikramaditya S. Khanna

Book Chapters

Corporate governance reform has become a topic of considerable debate both in the US and in many emerging markets. Indeed, the discussion is important because these reforms may have potentially long-standing effects upon the global allocation of capital, and in understanding the ways in which governance norms are communicated across markets and nations in an ever-globalizing world. In this chapter we examine the corporate governance reform efforts of the world's two biggest and fastest growing emerging markets, the People's Republic of China (PRC or China) and India. In the process we find that our understanding of how and why corporate …

The Public Control Of Corporate Power: Revisiting The 1909 U.S. Corporate Tax From A Comparative Perspective, Ajay K. Mehrotra

Articles by Maurer Faculty

The origins of U.S. corporate taxation are often associated with the 1909 corporate excise tax. Scholars who have investigated the beginnings of this levy have mainly focused on the legislative history of the 1909 corporate tax to argue that it was either an expression of the Progressive Era impulse to regulate large-scale corporations or an attempt to use corporations as remittance devices to collect taxes aimed at wealthy shareholders. This Article broadens the conventional historical accounts of the emergence of American corporate taxation by revisiting the 1909 U.S. corporate tax from a comparative perspective. The aim is to look both …

Corporate Political Speech: Who Decides, Lucian A. Bebchuk, Robert J. Jackson Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court spoke clearly this Term on the issue of corporate political speech, concluding in Citizens United v. FEC' that the First Amendment protects corporations' freedom to spend corporate funds on indirect support of political candidates. 2 Constitutional law scholars will long debate the wisdom of that holding, as do the authors of the two other Comments in this issue.3 In contrast, this Comment accepts as given that corporations may not be limited from spending money on politics should they decide to speak. We focus instead on an important question left unanswered by Citizens United: who should have the …

Panel 3: Bankruptcy & Restructuring Of Financial Institutions, Barry E. Adler, William A. Ackman, Marcia L. Goldstein, Arthur J. Gonzalez, Michael J. Krimminger, Edward R. Morrison

Faculty Scholarship

Barry Adler: Thank you all for being here. It is an honor for me to be on this panel and an honor to moderate it. Let me introduce our panel before we get started. William A. Ackman, the founder and CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management; Marsha Goldstein, a partner and chair of the business finance and restructuring department at Weil, Gotshal; the Honorable Arthur Gonzalez, a judge in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York; and Ed Morrison, the Harvey Miller Professor of Law and Economics at Columbia Law School. Also on this panel is …

Commentary: The Federalization Of Nonprofit Regulation And Its Discontents, James J. Fishman

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

The Internal Revenue Service, at the instigation of the Senate Finance committee-the Service's primary congressional overseer-has commenced a corporate governance initiative by issuing announcements and guidelines, as well as providing educational advice as to how charities' internal affairs should be ordered. The Service also has revised the Form 990 Annual Information Return, a publicly available document, so that it contains mandatory corporate governance questions.2 Nonprofit organizations traditionally have been creatures of state law and overseen by state agencies and regulators.3 What is unique about the corporate governance initiative is the Service's admission that it lacks express statutory authority for this …

Renegotiation Of Cash Flow Rights In The Sale Of Vc-Backed Firms, Brian Broughman, Jesse Fried

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Incomplete contracting theory suggests that VC cash flow rights - including liquidation preferences - may be subject to renegotiation. Using a hand-collected dataset of sales of Silicon Valley firms, we find common shareholders do sometimes receive payment before VCs' liquidation preferences are satisfied. However, such deviations tend to be small. We also find that renegotiation is more likely when governance arrangements, including the firm's choice of corporate law, give common shareholders power to impede the sale. Our study provides support for incomplete contracting theory, improves understanding of VC exits, and suggests that choice of corporate law matters in private firms.

Organizational Liability, James A. Fanto

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Citizens United And The Corporate Form, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

In Citizens United vs. FEC, the Supreme Court struck down a Federal statute banning direct corporate expenditures on political campaigns. The decision has been widely criticized and praised as a matter of First Amendment law. But it is also interesting as another step in the evolution of our legal views of the corporation. This Article argues that by viewing Citizens Unitedthrough the prism of theories about the corporate form, it is possible to see that the majority and the dissent departed from previous Supreme Court jurisprudence on the First Amendment rights of corporations. It is also possible to then predict …

Contract Interpretation Redux, Alan Schwartz, Robert E. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

Contract interpretation remains the largest single source of contract litigation between business firms. In part this is because contract interpretation issues are difficult, but it also reflects a deep divide between textualist and contextualist theories of interpretation. While a strong majority of U.S. courts continue to follow the traditional, "formalist" approach to contract interpretation, some courts and most commentators prefer the "contextualist" interpretive principles that are reflected in the Uniform Commercial Code and the Second Restatement. In 2003, we published an article that set out a formalist theory of contract interpretation to govern agreements between business firms. We argued that, …

Reading Stoneridge Carefully: A Duty-Based Approach To Reliance And Third Party Liability Under Rule 10b-5, Donald C. Langevoort

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Supreme Court's decision in the Stoneridge case has largely been interpreted as a imposing a strict, pro-defendant reliance requirement. This article offers an alternative reading that takes the Court's analysis more seriously than its overheated dicta, one that makes "remoteness" a serious and meaningful inquiry that can produce balanced and fair responses to the concern that seemed to motivate the search for restraint: fear of disproportionate liability. It explores the nature of the dispropotion, and suggests ways--using the Court's own explanatory tools--for deciding when third party involvement is close enough to the fraud so that fear of disproportion lessens. …

Supply Chains And Porous Boundaries: The Disaggregation Of Legal Services, Milton C. Regan, Palmer T. Heenan

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The economic downturn has had significant effects on law firms, and is causing many of them to rethink some basic assumptions about how they operate. In important respects, however, the downturn has simply intensified the effects of some deeper trends that preceded it, which are likely to continue after any recovery that may occur.

This paper explores one of these trends, which is corporate client insistence that law firms “disaggregate” their services into discrete tasks that can be delegated to the least costly providers who can perform them. With advances in communications technology, there is increasing likelihood that some of …

A Short History Of Tontines, Kent Mckeever

Faculty Scholarship

A tontine is an investment scheme through which shareholders derive some form of profit or benefit while they are living, but the value of each share devolves to the other participants and not the shareholder's heirs on the death of each shareholder. The tontine is usually brought to an end through a dissolution and distribution of assets to the living shareholders when the number of shareholders reaches an agreed small number.

If people know about tontines at all, they tend to visualize the most extreme form – a joint investment whose heritable ownership ends up with the last living shareholder. …

Corporate Environmental Social Responsibility: Corporate "Greenwashing" Or A Corporate Culture Game Changer?, Hope M. Babcock

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article focuses on the extent to which unenforceable voluntary initiatives undertaken by corporations can change corporate behavior to make businesses more environmentally responsible, i.e. not only comply with the law, but to do more than the law actually requires of them. These initiatives, loosely gathered under the umbrella of a movement called corporate social responsibility (CSR), are often proposed by the government as a way to fill regulatory and enforcement gaps or by industry, often as an alternative to regulatory requirements. In each case, their goal is to improve the compliance record of businesses and, in some cases, to …

Locating Innovation: The Endogeneity Of Technology, Organizational Structure, And Financial Contracting, Ronald J. Gilson

Faculty Scholarship

There is much we do not understand about the "location" of innovation: the confluence, for a particular innovation, of the technology associated with the innovation; the innovating firm's size and organizational structure; and the financial contracting that supports the innovation. This Essay suggests that these three indicia are determined simultaneously and discusses the interaction among them through four examples of innovative activity whose location is characterized by tradeoffs between pursuing the activity in an established company, in a smaller, earlier-stage company, or some combination of the two. It first considers the dilemma faced by an established company in deciding whether …