Law Commons^™

Due Diligence: Company Information For Law Students, Matthew M. Morrison

Cornell Law Librarians' Publications

Many law students are placed with corporate law firms whose clients are overwhelmingly companies. While many law school courses focus on doctrine, students need to learn company information and where to find it. This article explains why teaching company information is crucial, where to find sources, and how to use these sources.

Supreme Court Tie In Teacher Case Delivers A Crucial Victory To Unions, Angela B. Cornell

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Fast-Food Workers Fight For A Raise And Create A Movement, Angela B. Cornell

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Lawyers And Fools: Lawyer-Directors In Public Corporations, Lubomir P. Litov, Simone M. Sepe, Charles K. Whitehead

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The accepted wisdom—that a lawyer who becomes a corporate director has a fool for a client—is outdated. The benefits of lawyer-directors in today’s world significantly outweigh the costs. Beyond monitoring, they help manage litigation and regulation, as well as structure compensation to align CEO and shareholder interests. The results have been an average 9.5% increase in firm value and an almost doubling in the percentage of public companies with lawyer-directors.

This Article is the first to analyze the rise of lawyer-directors. It makes a variety of other empirical contributions, each of which is statistically significant and large in magnitude. First, …

The Reform Of Corporate Taxation In The European Union, Nina Winkler

Cornell Law School Inter-University Graduate Student Conference Papers

The Commission of the European Communities is currently drafting a proposal for an EU Directive to implement the first comprehensive corporate tax strategy for the Internal Market. The adoption of a common consolidated corporate tax base for EU multinational enterprises is one of today’s most highly debated issues on Brussels’ political agenda. Since the reform would affect all international companies conducting business in the Internal Market, it should also be of great interest for non-EU corporate and tax law scholars and lawyers. The paper critically evaluates the key advantages and disadvantages of the concept of an EU consolidated tax base …

On The Nature Of Corporations, Lynn A. Stout

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Legal experts traditionally distinguish corporations from unincorporated business forms by focusing on corporate characteristics like limited shareholder liability, centralized management, perpetual life, and free transferability of shares. While such approaches have value, this essay argues that the nature of the corporation can be better understood by focusing on a fifth, often-overlooked, characteristic of corporations: their capacity to "lock in" equity investors' initial capital contributions by making it far more difficult for those investors to subsequently withdraw assets from the firm. Like a tar pit, a corporation is much easier for equity investors to get into, than to get out of. …

Who Pays The Auditor Calls The Tune?: Auditing Regulations And Clients' Incentives, Amy Shapiro

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

As we move on from the financial scandals of the early 2000s, the question of how to prevent the next Enron continues to be a pressing one. This Article focuses on the law’s deeply conflicted treatment of auditors of public corporations. Though the audit firm is charged with serving as the public’s watchdog in insuring good financial disclosure, the auditor’s actual client is the audited corporation itself, whose interests concerning disclosure are not necessarily aligned with those of investors. Because the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 left this structure in place, further reform is needed. One promising suggestion is to give …

Shareholder As Ulysses: Some Empirical Evidence On Why Investors In Public Corporations Tolerate Board Governance, Lynn A. Stout

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

This Article evaluates two possible explanations for why shareholders of public corporations tolerate board control of corporate assets and outputs: the widely accepted monitoring hypothesis, which posits that shareholders rely on boards primarily to control the "agency costs" associated with turning day-to-day control over the firm over to self-interested corporate executives, and the mediating hypothesis, which posits that shareholders also seek to "tie their own hands" by ceding control to directors as a means of attracting the extracontractual, firm-specific investments of such stakeholder groups as executives, creditors, and rank-and- file employees.

Part I reviews each hypothesis and concludes that each …