Law Commons^™

Barriers To Effective Risk Management, Michelle M. Harner

Faculty Scholarship

“As long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing.”**

This now infamous quote by Charles Prince, Citigroup’s former Chief Executive Officer, captures the high-risk, high-reward mentality and overconfidence that permeates much of corporate America. These attributes in turn helped to facilitate a global recession and some of the largest economic losses ever experienced in the financial sector. They also represent certain cognitive biases and cultural norms in corporate boardrooms and management suites that make implementing a meaningful risk culture and thereby mitigating the impact of future economic downturns a challenging proposition.

The …

The Madoff Scandal, Market Regulatory Failure And The Business Education Of Lawyers, Robert J. Rhee

Faculty Scholarship

This essay suggests that a deficiency in legal education is a contributing cause of the regulatory failure. The most scandalous malfeasance of this new era, the Madoff Ponzi scheme, evinces the failure of improperly trained lawyers and regulators. It also calls into question whether the prevailing regulatory philosophy of disclosure of disclosure is sufficient in a complex market. This essay answers an important question underlying these considerations: What can legal education do to better train business lawyers and regulators for a market that is becoming more complex? One answer, it suggests, is a simple one: law schools should teach a …

You Can Come Under The Tarp, But First... The Bank Of America-Merrill Lynch Merger Was A Failure Of Corporate Governance, James K. Donaldson

Law Student Publications

In response to the financial credit crisis in the fall of 2008, Congress, the U.S. Treasury, and the Federal Reserve Board of Governors took unprecedented action to prevent both large and small financial institutions from insolvency. Ultimately, the Troubled Asset Relief Program was created to inject various banks with the cash necessary to prevent the banks' insolvency and the threat that bank failures posed to the nation's economy. In the midst of that crisis, Bank of America agreed to acquire Merrill Lynch. Each institution, in their individual capacity, received TARP funds from the Treasury several weeks after entering into the …