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Full-Text Articles in Law
Anonymous Companies, William J. Moon
Anonymous Companies, William J. Moon
Faculty Scholarship
Hardly a day goes by without hearing about nefarious activities facilitated by anonymous “shell” companies. Often described as menaces to the financial system, the creation of business entities with no real operations in sun-drenched offshore jurisdictions offering “zero percent” tax rates remains in vogue among business titans, pop stars, multimillionaires, and royals. The trending headlines and academic accounts, however, have paid insufficient attention to the legal uses of anonymous companies that are both ubiquitous and almost infinite in their variations.
This Article identifies privacy as a functional feature of modern business entities by documenting the hidden virtues of anonymous companies—business …
Delaware's Global Competitiveness, William J. Moon
Delaware's Global Competitiveness, William J. Moon
Faculty Scholarship
For about a hundred years, Delaware has been the leading jurisdiction for corporate law in the United States. The state, which deliberately embarked on a mission to build a haven for corporate law in the early twentieth century, now supplies corporate charters to over two thirds of Fortune 500 companies and a growing share of closely held companies. But Delaware’s domestic dominance masks the important and yet underexamined issue of whether Delaware maintains its competitive edge globally.
This Article examines Delaware’s global competitiveness, documenting Delaware’s surprising weakness competing in the emerging international market for corporate charters. It does so principally …
Delaware's New Competition, William J. Moon
Delaware's New Competition, William J. Moon
Faculty Scholarship
According to the standard account in American corporate law, states compete to supply corporate law to American corporations, with Delaware dominating the market. This “competition” metaphor in turn informs some of the most important policy debates in American corporate law.
This Article complicates the standard account, introducing foreign nations as emerging lawmakers that compete with American states in the increasingly globalized market for corporate law. In recent decades, entrepreneurial foreign nations in offshore islands have used permissive corporate governance rules and specialized business courts to attract publicly traded American corporations. Aided in part by a select group of private sector …
How To Prevent Hard Cases From Making Bad Law: Bear Stearns, Delaware And The Strategic Use Of Comity, Marcel Kahan, Edward B. Rock
How To Prevent Hard Cases From Making Bad Law: Bear Stearns, Delaware And The Strategic Use Of Comity, Marcel Kahan, Edward B. Rock
All Faculty Scholarship
The Bear Stearns/JP Morgan Chase merger placed Delaware between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, the deal’s unprecedented deal protection measures – especially the 39.5% share exchange agreement – were probably invalid under current Delaware doctrine because they rendered the Bear Stearns shareholders’ approval rights entirely illusory. On the other hand, if a Delaware court were to enjoin a deal pushed by the Federal Reserve and the Treasury and arguably necessary to prevent a collapse of the international financial system, it would invite just the sort of federal intervention that would undermine Delaware’s role as the …
Corporate Taxation And International Charter Competition, Mitchell Kane, Edward B. Rock
Corporate Taxation And International Charter Competition, Mitchell Kane, Edward B. Rock
All Faculty Scholarship
Corporate Charter competition has become an increasingly international phenomenon. The thesis of this article is that this development in the corporate law requires a greater focus on the corporate tax law. We first demonstrate how a tax system’s capacity to distort the international charter market depends both upon its approach to determining corporate location and the extent to which it taxes foreign source corporate profits. We also show, however, that it is not possible to remove all distortions through modifications to the tax system alone. We present instead two alternative methods for preserving an international charter market. The first best …