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Business Organizations Law Commons

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Full-Text Articles in Business Organizations Law

Corporate Distress, Credit Default Swaps, And Defaults: Information And Traditional, Contingent, And Empty Creditors, Henry T. C. Hu Oct 2018

Corporate Distress, Credit Default Swaps, And Defaults: Information And Traditional, Contingent, And Empty Creditors, Henry T. C. Hu

Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law

Federal securities law seeks to ensure the quality and quantity of information that corporations make publicly available. Informational asymmetries associated with companies in financial distress, but not in bankruptcy, have received little attention. This Article explores some important asymmetries in this context that are curious in their origin, nature, and impact. The asymmetries are especially curious because of the impact of a world with credit default swaps (CDS) and CDS-driven debt “decoupling.” The Article explores two categories of asymmetries. The first relates to information on the company itself. Here, the Article suggests there is fresh evidence for the belief that …


Transparency In Corporate Groups, Jay Lawrence Westbrook Oct 2018

Transparency In Corporate Groups, Jay Lawrence Westbrook

Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law

This Article addresses a remarkable blind spot in American law: the failure to apply the well-established principles of secured credit to prevent inefficiency, confusion, and fraud in the manipulation of the webs of subsidiaries within corporate groups. In particular, “asset partitioning” has been a fashionable subject in which the central problem of non-transparency has been often mentioned but little addressed. This Article offers a concept for a new system of corporate disclosure for the benefit of creditors and other stakeholders. It would require disclosure of corporate structures and allocations of assets among affiliates to the extent the affiliates are to …


Bankruptcy Fiduciary Duties In The World Of Claims Trading, John A. E. Pottow Oct 2018

Bankruptcy Fiduciary Duties In The World Of Claims Trading, John A. E. Pottow

Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law

In earlier work, I explored the role of fiduciary duties in the bankruptcy trustee’s administration of a debtor’s estate, noting the absence of any explicit demarcation of those duties in the Bankruptcy Code. In this piece, I report the highlights of that analysis and see to what extent (if any) fiduciary duties can inform policy prescriptions for the issue of bankruptcy claims trading, colorfully referred to by some as the world of “bankruptcy M&A.” My initial take is pessimistic. Fiduciary duties, at least as traditionally conceived in bankruptcy, are unlikely to provide much help. But there is still a source …


The Corporate Law Dilemma And The Enlightened Sovereign Control Paradigm: In Search Of A New Legal Framework, Vincenzo Bavoso Jun 2018

The Corporate Law Dilemma And The Enlightened Sovereign Control Paradigm: In Search Of A New Legal Framework, Vincenzo Bavoso

Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law

This Article is centered on the proposal of a new model of corporate decision-making: the enlightened sovereign control paradigm. In revisiting the long-standing academic debate on the corporate objective, typically enshrined in the dichotomy between shareholder value and stakeholder theory, a critique of these existing models is put forward. In particular, it questions the ability of the existing theories to take account of the complex and multidimensional risks that are created by the company which affect different constituencies both inside and outside the company. While the global financial crisis of 2008 reignited the urgency to further define an appropriate legal …