Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Discipline
- Institution
- Keyword
-
- Corporate governance (2)
- Financial crises (2)
- Financial crisis (2)
- Bailouts (Government policy) (1)
- Bank of America (1)
-
- Bernanke (1)
- Boards (1)
- Bonds (1)
- CDS (1)
- CFMA (1)
- CFTC (1)
- Capital market (1)
- Capitalism and Society (1)
- Class actions (1)
- Class actions (Civil procedure) (1)
- Clearing (1)
- Collateralized debt obligations (1)
- Commodity Futures Modernization Act (1)
- Commodity Futures Trading Commission (1)
- Compromise (Law) (1)
- Corporate elections (1)
- Corporate law (1)
- Credit Default Swap (1)
- DCO (1)
- Debt relief (1)
- Debtor and creditor (1)
- Default rules (1)
- Derivatives Clearing Organization (1)
- Directors (1)
- Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (1)
Articles 1 - 13 of 13
Full-Text Articles in Securities Law
Is Our Economy Safe? A Proposal For Assessing The Success Of Swaps Regulation Under The Dodd-Frank Act, Michael Greenberger
Is Our Economy Safe? A Proposal For Assessing The Success Of Swaps Regulation Under The Dodd-Frank Act, Michael Greenberger
Faculty Scholarship
On July 21, 2010, President Barack Obama signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act into law. The central goal of the Dodd-Frank Act is to ensure that all standardized derivates products are regulated. The Act requires these trades be fully transparent and backed by adequate capital. The central question for evaluating the success of the Dodd-Frank Act is simple but profound: Has the Dodd-Frank Act made the economy any safer from the threat of another economic meltdown? This paper introduces a number of metrics that can be used to assess the success of the Dodd-Frank Act.
Voting Power Without Responsibility Or Risk--How Should Proxy Reform Address The Decoupling Of Economic And Voting Rights?, Roberta S. Karmel
Voting Power Without Responsibility Or Risk--How Should Proxy Reform Address The Decoupling Of Economic And Voting Rights?, Roberta S. Karmel
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Fiduciary Exemption For Public Necessity: Shareholder Profit, Public Good, And The Hobson's Choice During A National Crisis, Robert J. Rhee
Fiduciary Exemption For Public Necessity: Shareholder Profit, Public Good, And The Hobson's Choice During A National Crisis, Robert J. Rhee
Faculty Scholarship
This Article is written as two discrete, independently accessible topical sections. The first topical section, presented in Part I of this Article, is a case study of Bank of America’s acquisition of Merrill Lynch and the impact of a flawed merger execution on the board’s subsequent decisions. The second topical section, presented Parts II-IV of this Article, advances a theoretical basis for fiduciary exemption during a public crisis. The financial crisis of 2008 was the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression. It nearly resulted in a collapse of the global capital markets. A key event in the history of …
Is 'Pay-To-Play' Driving Public Pension Fund Activism In Securities Class Actions? An Empirical Study, David H. Webber
Is 'Pay-To-Play' Driving Public Pension Fund Activism In Securities Class Actions? An Empirical Study, David H. Webber
Faculty Scholarship
The recent emergence of public pension funds as frequent lead plaintiffs in securities class actions has prompted speculation that the funds’ litigation activism is driven by “pay-to-play”. “Pay-to-play” posits that public pension funds are driven by politician board members to obtain lead plaintiff appointments in securities class actions because of campaign contributions made by plaintiffs’ lawyers to those board members. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the securities litigation activity of 111 such funds from the years 2003 through 2006. Three of the paper’s findings cast doubt on the “pay-to-play” theory, including that: (1) politicians and political control negatively …
Promoting Innovation: The Law Of Publicly Traded Corporations, Merritt B. Fox
Promoting Innovation: The Law Of Publicly Traded Corporations, Merritt B. Fox
Faculty Scholarship
Improving economic welfare requires that society’s scarce savings be allocated among proposed real investment projects in a way that appreciates the prospects of promising new innovations. Corporate and securities law help structure important elements of this process of allocation. This article sketches out an approach based upon a seemingly paradoxical analogy of a market economy’s overall finance process to the way a hierarchical organization gathers and processes relevant bits of information dispersed among many individuals in order to make decisions. It thereby takes advantage of important thinking in communications and organizational theory about how to make organizations sensitive to the …
Private Ordering And The Proxy Access Debate, Scott Hirst, Lucian A. Bebchuk
Private Ordering And The Proxy Access Debate, Scott Hirst, Lucian A. Bebchuk
Faculty Scholarship
This Article examines two “meta” issues raised by opponents of the SEC’s proposal to provide shareholders with rights to place director candidates on the company’s proxy materials. First, opponents argue that, even assuming proxy access is desirable in many circumstances, the existing no-access default should be retained and the adoption of proxy access arrangements should be left to opting out of this default on a company-by-company basis. This Article, however, identifies strong reasons against retaining no-access as the default. There is substantial empirical evidence indicating that director insulation from removal is associated with lower firm value and worse performance. Furthermore, …
The Market Reaction To Legal Shocks And Their Antidotes: Lessons From The Sovereign Debt Market, Michael Bradley, James D. Cox, Mitu Gulati
The Market Reaction To Legal Shocks And Their Antidotes: Lessons From The Sovereign Debt Market, Michael Bradley, James D. Cox, Mitu Gulati
Faculty Scholarship
In October 2000 a hedge fund holding an unpaid debt claim won an enormous victory against the debtor, the Republic of Peru, through an opportunistic interpretation of the common pari passu clause by a Brussels court. This development was met by charges from policy makers and practitioners that the court's decision (its novel interpretation of the pari passu clause) would lead to a dramatic increase in the risks of holdout litigation faced by sovereign debtors. Over the ensuing years, multiple reform solutions were proposed including the revision of certain contractual terms, the filing of amicus briefs in a key case, …
Fiduciaries With Conflicting Obligations, Steven L. Schwarcz
Fiduciaries With Conflicting Obligations, Steven L. Schwarcz
Faculty Scholarship
This Article examines the dilemma of a fiduciary acting for parties who, as among themselves, have conflicting commercial interests - an inquiry fundamentally different from that of the traditional study of conflicts between fiduciaries and their beneficiaries. Existing legal principles do not fully capture this dilemma because agency law focuses primarily on an agent’s duty to a given principal, not on conflicts among principals; trust law focuses primarily on gratuitous transfers; and commercial law generally addresses arm’s length, not fiduciary, relationships. The dilemma has become critically important, however, as defaults increase in the multitude of conflicting securities (e.g., classes of …
Too Big To Fail?: Recasting The Financial Safety Net, Steven L. Schwarcz
Too Big To Fail?: Recasting The Financial Safety Net, Steven L. Schwarcz
Faculty Scholarship
Government safety nets in the United States and abroad focus, anachronistically, on problems of banks and other financial institutions, largely ignoring financial markets which have become major credit sources for consumers and companies. Besides failing to protect these markets, this narrow focus encourages morally hazardous behavior by large institutions, like AIG and Citigroup, that are "too big to fail." This paper examines how a safety net should be recast to protect financial markets and also explains why that safety net would mitigate moral hazard and help resolve the too-big-to-fail dilemma.
Lying And Getting Caught: An Empirical Study Of The Effect Of Securities Class Action Settlements On Targeted Firms, James D. Cox, Lynn Bai, Randall S. Thomas
Lying And Getting Caught: An Empirical Study Of The Effect Of Securities Class Action Settlements On Targeted Firms, James D. Cox, Lynn Bai, Randall S. Thomas
Faculty Scholarship
The ongoing Great Recession has triggered numerous proposals to improve the regulation of financial markets and, most importantly, the regulation of organizations such as credit rating agencies, underwriters, hedge funds, and banks, whose behavior is believed to have caused the credit crisis that spawned the economic collapse. Not surprisingly, some of the reform efforts seek to strengthen the use of private litigation. Private suits have long been championed as a necessary mechanism not only to compensate investors for harms they suffer from financial frauds but also to enhance deterrence of wrongdoing. However, in recent years there has been a chorus …
Distorting Legal Principles, Steven L. Schwarcz
Distorting Legal Principles, Steven L. Schwarcz
Faculty Scholarship
Legal principles enable society to order itself by preserving broadly based expectations. Sometimes, however, parties transact in ways that are so inconsistent with generally accepted principles as to create uncertainty or confusion that undermines the basis for reasoning afforded by the principles. Such a distortion might occur, for example, if a normally mandatory legal rule were unexpectedly treated as a default rule. This article explores the problem of distorting legal principles, initially focusing on rehypothecation, a distortion whose uncertainty and confusion contributed to the downfall of Lehman Brothers and the resulting global financial crisis. But not all distortions are, on …
Fending For Themselves: Why Securities Regulations Should Encourage Angel Groups, Abraham J. B. Cable
Fending For Themselves: Why Securities Regulations Should Encourage Angel Groups, Abraham J. B. Cable
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Let The Securities And Exchange Commission Outsource Enforcement By Litigation: A Proposal, Tamar Frankel
Let The Securities And Exchange Commission Outsource Enforcement By Litigation: A Proposal, Tamar Frankel
Faculty Scholarship
The stories of Stanford's suspected Ponzi scheme, and Madoff s proven scheme, as well as the Securities and Exchange Commission's lenient settlements with very large suspected violators, and its focus on the numerous, small accused, have raised questions about the Commission's enforcement resources. This Article suggests that the Commission outsource civil cases against very large defendants when the examination of the defendant finds signs of wrongdoing under the securities acts. The Commission already outsources two types of legal services and the United States government practices extensive outsourcing. This article suggests that with appropriate limitations and controls outsourcing of enforcement litigation …