Law Commons^™

Disruptive Philanthropy: Chan-Zuckerberg, The Limited Liability Company, And The Millionaire Next Door, Dana Brakman Reiser

Florida Law Review

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, have pledged to give 99% of their net worth to—in their words—“advance[e] human potential and promot[e] equal opportunity.” To make good on this promise, however, they did not set up a traditional nonprofit, tax-exempt organization. Instead, they founded the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, a limited liability company (LLC). The bulk of this Article provides the definitive explanation for this seemingly bizarre choice. Importantly, the philanthropy LLC structure offers donors the flexibility to bolster charitable grantmaking with impact investment and political advocacy, free of the restrictions, penalties, and transparency requirements applied to tax-exempt …

Toward Consistent Fiduciary Duties For Publicly Traded Entities, Sandra K. Miller, Karie Davis-Nozemack

Florida Law Review

After the 2008 recession, it is difficult to imagine that the public is investing billions of dollars in publicly traded entities with little regulation of board conflicts and no fiduciary duty protections. Yet, that is precisely the case for more than $284 billion of investments. Investors have flocked to publicly traded limited partnerships (LPs) and limited liability companies (LLCs), collectively known as master limited partnerships (MLPs), because many are high-performing energy companies with a tax preference. MLP market capitalization, while only $14 billion in 2000, topped $284 billion as of February 2016, and more initial public offerings are on the …

Shareholder Wealth Maximization And Its Implementation Under Corporate Law, Bernard S. Sharfman

Florida Law Review

This Article tackles the question of when courts should intervene in the decision-making of a corporation and review a corporate business decision for shareholder wealth maximization. This Article takes a very traditional approach to answering this question. It notes with approval that courts have historically been very hesitant to participate in the process of determining if a corporate decision is wealth maximizing. Courts have restrained themselves from interfering with board decision-making because they understand that it is the board of directors (the board) in coordination with executive management that has the best information and expertise to determine if a corporate …

Facilitating Successful Failures, Michelle M. Harner, Jamie Marincic Griffin

Florida Law Review

Approximately 80,000 businesses fail each year in the United States. This Article presents an original empirical study that surveys more than 400 business restructuring professionals. The study focuses on a critical factor that arguably contributes to these failures—the conduct of boards of directors and management. Anecdotal evidence suggests that management of distressed companies often bury their heads in the sand until it is too late to remedy the companies’ problems, a phenomenon commonly called “ostrich syndrome.” The data confirm this behavior, shows a prevalent use of loss framing, and suggest trends consistent with prospect theory. This Article draws on both …

Deferred Prosecutions And Corporate Governance: An Integrated Approach To Investigation And Reform, Lawrence A. Cunningham

Florida Law Review

When evaluating how to proceed against a corporate investigative target, law enforcement authorities often ignore the target’s governance arrangements, while subsequently negotiating or imposing governance requirements, especially in deferred prosecution agreements. Ignoring governance structures and processes amid investigation can be hazardous, and implementing improvised reforms afterwards may have severe unintended consequences—particularly when prescribing standardized governance devices. Drawing, in part, on new lessons from three prominent cases—Arthur Andersen, AIG, and Bristol-Myers Squibb—this Article criticizes prevailing discord and urges prosecutors to contemplate corporate governance at the outset and to articulate rationales for prescribed changes. Integrating the role of corporate governance into prosecutions …

Confronting The Two Faces Of Corporate Fraud, Miriam H. Baer

Florida Law Review

Some criminals engage in meticulous planning. Others commit crimes in the heat of the moment. Corporate fraud incorporates both planned and spur-of-the-moment misconduct. Although law and economics scholars have traditionally viewed corporate fraud as a manifestation of opportunism among the corporation’s agents, a new generation of scholars, influenced by findings in behavioral psychology, has focused on the temporal aspects of corporate misconduct. Wrongdoing comes about, not simply because an agent opportunistically takes advantage of her principal, but also because her short-term self falls prey to temptations and cognitive biases that effectively disable her law-abiding long-term self.

Although the law and …

Ceo Retention, Lee Harris

Florida Law Review

Again and again, economists, corporate law scholars, and Congress have turned to reforms, such as executive compensation reforms, as a solution to executive misbehavior. The root of the evil, they muse, is skyhigh pay with only a flimsy connection to managerial performance. If CEO pay can only be rejiggered on the front end and tied to performance, the argument goes, executives can be expected to pursue shareholder interests and put aside egos, and firms will prosper. This Article argues that such reforms are, despite the best of intention, fool’s gold. The fallacy is not in thinking that CEOs and other …

Dampening Financial Regulatory Cycles, Brett Mcdonnell

Florida Law Review

Financial regulation should be countercyclical, strengthening during speculative booms to contain excessive leverage and loosening following crises so as to not limit credit extension in hard times. And yet, financial regulation in fact tends to be procyclical, strengthening following crises and loosening during booms. This Article considers competing descriptive and normative analyses of that procyclical tendency. All of the models and arguments considered are rooted in a public choice perspective on financial regulation, i.e., rational choice ideas drawn from economics and applied to politics, but with that perspective modified to take account of behavioralist biases in rationality, particularly the availability …

The Economics And Regulation Of Network Branded Prepaid Cards, Todd J. Zywicki

Florida Law Review

One of the fastest growing sectors of the consumer payments marketplace is the general-purpose reloadable prepaid card sector. Their importance accelerated as a consequence of new regulations enacted in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. This increased use of prepaid cards also increased angst among regulators, especially regarding the number and size of fees on prepaid cards. State and federal regulators as well as Congress are interested in imposing new regulations on prepaid cards. These calls for regulation, however, proceed in a largely fact-free environment. This Article describes the current economic and regulatory landscape for prepaid cards. The market …

Criminal Corporate Character, Robert E. Wagner

Florida Law Review

In the last few years, corporations have been accused of crimes ranging from environmental pollution on an unprecedented scale, to manslaughter, to election tampering, to large-scale antitrust violations. Many of these accused companies had previously committed similar acts or even the exact same offense. Unfortunately, the rules of evidence in the federal system and in virtually every state system prohibit the use of this information in a prosecution for such crimes. The reasons for this prohibition are based in historical anomalies, a mistaken understanding of corporate function, and a misplaced anthropomorphism of the corporation. This combination of errors has resulted …

The New Professional Plaintiffs In Shareholder Litigation, Jessica Erickson

Florida Law Review

In 1995, Congress solved the problem of professional plaintiffs in shareholder litigation—or so it thought. The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act (PSLRA) was designed to end the influence of shareholder plaintiffs who had little or no connection to the underlying suit. Yet it may have failed to accomplish its goal. In the wake of the PSLRA, many professional plaintiffs simply moved into other types of corporate lawsuits. In shareholder derivative suits and acquisition class actions across the country, professional plaintiffs are back. They are repeat filers involved in dozens of lawsuits. They are the attorneys’ spouses, parents, and children. They …

Policing Public Companies: An Empirical Examination Of The Enforcement Landscape And The Role Played By State Securities Regulators, Amanda M. Rose, Larry J. Leblanc

Florida Law Review

Multiple different securities law enforcers can pursue U.S. public companies for the same misconduct. These enforcers include a variety of federal agencies, class action attorneys, and derivative litigation attorneys, as well as fifty separate state regulators. Scholars and policy makers have increasingly questioned whether the benefits of this multienforcer approach are worth the costs, or whether a more coordinated and streamlined securities enforcement regime might lead to efficiency gains. How serious are these concerns? And what role do state regulators play in the enforcement mix? Whereas the enforcement efforts of the Securities and Exchange Commission and class action lawyers have …

Resurrecting Deference To The Securities And Exchange Commission: Mark Cuban Trading On Inside Information, Steven J. Cleveland

Florida Law Review

By applying the Supreme Court‘s administrative law jurisprudence to the examination of the validity of Rule 10b5-2(b)(1)—a rule recently adopted by the Securities and Exchange Commission (Commission)—this Article fills a significant gap in the existing literature. To date, commentators have argued against the rule‘s validity by applying the Supreme Court‘s securities law jurisprudence without considering the role of administrative law—despite the Court‘s comments that the pertinent statute is ambiguous, despite express delegation of rulemaking authority by Congress to the Commission, and despite developments in administrative law subsequent to the Court‘s relevant securities law decisions. By not considering the role of …

Corporate Governance: The Sweedish Solution, Geroge W. Dent Jr

Florida Law Review

The optimal allocation of authority among executives, directors, and shareholders of public companies has been debated as long as there have been public companies, and the issue now seems further from resolution than ever. In recent years Sweden has changed its corporate governance system by delegating the nomination of corporate directors (and thus, in effect, ultimate control) to committees typically comprising representatives of each company’s largest shareholders. This system gives shareholders a degree of power “that only the most daring corporate governance initiatives in the rest of the world could even imagine.”1 The change is a big success—it has pleased …

The Like-Kind Exchange Equity Conundrum, Bradley T. Borden

Florida Law Review

The tax-free treatment oflike-kind exchanges presents one of tax law’s most compelling equity conundrums. Tax law generally does not tax property holders on the property’s appreciation but does tax gain or loss recognized by property sellers and exchangers of non-like-kind property. In the basic Aristotelian system, equity requires that likes be treated alike, but the system does not provide criteria to determine what is alike. Depending upon the criteria, exchangers of like-kind property can be similar either to holders or to sellers and exchangers of non-like-kind property. The equity conundrum asks whether tax law should treat exchangers of like-kind property …

Confusion And Upredictability In Shareholder Derivative Litigation: The Delaware Courts' Response To Recent Corporate Scandals, Ann Scarlett

Florida Law Review

The Delaware courts responded to the recent wave of corporate scandals, exemplified by Enron and WorldCom, by changing their approach to shareholder derivative litigation. This Article analyzes the Delaware courts’ response to these scandals and concludes that the courts have created doctrinal confusion and introduced unpredictability into derivative litigation. This Article also analyzes the future negative consequences for shareholders, corporations, directors, investors, and other litigants. Finally, this Article proposes improvements for derivative litigation that may alleviate the confusion and unpredictability created by the Delaware courts’ response to the recent scandals

In Honor Of Walter O. Weyrauch: The Ubiquity Of Greed: A Contextual Model For Analysis Of Scienter, Ann Morales Olazabal, Patricia Sanchez Abril

Florida Law Review

Some securities fraud plaintiffs contend that greed—in the form of perpetuating a prestigious executive position, ensuring a gainful bonus, or maintaining the appearance of corporate profitability—is a bona fide motive evidencing scienter. But currently, no single judicial standard or analytical rubric guides the analysis of whether allegations of greed indicate scienter in these cases. The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 (PSLRA) requiresthat the complaint state “with particularity” facts giving rise to a “strong inference” that the defendant acted with the scienter required for the cause of action. Plaintiffs have long established scienter through “motive and opportunity” pleading: facts …

Hurd V. Espinoza: “Third Party Confidential Information” In Delaware Corporate Litigation, Giselle Gutierrez

Florida Law Review

On June 24, 2010, celebrity attorney Gloria Allred sent a letter (the Allred Letter) to Mark Hurd, then the Chief Executive Officer of Hewlett-Packard Company (HP), claiming that Hurd sexually harassed her client Jodie Fisher, a former HP contractor. In addition to being marked “CONFIDENTIAL TO BE OPENED BY ADDRESSEE ONLY,” the letter included a ledger at the top that read, “PERSONAL & CONFIDENTIAL.” Hurd gave the letter to Michael Holston, HP’s Executive Vice President and General Counsel. Although Hurd and Fisher privately settled the claim without Fisher filing suit, HP publicly announced on August 6, 2010, that Hurd had …