Law Commons^™

Is Incorporation The Solution To The Enigma Of Corporate Tax Residency For International Tax Purposes?, Charles Edward Andrew Lincoln Iv

Texas A&M Law Review

Incorporation of a company for testing residency—if applied uniformly—is likely the best and most accurate way to reflect corporate residency for tax purposes. However, it does not always reflect economic reality. There is not a consensus on what the best approach is. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (“OECD”) countries overwhelmingly use three tests for residency: incorporation, central management and control, and domicile. Indeed, a court in the United States or other jurisdictions may often ask if tax-avoidance motives exist when incorporation occurs in one jurisdiction and central management and control occurs in another.

This Article follows the 2017 …

The Lost Lessons Of Shareholder Derivative Suits, Jessica Erickson

Washington and Lee Law Review

Merger litigation has changed dramatically. Today, nearly every announcement of a significant merger sparks litigation, and these cases look quite different from merger cases in the past. These cases are now filed primarily outside of Delaware, they typically settle without shareholders receiving any financial consideration, and corporate boards now have far more ex ante power to shape these cases. Although these changes are often heralded as unprecedented, they are not. Over the past several decades, derivative suits experienced many of the same changes. This Article explores the similarities between the recent changes in merger litigation and the longer history of …

The Effects Of Shareholder Primacy, Publicness, And "Privateness" On Corporate Cultures, Donald C. Langevoort

Seattle University Law Review

My conundrum question is this: suppose managerialism triumphed in the governance wars so as to regain its desired level of autonomy from shareholder pressures for boards and managers—would we then expect to see a cultural shift inside corporations toward greater honesty and civil engagement, and if so, why? A helpful diagnostic question is to ask how managers currently construe shareholder and market primacy. Have they internalized it as a value or do they instead resent the demands? My argument here leans more toward resentment, though my contribution is more about how to develop a credible hypothesis than how to prove …

Unsubstantiated Allegations And Organizational Culture, Eugene Soltes

Seattle University Law Review

When organizations investigate allegations of misconduct, they routinely determine that some allegations are unsubstantiated. A variety of factors may contribute to the conclusion that an allegation does not warrant substantiation, including a lack of supporting evidence, false claims against others within the organization, and a failure to conduct a thorough inquiry. This Article examines the potential value of examining unsubstantiated allegations of misconduct to better understand an organization’s culture. I show that unsubstantiated allegations provide insight into where future violations may occur, employees’ proclivity to engage in subsequent violations, and firm productivity. I conclude by discussing ways that organizations can …

The Role Of The Board Of Financial Services Firms In Improving Their Firm's Culture, Ciaran Walker

Seattle University Law Review

In this Article, we look at the role the board is expected to play under regulatory requirements and guidance; we then look specifically at the failings of boards in a number of the recent “scandals.” Finally, we offer a number of suggestions on ways in which the board can have a more effective role in improving firms’ culture. In this latter regard, we specifically focus on industry (rather than firm-specific) initiatives that could enable the board to have a more effective role, particularly in light of the setting up of the industry-funded Banking Standards Board in the U.K. and the …

The Problem With Predators, June Carbone, William K. Black

Seattle University Law Review

Both corporate theory and sex discrimination law start with presumptions that CEOs seek to advance legitimate ends and design the internal organization of business enterprises to achieve such ends. Yet, a growing literature questions why CEOs and boards of directors nonetheless select for Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy, and toxic masculinity, despite the downsides associated with these traits. Three scholarly literatures—economics, criminology, and gender theory—draw on advances in psychology to shed new light on the construction of seemingly dysfunctional corporate cultures. They start by questioning the assumption that CEOs—even CEOs of seemingly mainstream businesses—necessarily seek to advance “legitimate” ends. Instead, they suggest …

"Tone At The Top" And The Communication Of Corporate Values: Lost In Translation?, Alfredo Contreras, Aiyesha Dey, Claire Hill

Seattle University Law Review

Many firms that were involved in large-scale corporate frauds had strong corporate codes of ethics and values statements. These firms were also subject to considerable social pressures to be mindful of their reputations; frauds are “negative reputational events.” Notably, the frauds not infrequently involved possible, or even outright, illegality. Why didn’t these strong forces—strong codes of ethics and firms’ clear interest in maintaining a good reputation, as well as the fear of legal liability—do more to prevent the frauds? It seems hard to imagine that serious misdeeds could occur if the top management was committed to preventing them. But top …

Why Do Good People Do Bad Things? A Multi-Level Analysis Of Individual, Organizational, And Structural Causes Of White-Collar Crime, Dr. Joe Mcgrath

Seattle University Law Review

This Article draws on the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) complaint against Serageldin, the transcript for his plea hearing, and the transcript for his sentencing hearing. The SEC’s complaint provides a prosecutorial account of the fraud. It also includes actual extracts from Serageldin’s recorded phone calls at Credit Suisse which provide a realtime narrative of the fraud. The court transcripts detail Serageldin’s own account of the fraud and give a biographical account of Serageldin’s life, provided by his mother, who offered character evidence on his behalf. These perspectives allowed for the recasting of the SEC’s account of the fraud and …

Regulating Banking Ethics: A Toolkit, David Zaring

Seattle University Law Review

There is little doubt that culture matters for institutions—entities ranging from economics departments to soccer teams spend plenty of time thinking about the cultures they hope to foster—and that culture is also exceedingly hard to measure or define. Regulators now have had a decade since the financial crisis to operationalize their approach to guiding and improving the ethics and culture of the banks they oversee. Understanding what they have chosen to do makes it easier to assess the value of the effort to make cultural transformation an important part of a regulatory program. It also offers lessons to the broader …

Developing Fiduciary Culture In Vietnam, Brian Jm Quinn

Seattle University Law Review

This Article examines Vietnam’s efforts during the past two and a half decades to build up its legal infrastructure during its transition from a centrally planned to a market economy. In particular, this Article will focus on the development of legal and regulatory infrastructure to support the development of the corporate sector and fiduciary culture in Vietnam. In thinking about corporate law, I do not intend to single out this particular area of law as somehow special in the context of transition. In fact, its commonness and generality are what makes the experience of the development of corporate law and …

In The Name Of Shareholder Value: Origin Myths Of Corporations And Their Ongoing Implications, Karen Ho

Seattle University Law Review

Part I of this Article analyzes some of the contemporary critiques of, and debates around, shareholder value in order to illustrate why many of these contestations demonstrate underlying gaps or problematic assertions in the history and politics of shareholder value, especially if they are delimited by the narrow legal frames and neoliberal assumptions of corporations. It also provides the context necessary to explicate and ground why shareholder primacy and ownership assumptions are historically and legally flawed, and how financial values and assumptions continue to be championed (and financial power elided), despite the recent implosions of shareholder value. Part II expands …

Management Culture And Surveillance, J.S. Nelson

Seattle University Law Review

As the modern workplace increasingly adopts technology, that technology is being used to surveil workers in ways that can be highly invasive. Ostensibly, management uses surveillance to assess workers’ productivity, but it uses the same systems to, for example, map their interpersonal relationships, study their conversations, collect data on their health, track where they travel on and off the job, as well as monitor and manipulate their emotional responses. Many of these overreaches are justified in the name of enterprise control. That justification should worry us. This Article aims to make us think about how surveillance is being used as …

Coercive Competition: A New Paradigm For Culture And Conduct Risk Management, Stephen Scott

Seattle University Law Review

Ultimately, this is an Article about human behavior, its causes and consequences. A subject so vast does not confine itself to any one, narrow, academic swim-lane and neither do I. Rather, I have afforded myself the luxury of borrowing liberally from a range of disciplines and their associated literatures, seeking to weave a coherent narrative that allows us to ask “what are we to do?” and to posit an approach to identifying responsive ideas that at least warrant some consideration.

Epistemic Corporate Culture: Knowledge, Common Knowledge, And Professional Oaths, Boudewijn De Bruin

Seattle University Law Review

This Article does not assume that professional oaths accomplish what they are intended to do. Yet, I believe that oaths can fulfill important functions once they are crafted as part of carefully designed, more comprehensive approaches to managing ethical culture. Or better, I believe that by investigating more closely what an oath really is and what its preconditions are, we may gain insights that will help to change corporate culture for the better, even if companies do not wish to adopt oaths to manage ethics. Methodologically, this Article is grounded in various strands of philosophical research. In particular, I build …

Bank Culture And The Official Sector: A Spectrum Of Options, Michael Held, Thomas M. Noone

Seattle University Law Review

If you think culture is too squishy, please hear us out. In Part I of this Article, we set out what we mean by culture. In Part II, we explain why we are interested in culture and why it matters to us now. In Part III, we will survey the work of other public authorities in their efforts to address culture. In our view, these efforts fall into several categories along a spectrum from more advisory to more prescriptive. We do not endorse any particular method. All of these efforts are useful attempts to address a common problem: repeated ethical …