Law Commons^™

Disclosure's Limits, Usha Rodrigues, Mike Stegemoller

Scholarly Works

Special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) have exploded in popularity, luring both adventurous retail investors and sophisticated institutional investors. In a SPAC, a publicly traded shell corporation acquires a private target, thereby taking it public in a manner that circumvents the rigors of a traditional initial public offering (IPO). Proponents vaunt SPACs’ ability to simplify the process of accessing the public markets and democratize capitalism, but in their current form they pose risks to retail investors and to the market as a whole. Using a hand-collected dataset, this Article fills a gap in the literature by providing new empirical data regarding …

Morrison And Cryptocurrencies: Is It Time To Revisit The Extraterritorial Application Of Rule 10b-5?, Eleanor B. Eastham

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Embrace The Sec, Usha Rodrigues

Scholarly Works

Securities law traditionally only permits corporations that have registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and completed an initial public offering (IPO) to sell equity to the general public—often a long, expensive process. Initial coin offering (ICOs) emerged in 2013 as a fundraising tool for non-public blockchain-based companies to raise billions of dollars while circumventing the SEC and public offering process altogether. But their early success brought the attention of the SEC, and in 2017 the SEC asserted the right to regulate ICOs. Since then, U.S. ICO promoters have struggled to avoid the SEC’s assertion of jurisdiction, contorting their …

Financial Contracting With The Crowd, Usha Rodrigues

Scholarly Works

Equity crowdfunding is broken. The current model imposes too many burdens on entrepreneurs in exchange for too little money. For alternative models, this Article looks to the time-tested venture capital financial contract, and the recent experience of initial coin offerings (ICOs). ICOs made headlines over the past two years, as the means by which blockchain technology companies raised billions of dollars to launch new cryptocurrency ventures. Although their novelty as a monetary and investing device is well known, ICOs also presented significant, unappreciated insights into financial contracting.

ICOs furnished an unprecedented experiment into how bargains would look if entrepreneurs raised …

The Up-C Revolution, Gregg D. Polsky, Adam H. Rosenzweig

Scholarly Works

Over the past few years, a revolutionary new tax structure, known as the Up-C, has become increasingly popular, particularly in instances where an LLC is being taken public. In such an Up-C IPO, a newly formed C corporation is placed on top of the existing LLC, which continues to operate the business. Shares of the C corporation are sold to new investors, and the proceeds are used by the C corporation to buy an interest in the LLC. Meanwhile, the legacy owners of the LLC (typically, founders and private investment funds) retain their interests in the LLC, while receiving exchange …

Does Shareholder Voting Matter? Evidence From The Takeover Market, Paul Mason, Usha Rodrigues, Mike Stegemoller, Steven Utke

Scholarly Works

Voting rights are a basic shareholder-protection mechanism. Outside of the core voting requirements state law imposes (election of directors and votes on fundamental changes), federal law grants shareholders additional voting rights. But these rights introduce concomitant costs into corporate governance. Each grant of a voting right thus invites the question: is the benefit achieved worth the cost the vote imposes?

The question is not merely a theoretical one. Recently the SEC, concerned about Nasdaq’s potential weakening of shareholder voting protections, has lamented that little evidence exists on the value of the shareholder vote. This Article provides that evidence. It examines …

Center-Left Politics And Corporate Governance: What Is The 'Progressive' Agenda?, Christopher Bruner

Scholarly Works

For as long as corporations have existed, debates have persisted among scholars, judges, and policymakers regarding how best to describe their form and function as a positive matter, and how best to organize relations among their various stakeholders as a normative matter. This is hardly surprising given the economic and political stakes involved with control over vast and growing "corporate" resources, and it has become commonplace to speak of various approaches to corporate law in decidedly political terms. In particular, on the fundamental normative issue of the aims to which corporate decision-making ought to be directed, shareholder-centric conceptions of the …

Unintended Consequences: The Link Between Judge Friendly's Texas Gulf Sulphur Concurrence And Recent Supreme Court Decisions Misconstruing Rule 10b-5, Margaret V. Sachs

Scholarly Works

In his Texas Gulf Sulphur concurrence, Judge Henry J. Friendly coun- seled the federal district courts concerning the numerous pending satellite class actions that had been filed under Section 10(b) of the Securities Ex- change Act and Rule 10b-5. In the course of so doing, he argued forcefully that private Rule 10b-5 litigation should be curtailed. Finding his argument convincing, the Supreme Court issued four major decisions restricting the Rule between 1975 and 1994, while nonetheless expanding it in Basic Inc. v. Levinson. Congress responded by blessing both aspects of the Court’s jurisprudence – imposing its own set of …

Dictation And Delegation In Securities Regulation, Usha Rodrigues

Scholarly Works

When Congress undertakes major financial reform, either it dictates the precise contours of the law itself or it delegates the bulk of the rulemaking to an administrative agency. This choice has critical consequences. Making the law self-executing in federal legislation is swift, not subject to administrative tinkering, and less vulnerable than rulemaking to judicial second-guessing. Agency action is, in contrast, deliberate, subject to ongoing bureaucratic fiddling and more vulnerable than statutes to judicial challenge.

This Article offers the first empirical analysis of the extent of congressional delegation in securities law from 1970 to the present day, examining nine pieces of …

The Judicial Role In Extraterritorial Application Of The Securities Exchange Act Of 1934: Vesco, William A. Aileo

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Regulating Foreign-Based Institutions For Collective Investment: The German Statute, The American Experience, And The Oecd Standard Rules, Charles B. Robson Jr.

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

The Enduring Legacy Of Modern Efficient Market Theory After Halliburton V. John, Mark Klock

Georgia Law Review

In 1988 the U.S. Supreme Court approved the fraud on the market theory for securities trading in an efficient market thus enabling securities class action plaintiffs to establish their required reliance element of the case through a rebuttable presumption. Basic v. Levinson held that efficient markets incorporate publicly disseminated information and investors who purchased or sold securities in an efficient market therefore relied on any publicly disseminated misinformation. For more than a quarter century since Basic, the efficient market theory has sustained a barrage of assaults from commentators who object to the use of economic theory in legal decision making …

Privileging Professional Insider Trading, Sarah Baumgartel

Georgia Law Review

This Article explores insider trading law's increasing
focus on personal relationships, and the way in which the
law has come to privilege professional over
nonprofessional insider trading. The Article discusses
how, in an effort to expand insider trading liability, the
government has sought to impose legal duties of loyalty
and confidentiality on a host of personal relationships not

otherwise subject to law-effectively basing civil and
criminal penalties on "corruption" in purely personal
relationships. At the same time, courts have adopted a
business property rationale regardingthe use of nonpublic
information and declined to prevent companies from
disclosing valuable nonpublic information to …

Clearinghouses And Regulation By Proxy, Yesha Yadav

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

Related to Georgia Journal of International and Comparative Law Conference: The New Roles of Corporations in Global Governance.

International Tax Free Exchanges: The Structure Of I.R.C. Section 367, Vikram A. Gosain

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Securities Regulations Investigations - United States-Swiss Treaty Attempts To Increase Cooperation In Releasing Names Of Swiss-Based Account Holders Involved In United States Securities And Exchange Commission Investigations, Daniel B. Simon Iii

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Tax Reform Act Of 1984 - Netherlands Antilles - Effect Of The Repeal Of The Withholding Tax On Portfolio Interest Payments To Foreign Investors, Lee C. Dilworth

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

The Export Trade Note: A New Instrument For International Trade, Eugene A. Ludwig, Michael J. Coursey

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

The Financial Industry's Plan For Resolving Failed Megabanks Will Ensure Future Bailouts For Wall Street, Arthur E. Wilmarth Jr.

Georgia Law Review

Wall Street has achieved a remarkable political comeback from the financial crisis of 2007-2009. Public anger over bailouts of large financial institutions spurred Congress to pass the Dodd- Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (Dodd- Frank) in July 2010.1 Megabanks, however, used their political influence to weaken Dodd-Frank's provisions, and they have pursued a determined campaign since 2010 to undermine Dodd- Frank's implementation. A primary goal of Dodd-Frank is to end "too big to fail" (TBTF) treatment for systemically important financial institutions (SIFIs) and their creditors. During the debates over Dodd-Frank, however, Wall Street defeated two major initiatives …

Bank Regulation And Securitization: How The Law Improved Transmission Lines Between Real Estate And Banking Crises, Erik F. Gerding

Georgia Law Review

Financial crises take many forms. Real estate crises can devastate economies.' So too can bank crises. Stock market crashes can precipitate crises of their own. The "subprime crisis" represents the confluence and worst of all three; like three cyclones merging together in warm offshore waters, these three kinds of crises generated even more destructive force when conjoined. The panic that took shape in U.S. real estate and capital markets in 2007 represents another example in a long historical line of intertwined banking and real estate crises. Securitization served as a new coupling rod joining cycles in real estate and banking …

The Evolving Role Of Economic Analysis In Sec Rulemaking, Joshua T. White

Georgia Law Review

Recently, the SEC has come under great scrutiny for how it conducts economic analysis around rulemakings, especially those associated with the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (Dodd-Frank or the Dodd-Frank Act) Dodd-Frank tasked the SEC with more than 100 rulemaking provisions. Perhaps no criticism had a more profound effect than the D.C. Circuit's decision in Business Roundtable v. SEC, which struck down the SEC's proxy access rule due to inadequate economic analysis.

Regulations are imperfect. They cannot be costlessly executed or enforced. Regulators also lack full information on the actual costs and benefits of proposed policies. For …

Politics In Securities Enforcement, Urska Velikonja

Georgia Law Review

American securities enforcement agencies often face charges that they use their enforcement power to further political goals.' Most recently, Standard & Poor's credit rating agency claimed that the U.S. Department of Justice unfairly singled it out for prosecution for fraudulent credit ratings after it downgraded U.S. sovereign debt. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC or the Commission), too, has been accused of using its enforcement politically: of bringing enforcement actions to improve its political standing, to punish its detractors, or to deflect attention from negative reports about its activities; and of holding back investigations of politically-connected figures.

Superstar Judges As Entrepreneurs: The Untold Story Of Fraud-On-The-Market, Margaret V. Sachs

Scholarly Works

This Article unites two disparate subjects of profound interest to legal scholars. One is fraud-on-the-market, reaffirmed late last term in Erica P. John Fund, Inc. v. Halliburton Co. (Halliburton II). Probably the most important claim in the securities litigation universe, fraud-on-the-market is the sine qua non of almost every securities class action that is filed. The other subject consists of the work of Judges Frank Easterbrook and Richard Posner, the “superstars” of the current federal appellate bench.

My purpose is several-fold: first, to show that fraud-on-the-market’s evolution, up through and culminating in Halliburton II, has been driven in significant measure …

The Sixth Commissioner, Nadelle Grossman

Georgia Law Review

The federal securities laws grant broad rulemaking authority to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). In promulgating rules, the SEC must not only ensure that its rules protect investors and the public interest, but also consider the effects of its rules on efficiency, competition, and capital formation (the ECCF mandate). However, the SEC's rulemaking authority has been frustrated. In two decisions striking down SEC rules, the D.C. Circuit has required the SEC to conduct a quantitative cost-benefit analysis under the ECCF mandate. This contrasts with the SEC's historic practice of qualitatively assessing the effects of its rules. While these D.C. …

The Development Of A Global Market-Based Debt Strategy To Regulate Private Lending To Developing Countries, Bradley K. Boyd

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Securities - Insider Trading - The Effects Of The New Eec Draft Insider Trading Directive, Douglas A. Nystrom

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Securities Regulation - Great Expectations And The Reality Of Rule 144a And Regulation S; The Sec's Approach To The Internationalization Of The Financial Marketplace, R. Brandon Asbill

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

China - A National Regulatory Framework For The Prc's Stock Markets Begins To Emerge, Benjamin R. Tarbutton

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

From German Shepherds To Wet Poodles: The Sec Exacts Concessions From Daimler-Benz Concerning Disclosure Of Its Hidden Reserves, Andrew H. Walcoff

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

The Value Of Public-Notice Filing Under Uniform Commercial Code Article 9: A Comparison With The German Legal System Of Securities In Personal Property, Jens Hausmann Dr.

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.