Law Commons^™

Taking Stock -- Salary And Options Too: The Looting Of Corporate America, Kenneth R. Davis

Kenneth R. Davis

Abstract “Taking Stock – Salary and Options Too: The Looting of Corporate America” Executive compensation has come to mean corporate greed. CEO pay has soared to incomprehensible levels. Even during the current financial crisis, more CEOs saw pay increases than cuts. Public resentment to multi-million dollar paychecks swelled to outrage when AIG and Merrill Lynch used bailout funds to dispense enormous bonuses to executives. The looting of America’s corporations has led to numerous strategies to curb executive compensation. These strategies include heightened corporate disclosure requirements, tax incentives, say on pay, and shareholder input into the process for nominating directors. All …

Lessons From The Subprime Debacle: Stress Testing Ceo Autonomy, Steven A. Ramirez

Steven A. Ramirez

Corporate governance law in the United States played a central role in the subprime debacle. Specifically, CEOs exercised sufficient autonomy to garner huge compensation payments based upon illusory income. Instead of profits, firms absorbed huge risks. The economic losses arising from this misconduct total trillions of dollars. This article seeks to reconfigure CEO autonomy in the public firm based upon the best extant empirical evidence regarding the optimal contours of CEO autonomy. This vision of optimal autonomy is then viewed through the lens of the subprime catastrophe. The article articulates the political dynamics that have led to suboptimal contours for …

Why Not Tell The Truth?: Deceptive Practices And The Economic Meltdown, Charles W. Murdock

Charles W. Murdock

Today we are witnessing a crisis caused by economic formulae developed without a responsible exercise of judgment and, in many instances, with a shocking disregard for the truth. The virtue of truthfulness is not just some abstract moral principle. Rather, it is a critical component of a well functioning society. As the current situation demonstrates, the lack of regard for truthfulness can have disastrous consequences, not just for our own country, but around the world.

This article will first examine how broadly truth is devalued throughout our society. Second, it will focus on the lack of truthfulness in politics and …

A Proposal To Strengthen Special Committees, Elizabeth Pollman

Elizabeth Pollman

Special committees make some of the most important decisions facing corporations. Decisionmaking is central to their purpose. That high-quality decisions be made on these issues has become even more urgent in this time of economic volatility and outrage about corporate irresponsibility. Indeed, special committees may be increasingly in the spotlight as the current economic crisis will likely lead to a flood of shareholder litigation, and when credit markets thaw, a wave of strategic transactions.

Sometimes a board will create a special committee of just one person to handle a crucial matter. This Article proposes that courts or legislatures firmly establish …

Invisible Ink In The Eighth Arrondissement, Karl T. Muth

Karl T Muth

IMPORTANT: This document may prompt you for a username and password. If this occurs, please simply click "cancel" and the document will load. Thank you. This Article deals with the history of the secret contract that governs the distribution of economic rents enjoyed by Formula One. It further explores the environment in which this secret contract evolved and briefly discusses applications for secret contracts in other scenarios and industries.

With Avarice Aforethought: Insider Trading And 10b5-1 Plans, Karl T. Muth

Karl T Muth

The 10b5-1 plan and its growing popularity create a variety of governance problems and temptations for executives at publicly-traded corporations. The thought, in creating a safe harbor for such plans, was to allow insiders to diversify their individual holdings while in possession of nonpublic, material information. The 10b5-1 plan allows the actual liquidation transaction to occur while the plan participant is in possession of inside information, so long as the orders or instructions causing the trade were created as part of a "plan" that predates the insider's acquisition of the pertinent information. This creates a sort of time machine, where …