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Corporate Defense Law For Dispersed Ownership, Nicholas L. Georgakopoulos

Hofstra Law Review

The Delaware law regarding defensive tactics has a consistent and unnoticed undercurrent: it favors defenses against attacks that would concentrate corporate ownership. Similar trends seem to be developing in European merger and acquisition law, but they have a different flavor. Europe tries to foster dispersed ownership by discouraging defenses because it starts from an environment of concentrated ownership. Professor Georgakopoulos argues that pursuit of dispersed ownership is justified from an economic perspective and that defenses are intimately related with dispersed ownership. The "semi-entrenched" control that Delaware provides and that firms consistently choose in IPO's and prefer compared to golden parachutes …