Law Commons^™

Oversight Liability For Risk Management Failures At Financial Firms, Robert T. Miller

Robert T Miller

Many people believe that excessive risk-taking at large financial firms was an important cause of the financial crisis in 2007-2008 and thus that preventing another crisis requires improving risk-management systems at such institutions. One way to do this would be to use board oversight liability to hold directors personally liable for failing properly to monitor the risks that their firms are running. The purpose of this Article is to determine what role director oversight liability can efficiently play in improving risk-management practices at large financial firms.

A key contention of the Article is that previous treatments of this problem have …

The Board's Duty To Monitor Risk After Citigroup, Robert T. Miller

Robert T Miller

When Citigroup suffered billions of dollars in losses on subprime securities, some of its shareholders sued the bank’s directors alleging that the losses resulted from breaches by the directors of their duty to properly monitor the risks that the bank was running by holding and dealing in such securities. After the Delaware Court of Chancery dismissed the complaint on the pleadings, many academic commentators argued that the court should have taken the opportunity to articulate more stringent legal standards governing director oversight. This contribution to a symposium at the University of Pennsylvania Law School argues that any significant expansion of …