Law Commons^™

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 …

Uncovering The Hidden Conflicts In Securities Class Action Litigation: Lessons From The State Street Case, Benjamin P. Edwards, Anthony Rickey

Scholarly Works

Courts, Congress, and commentators have long worried that stockholder plaintiffs in securities and M&A litigation and their counsel may pursue suits that benefit themselves rather than absent stockholders or the corporations in which they invest. Following congressional reforms that encouraged the appointment of institutional stockholders as lead plaintiffs in securities actions, significant academic commentary has focused on the problem of “pay to play”—the possibility that class action law firms encourage litigation by making donations to politicians with influence over institutional stockholders, particularly public sector pension funds.

A recent federal securities class action in the District of Massachusetts, however, suggests that …