Business Organizations Law Commons^™

Theories Of The Corporation And The Limited Liability Company: How Should Courts And Legislatures Articulate Rules For Piercing The Veil, Fiduciary Responsibility And Securities Regulation For The Limited Liability Company, David L. Cohen

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

Rethinking Disclosure Liability In The Modern Era, Merritt B. Fox

Faculty Scholarship

The state of issuer disclosure in 1997 is like the proverbial half-filled glass. On one hand, as Dean Seligman has amply demonstrated in his contribution to this symposium, the glass is half empty in the sense that the legal incentives for established issuers to engage in high quality disclosure at the time that they sell new securities have decreased in recent decades. Due to the more liberal exemptions available under Regulation S, Rule 144A, Regulation D and Regulation A, a much smaller portion of such sales is even subject to the formal disclosure oriented registration process under Section 5 of …

Brave New World?: The Impact(S) Of The Internet On Modern Securities Regulation, John C. Coffee Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

It is now a trite commonplace that the advent of the Internet will in time revolutionize securities regulation. Merely the facts that the Internet has somewhere between thirty and sixty million users worldwide today (with an estimated ten to thirty million in the United States) and that some 800,000 U.S. investors already have online brokerage accounts establish that there is a potential global market that can be accessed at very low cost. But the magnitude of the market says little about what will be the character and effect of this approaching revolution.

Technological change is not a new phenomenon for …

The Shaping Force Of Corporate Law In The New Economic Order, Jeffrey N. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

My topic for this Allen Chair lecture is the shaping force of corporate governance in the new economic order. It is easy to think of corporate law as an arcane field with mysterious terms and peculiar rules, ultimately of interest only to those who are prepared to bill at least 2000 hours a year to unravel its complexities. This is the view that there is a pointless mystery about shareholders, directors, common stocks, debentures, and the bizarre creature my class encountered recently, a convertible exchangeable cumulative preferred stock; and that ultimately corporate law and practice consists of the expert manipulation …

Directorial Fiduciary Duties In A Tracking Stock Equity Structure: The Need For A Duty Of Fairness, Jeffrey J. Hass

Michigan Law Review

Part I of this article briefly describes the key distinctions between a tracking stock corporation and a conventional corporation. It then touches on the reasons why corporations have adopted tracking stock equity structures. Part II articulates the unique legal challenges presented by a tracking stock equity structure. Part III discusses the disclosure that tracking stock corporations have made with respect to these challenges. Part IV briefly summarizes the fiduciary duties of care and loyalty and explores why these duties are ill-equipped to address these challenges. Part V presents the duty of fairness and discusses the duty's elements in detail. In …

Representing Business Clients In 1996, Oregon Law Institute, David Culpepper, Barnes H. Ellis, N. Robert Stoll, Steven D. Stadum, Peter R. Jarvis, Bradley F. Tellam, Claudia K. Powers, Corbett Gordon, Frank X. Curci, Micah D. Stolowitz, Jere M. Webb

Oregon Law Institute, 1996

Course Materials from the May 3, 1996 Program in Portland

F. Hodge O'Neal Corporate And Securities Law Symposium: Path Dependence And Comparative Corporate Governance, Ronald J. Mann, Curtis J. Milhaupt

Faculty Scholarship

The study of institutions, and particularly the study of institutions that societies use to govern business enterprises, is at a point of transition. In the last two or three decades, scholars focusing on economic principles to define appropriate legal rules and corporate institutions rose up to challenge the traditional orthodoxy of corporate governance found in the Berle and Means corporation.

One of the most exciting trends in the literature rests upon the "increasing marginal returns" school of economics associated with Brian Arthur and the Santa Fe Institute. The traditional neoclassical economic theory of production, familiar from decades of undergraduate and …

The Absence Of Cross-Cultural Communication: Sec Mandatory Disclosure And Foreign Corporate Governance, James A. Fanto

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Reflections On Executive Compensation And A Modest Proposal For (Further) Reform, Mark J. Loewenstein

Publications

No abstract provided.

Proprietary Norms In Corporate Law: An Essay On Reading Gambotto In The United States, Deborah A. Demott

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Cook And The Corporate Shareholder: A Belated Review Of William W. Cook's Publications On Corporations, Alfred F. Conard

Michigan Law Review

A Review of A Treatise on the Law of Stock and Stockholders, as Applicable to Railroad, Banking, Insurance, Manufacturing, Commercial, Business, Turnpike, Bridge, Canal, and Other Private Corporations by William W. Cook

Are Stock Markets Costly Casinos? Disagreement, Market Failure, And Securities Regulation, Lynn A. Stout

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Agreeing To Disagree Over Excessive Trading, Lynn A. Stout

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Disciplining Managers: Shareholder Cooperation In The Shadow Of Shareholder Competition, Manuel A. Utset

Scholarly Publications

No abstract provided.

Competition Versus Consolidation: The Significance Of Organizational Structure In Financial And Securities Regulation, John C. Coffee Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

It's as predictable as the swallows' return to Capistrano. At the outset of each new Administration, a Presidential Task Force proposes a restructuring of the federal administrative agencies. New developments in rapidly evolving markets, it is argued, require a consolidation of agencies to generate a broader perspective, to create a "level playing field," and to end the possibility of a "race to the bottom" (to the extent that market participants can opt for one regulatory system over another). The proposal draws little overt criticism, but turf-conscious agencies quietly mobilize their constituencies to oppose the reform. The first sign of trouble …

Is Unlimited Liability Really Unattainable: Of Long Arms And Short Sales, Mark R. Patterson

Faculty Scholarship

Unlimited shareholder liability would radically change the way we look at corporations. In an unlimited-liability world, one part at least of the veil between corporation and shareholder would no longer exist. As a result, the relationship between corporation and shareholder would be, both in law and in fact,much closer than it is currently. The two parts of this change-the legal and the factual-would reinforce each other. The legal change would be reflected in court decisions enforcing unlimited liability Regardless of the exact contours that decisions in this area took initially, there would be at least some shareholders-mutual funds, for example--whom …

Re-Engineering Corporate Disclosure: The Coming Debate Over Company Registration, John C. Coffee Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

Statutory obsolescence is the fate of all legislation. At some point in the natural "life cycle" of any statute, courts tend to move from purposive statutory construction, focused on the actual legislative intent, to greater deference towards administrative expertise as they implicitly recognize that the original legislative intent no longer fits the contemporary institutional landscape. Given that the federal securities laws were passed during the 1930s, they have now entered the geriatric zone where their possible obsolescence must be considered. Some academics have already called for the SEC's elimination on precisely this basis. Practitioners complain about the "metaphysical" and "hypertechnical" …

Dynamic Economic Analyses Of Selected Provisions Of Corporate Law: The Absolute Delegation Rule, Disclosure Of Intermediate Estimates And Ipo Pricing, Royce De R. Barondes

Faculty Publications

This Article examines three separate aspects of the relationships between corporations and their securityholders from a dynamic economic perspective: (i) the feasibility of permitting shareholders to participate in the management of their corporations through the exercise of voting rights, (ii) Rule 3b-6, the safe harbor for projections (the Safe Harbor)8 under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (the 1934 Act),9 and (iii) the extraordinary returns available from investing in initial public offerings (IPO's). Three particular dynamic aspects are implicated in these situations.

Form And Substance In The Definition Of A "Security": The Case Of Limited Liability Companies, Larry E. Ribstein

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Sec And The Future Of Corporate Governance, Mark J. Loewenstein

Publications

No abstract provided.

Insider Trading Deterrence Versus Managerial Incentives: A Unified Theory Of Section 16(B), Merritt B. Fox

Faculty Scholarship

Part I of this article assesses the social costs of a crude rule of thumb. Because section 16(b) applies to a given class of paired transactions, it deters both transactions based on inside information and transactions not so based. Each time section 16(b) is stretched to include a class of paired transactions, it deters some additional innocent transactions. This side effect will take the form of officers' and directors' purchasing fewer shares in their own companies and refusing to accept as large a portion of their compensation in a form based on share price. There are strong theoretical and empirical …

Thinking To Be Paid Versus Being Paid To Think, Merritt B. Fox

Faculty Scholarship

In the first chapter of The Economic Structure of Corporate Law, Frank Easterbrook and Daniel Fischel make an arresting statement:

... [P]eople who are backing their beliefs with cash are correct; they have every reason to avoid mistakes, while critics (be they academics or regulators) are rewarded for novel rather than accurate beliefs. Market professionals who estimate these things wrongly suffer directly; academics and regulators who estimate wrongly do not pay a similar penalty. Persons who wager with their own money may be wrong, but they are less likely to be wrong than are academics and regulators, who are wagering …

Table Of Contents - Cardozo Law Review, Volume 15, Issue 4

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Implications Of The Stakeholder Model, Roberta S. Karmel

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The New Corporate Law, Joel Seligman

Scholarship@WashULaw

My thesis is a simple one. In the twentieth century state corporate law norms for the large publicly held corporation have been progressively supplanted by federal standards, particularly those originating in federal securities law. This has occurred both because of the promulgation of new federal standards and because of the atrophy of state corporate law. Certain applications of this thesis are little questioned today. For instance, it is now a conventional idea that the state law applicable to insider trading has largely been ignored and has been generally displaced by such federal securities law staples as Rule 10b-5, section 16 …

Making America Competitive, Mark J. Loewenstein

Publications

No abstract provided.

Corporate Law After The Eighties: Reflections On The Relationship Between Management, Shareholders, And Stakeholders, Peter J. Henning

Law Faculty Research Publications

No abstract provided.

When Is A Corporate Executive "Substantially Unfit To Serve"?, Jayne W. Barnard

Faculty Publications

The recently enacted Securities Enforcement Remedies and Penny Stock Reform Act of 1990 provides that, in an SEC enforcement action, a federal court may enjoin or "disbar" the defendant from serving in the future as an officer or director of a public company. A court may enter such an order if it finds that the defendant is "substantially unfit" to serve as a corporate executive; the Act, however, does not define "substantial unfitness." In this Article Professor Jayne Barnard provides a framework for defining this term and identifying the defendants to which the Remedies Act should apply. Professor Barnard begins …

Responsibility Of Investment Bankers To Shareholders, Ted J. Fiflis

Publications

No abstract provided.

Benign Restraint: The Sec's Regulation Of Execution Systems, David M. Schizer

Faculty Scholarship

To the handful of traders who founded the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in 1792 – and perhaps even to the securities traders of the 1960's – today's securities markets would be virtually unrecognizable. New communications and data processing technologies, the globalization of investment portfolios, and a surge in trading volume have created new needs and possibilities. As a result, revolutionary advances have occurred in the design and performance of execution systems: the technologies (computers, telephones, modems) and formats (auction-based stock exchanges, dealer-based "over-the-counter" markets, computerized single price auctions) that traders use to conduct trades. These advances enable trades on …