Business Organizations Law Commons^™

Analysis Of Section 230 Under A Theory Of Premises Liability: A Focus On Herrick V.Grindr And Daniel V. Armslist, Kassandra C. Cabrera

University of Miami Business Law Review

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (“CDA”) has been held to give online service providers acting as interactive computer services sweeping immunity for content posted on their platforms. The intention behind the creation of Section 230 was not to immunize online service providers from all liability. Rather, Section 230 was enacted to protect online intermediaries acting as “Good Samaritans” – those who made “good faith” efforts to restrict unlawful or harmful content, but due to the breadth of the internet and advancements in technology over or under-filtered content on their platforms. This note outlines an approach for courts to …

Ftc Enforcement Authority In The Modern Era: A Commission In Crisis?, Brandon Mantilla

University of Miami Business Law Review

This note provides a brief history of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC)’s enforcement authority before analyzing the U.S. Court of Appeals for the seventh Circuit’s circuit-splitting decision in FTC v. Credit Bureau Center, LLC. As the Supreme Court prepares to tackle questions surrounding authority to seek monetary relief, I contextualize how enforcement authority has historically been derived before analyzing how the issue may be resolved. Doing so involves engaging several cases that may prove consequential in determining the outcome and outlines potential legislative solutions to the battle over restitution. Before arriving at the most likely scenarios, a view of the …

Proving Economic Loss For In-And-Out Traders In Light Of First Solar, Daniel Roy Settana Iii

University of Miami Business Law Review

Federal courts have grappled with the issue of whether or not to include in-and-out traders in federal securities class action lawsuits. One set of courts has excluded in-and-out traders on the grounds that they could not prove loss causation, while another set of courts has included in-and-out traders because of the possibility that they could prove that they had suffered a loss. In Mineworker’s Pension Scheme versus First Solar, Inc., the Ninth Circuit recently addressed what should be the correct standard for loss causation. While the Ninth Circuit’s decision resolved its own intra-circuit split, the Court’s decision widened an already …

The Occ Fintech Charter And The Bank Holding Company Act, Lauren Bomberger

University of Miami Business Law Review

The definition of a bank under the Bank Holding Company Act of 1956 (“BHCA”) has changed several times since the statute was first enacted. Congress has identified a number of underlying rationales for applying the BHCA to certain entities thus necessitating a change in the definition. Recent innovations in technology, however, have made it challenging to adapt the U.S. financial regulatory regime to these advances, particularly for the financial technology (“FinTech”) industry. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency’s (“OCC”) FinTech charter is one example of an attempt by a U.S. financial regulator to grapple with emerging technologies in …

Good Corporate Governance Policies And Disclosure Mechanisms In Startup Companies, Yahel Kaplan

University of Miami Business Law Review

In the past decades, particularly following the collapse of huge corporation such as WorldCom and Enron due to dubious or illegal financial management, countries began gradually increasing the oversight of publicly traded companies with few jurisdictions conjuring recommended corporate governance codes (RCGC) to ensure sufficient oversight, reduce manager’s ability to loot their companies, and ensure that shareholders’ and stakeholders’ interests are monitored effectively by companies. While RCGC was intended namely for public company, several organizations called for the adoption of RCGC in startup companies. Startup companies suffer from various failures which the classic corporate laws are not equipped to address …

Lessons For Today By The Deregulation Of Yesteryear: Analyzing Modern Capital Market Deregulation With Historical Examples, Jordan J. Saddoris

University of Miami Business Law Review

Financial market regulators in the US have proposed cutting down their own rulebooks in recent years. However, when it comes to deregulating modern capital markets, the outcomes of historical alterations of similar natures should serve as lessons in what works and what doesn’t. This comment analyzes three modern-day proposals to deregulate US financial markets, using historical actions to argue for the likely efficacy of each.

With Coronavirus Ravaging The Economy, Congress Shows Highest Tax Priorities: An Exploration Of The Provisions In The Cares Act And Beyond, Paul Nylen, Brian Huels, Shane Wheeler

University of Miami Business Law Review

The virus known as SARS–CoV–21 (Coronavirus) swept over the United States in ways that no other crisis has affected modern society. While the Spanish Flu of 1918 has often been cited for its pandemic similarities to the Coronavirus, from an economic standpoint the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the Great Recession of 2008 are perhaps the Coronavirus’s best analogy for the modern economic carnage that has occurred. In those previous events, Congress responded with sweeping legislation like Dodd–Frank and the Patriot Act. With the Coronavirus, Congress responded with the CARES Act. Within the CARES Act are historical changes to …

Beyond The Public Square: Imagining Digital Democracy, Mary Anne Franks

Articles

To create online spaces that do not merely replicate existing hierarchies and reinforce unequal distributions of social, economic, cultural, and political power, we must move beyond the simplistic clich6 of the unregulated public square and commit to the hard work of designing for democracy.

When we say 'public square,' ... we need to ask- who or what is this public? Who owns this space, what makes it public? . . . This is the essence of democracy: the ability to question power, and the power to do so. - Tom Wilkinson

Team Production Revisited, William Wilson Bratton

Articles

This Article reconsiders Margaret Blair and Lynn Stout's team production model of corporate law, offering a favorable evaluation. The model explains both the legal corporate entity and corporate governance institutions in microeconomic terms as the means to the end of encouraging investment, situating corporations within markets and subject to market constraints but simultaneously insisting that productive success requires that corporations remain independent of markets. The model also integrates the inherited framework of corporate law into an economically derived model of production, constructing a microeconomic description of large enterprises firmly rooted in corporate doctrine but neither focused on nor limited by …

Bill Ab5 And The Gig Economy, Peter Buckley

University of Miami Business Law Review

This paper explores California Assembly Bill No. 5 and its effect on the “gig economy.” Notably, this paper takes an in-depth look at companies providing cheap services to California residents and the detrimental effects on California business models by labeling independent contractors as employees. I will contrast the Bill with previous California court decisions on independent contracts and the joint ballot initiatives being jointly proposed by Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, and other gig companies. Within this paper I will refer to workers as “drivers” for the sake of simplicity; however, it should be noted that these companies refer to them as …

Rock The Cash-Bah! How Alston Presents A New Challenge To The Amateurism Justification And Ways The Ncaa Can Modernize To Remain Afloat, John Y. Doty

University of Miami Business Law Review

During the last decade, antitrust litigation involving Division I athletes and the NCAA has resulted in changes to the NCAA’s rules, presenting a threat to amateurism. As athletes have voiced concerns about their likeness being used without permission in video games, the difficulty of balancing sports and academics, and going to bed hungry when millions of dollars in profits are being made off of them, the NCAA has allowed conferences and schools to provide student-athletes with stipends for cost of attendance expenses. However, even though the NCAA has modified its rules, athletes continue to ask for more, and courts have …

A Means To An End: How The Expansion Of The Federal Arbitration Act Of 1925 By The Supreme Court Created A Loophole For Corporations To Avoid Claims By Consumers And Workers Alike, Brittany L. Pushkin

University of Miami Business Law Review

A Means to an End: How the Expansion of The Federal Arbitration Act of 1925 by the Supreme Court Created a Loophole for Corporations to Avoid Claims by Consumers and Workers Alike Arbitration is rarely thought of outside the legal and business world by the everyday lay person. Whether we know it or not—all of us, in some capacity, have agreed to a mandatory arbitration clause. A contract for cellular service, an employer-employee arrangement, or an agreement to open a bank account are just a few common examples that lock not only clients, but also employees, in contracts that contain …

A More Pixelated Union: A Look At The Path To Unionization In The Video Game Industry Under Trump’S National Labor Relations Board, William C. Selfridge

University of Miami Business Law Review

In the past twenty years, the video game industry has become one of the largest entertainment industries not only in the United States but in the entire world. Yet as video game sales continue to increase at massive rates, it seems the conditions for those making the games have not improved with it, at least according to some in the know. While other entertainment industries have moved to unionize, those in the video game industry have yet to take that leap. To make matters worse, during the administration of President Donald J. Trump, the National Labor Relations Board (“NLRB”) shifted …

Wells Fargo & Co. V. U.S.: A Potential Beginning Of The End Of The Objective Reasonable Basis Tax Penalty Defense, Beckett G. Cantley, Geoffrey C. Dietrich

University of Miami Business Law Review

The Internal Revenue Code (“IRC”) § 6662(a) permits the IRS to impose a twenty-percent (20%) accuracy-related penalty to an underpayment of tax, and there are several different defenses to this penalty depending on the facts of the case and the reason for the penalty.3 One of the most common accuracy-related penalties is the negligence penalty.4 Although there are multiple different reasons for the application of an accuracy-related penalty, only one penalty may be applied for each understatement.5 If a taxpayer faces the negligence penalty, one common defense is that the taxpayer’s return position has a reasonable basis under the relevant …

The Hottest Employee Benefit Of 2020: Employers Offer To Repay Employees’ Student Loan Debt, Anne Kotlarz

University of Miami Business Law Review

The Student Loans Crisis has spread like wildfire reaching a whopping $1.56 trillion worth of debt. What started off as the Federal government’s initiative to encourage Americans to invest in their future through obtaining secondary education, has turned into a systemic crisis that burns just as hot as global warming. Lobbyists are currently petitioning Congress to enact meaningful legislation to extinguish the flames of the growing student loan debt. Most notably, the private sector is proposing congressional reform to amend the tax code to enable employers to offer employees student loan repayment assistance tax-free. This article delves into this proposal …

Assessing The Unethical Phenomenon Behind Hollywood’S Handshake Agreements, Daniel Rico

University of Miami Business Law Review

The Hollywood Film Industry has maintained a unique characteristic of allowing substantial capital investments to regularly proceed on the basis of oral (“handshake”) agreements.1 These handshake agreements result in an uncertain threat of legal enforcement and an increased exposure to contract liability. Nevertheless, handshake contracts have become so prevalent in Hollywood’s entertainment industry that no matter one’s opinion on the merits of using these contracts, attorneys have conformed to this longstanding tradition in order to stay competitive.

As a result, this longstanding practice of conducting business through handshake agreements has contributed to another time-honored Hollywood tradition: contract disputes. Hollywood’s flexible …

Unvested: How Equity And The Deferred Payment Gamble In Startups Shortchange Employees Targeted By Discrimination, Katie Black

University of Miami Law Review

The new American Dream is not limited to Silicon Valley. Startups span the nation. They exist in a vast array of sizes and ideologies. Nonetheless, by their very nature, startups are boundary-pushing enterprises. For all the world-altering good they can do, sometimes, that crashing-into-walls mentality comes at the price of pushing human and legal boundaries as well. While the entity tries to grow and create, almost hydraulically using what little human and financial capital it may have to build the once-impossible, startup employees can be left to bear the cost when it is their boundaries that are broken. Discrimination is …

Bank Resolution And Creditor Distribution: The Tension Shaping Global Banking –Part Ii: The Cross-Border Dimension, David Ramos, Javier Solana

University of Miami Business Law Review

New bank resolution frameworks that aim to address the complex task of managing the collapse of a large financial institution stand in considerable tension with basic principles and policy objectives of insolvency law. In this two-part study, we present an analytical framework that aims at helping us understand how this tension can undermine the effectiveness of the new bank resolution frameworks. In the first part of this article, we introduced our three-layered framework and explored its first two layers: the group dimension, and the duality of crisis-prevention and crisis-management tools. In this Part II, we explore the last layer: the …

The Bleeding Edge: Theranos And The Growing Risk Of An Unregulated Private Securities Market, Theodore O'Brien

University of Miami Business Law Review

America’s securities laws and regulations, most of which were created in the early twentieth century, are increasingly irrelevant to the most dynamic emerging companies. Today, companies with sufficient investor interest can raise ample capital through private and exempt offerings, all while eschewing the public exchanges and the associated burdens of the initial public offering, public disclosures, and regulatory scrutiny. Airbnb, Inc., for example, quickly tapped private investors for $1 billion in April of 2020, adding to the estimated $4.4 billion the company had previouslyraised.2 The fundamental shift from public to private companies is evidenced by the so-called “unicorns,” the more …

The United States: Big Data, Little Regulation, Megan Valent

University of Miami Business Law Review

In the United States today, there is no single law to address the privacy concerns associated with the collection of consumer data. Lawmakers have introduced policies that seek to address data privacy at the federal level, but Congress has not yet acted to create a comprehensive law to protect consumers. On the contrary, in 2016, the European Union passed its General Data Protection Regulation to address the dangers associated with “Big Data” and to give consumers control over their data.

Unfortunately, in the United States consumers are often unaware of how their data is being handled and what is done …

Smart Contracts: Implications On Liability And Competence, Ryan Hasting

University of Miami Business Law Review

Smart contracts are increasingly popular in business and law. Smart contracts are also becoming increasingly complex. Advances in technology allow smart contracts to handle far more intricate transactions than the traditional—and simple— vending machine example. With increased complexity comes increased responsibility. When parties rely on an attorney to review or draft a smart contract, that attorney must understand what he or she is reading or writing. Smart contracts, however, are not written in a language most attorneys can understand, let alone write. While a general description of the contract may be translated into plain English, the contract itself is written …

Uber And The Need For Particularized Regulation, Kayla Marie Heckman

University of Miami Business Law Review

With technology constantly evolving, the law must evolve with it. Uber Technologies, Inc. (“Uber”) has transformed the transportation industry by making transportation readily available with the touch of a button on one’s mobile phone. Uber is now one of the leading companies in transportation and operates worldwide. While this expansion has been great for consumers, it has come with significant drawbacks and challenges. Uber threatens the taxi industry, the cities in which it operates, and even its own drivers. This Note will discuss how Uber’s rapid growth is disrupting transportation in major cities quicker than its impact can properly be …

Modernizing The Fair And Equitable Treatment Standards In The Energy Charter Treaty, Sydney Thurman-Baldwin

University of Miami Business Law Review

As oil and gas continue to be hot commodities for national economies, the number of international arbitrations in the energy sector has continued to rise in recent years. As the utilization of International Arbitration continues to rise in Energy disputes, so does the invocation of The Energy Charter Treaty (“ECT”). The ECT promotes inter-governmental cooperation with contracting parties in the energy sector through its provisions on investment protection, provisions on trade, transit of energy, energy efficiency, environmental protection and dispute resolution. These provisions are considered to be the cornerstone of the treaty, fostering a ‘level playing field’ for foreign investments …

Airdrops: “Free” Tokens Are Not Free From Regulatory Compliance, Bridgett S. Bauer Esq.

University of Miami Business Law Review

No abstract provided.

Corporate Law And The Myth Of Efficient Market Control, William Wilson Bratton, Simone M. Sepe

Articles

In recent times, there has been an unprecedented shift in power from managers to shareholders, a shift that realizes the long-held theoretical aspiration of market control of the corporation. This Article subjects the market control paradigm to comprehensive economic examination and finds it wanting.

The market control paradigm relies on a narrow economic model that focuses on one problem only: management agency costs. With the rise of shareholder power, we need a wider lens that also takes in market prices, investor incentives, and information asymmetries. General equilibrium (GE) theory provides that lens. Several lessons follow from reference to this higher-order …

Variations On A Theme: Corporate Law In Latin America, Continental Europe, And The United States, Ángel R. Oquendo

University of Miami Inter-American Law Review

The regulation of incorporated companies in Latin America and Continental Europe appears to distance itself from that in the United States. It differs in how it structures itself and handles incorporation, incorporators, piercing, governance, discipline, and shareholders. In their regulatory exertions, both regimes rely, certainly, on legislation and adjudication yet do so differently, qualitatively in addition to quantitatively.

Apparently, civil and common law continue to specialize respectively though not exclusively in statutes and binding precedents. Still, they ever more frequently intrude into each other’s apparent specialty, while leaving their own imprint on it. The tendency to converge coexists with that …

Let’S Shake On It: Perceived Pre-Contractual Risk In Cross-Border Investment, Kevin J. Fandl Jd, Phd

University of Miami Business Law Review

This article asks whether a legal system that provides protection for commitments made prior to contract formation is more or less conducive to risk-taking by foreign investors than a legal system that does not. I surmise that increased levels of protection for precontractual commitments establish an environment more hospitable to new business development, giving potential entrepreneurs added security in their ventures. And I further surmise that different legal traditions provide different levels of protection for these pre-contractual commitments.

To better understand the risks faced by cross-border business investors, this article describes the key distinctions between legal systems that create potential …

The Final Rule: A Call For Congressional Action To Return The Flsa And The Middle Class To Its Former Glory, Ashley Singrossi

University of Miami Business Law Review

2017 was full of change in America. But not for the middle class. The middle class remained stagnant, if not shrinking—as it has been for decades. Many scholars and economists theorize why the class that is the backbone of America—that once flourished as the beacon of hope for hard–working people around the world—has steadily declined over the past few decades. The answer lies in labor regulation. Federal labor regulations helped build America’s robust middle class. But those regulations are outdated and ineffective. If we want to see the middle class restored to its prosperity, and stop it from slowly slipping …

Setting Sail To Cuba: Analyzing The Recent Introduction Of Cruise Lines And The Impact On American Tourist Freedoms, Alessandria San Roman

University of Miami Business Law Review

After President Obama’s announcement in early 2015 of increased relations with the Cuban government despite the existing Cuban embargo under the Helms–Burton Act and the Cuban Democracy Act, Carnival Cruise line made history in July of 2015 when it became the first United States cruise line to receive approval from both the United States Department of Treasury and the United States Department of Commerce to offer cruises to Cuba. Since its introduction, there has been wide increase in Cuba’s tourism industry. However, Cuban regulations still regulate where and how cruise lines can travel. The increased relations are still in their …

Whistling In The Wind: Why Federal Whistleblower Protections Fall Short Of Their Corporate Governance Goals, Meera Khan

University of Miami Business Law Review

Teetering on the line between hero and villain, whistleblowers have a remarkably unusual role in contemporary American society. Those who blow the whistle on public sector activities, like Edward Snowden and the Watergate Scandal’s “Deep Throat”, are often vilified in history as treasonous and unprincipled rogues. In the private sector, however, whistleblowers are seen as moral compasses for corporate behavior, and are even afforded federal protections for speaking out against internal malfeasance. The piecemeal evolution of whistleblower legislation including the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002 and the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 created regulatory and enforcement …