Business Organizations Law Commons^™

Right To Defence In Eu Competition Law; The Case Of Inspections, Marta Michałek

Monografie CARS/CARS Monographs

Praca stanowi dysertację doktorską obronioną przez autorkę na Uniwersytecie we Fryburgu (Szwajcaria) w 2015 r. W książce przeanalizowana została kwestia ochrony prawa przedsiębiorców do obrony w ramach inspekcji przeprowadzonych przez Komisję Europejską. Ocena poziomu ochrony przyznawanej 978-83-63962-86-9przedsiębiorcom dokonana została na podstawie porównania (i) obecnego porządku prawnego UE i podejścia przyjętego przez Trybunał Sprawiedliwości Unii Europejskiej z (ii) ochroną zapewnioną przez Europejską Konwencję Praw Człowieka i standardami określonymi przez Europejski Trybunał Praw Człowieka w tej kwestii. Analiza obejmuje następujące zagadnienia: charakterystykę prawa do obrony, najbardziej istotne międzynarodowe (zwłaszcza europejskie) systemy lub akty prawne wprowadzające ochronę prawa do obrony, uprawnienia kontrolne Komisji, …

The Future Direction Of Delaware Law (Including A Brief Exegesis On Fee Shifting Bylaws), J. Robert Brown Jr.

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Delaware sets the governance standards for most public companies. The ability to attract corporations could not be explained solely by the existence of a favorable statutory regime. Delaware was not invariably the first or the only state to implement management friendly provisions. Given the interpretive gaps in the statute and the critical importance of the common law in the governance process, courts played an outsized role in setting legal standards. The management friendly nature of the Delaware courts contributed significantly to the state’s attraction to public corporations.

A current example of a management friendly trend in the case law had …

Comment Letter: The Nyse And The End Of The Structural Separation Between Regulatory And Commercial Interests Of The Exchange, J. Robert Brown Jr.

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

The NYSE transformed into a for profit entity in 2006. As part of the approval process, the NYSE agreed to structurally separate the regulatory function from the business function. In doing so, the NYSE created NYSE Regulation, a non-profit with an independent board, to handle most regulatory matters. During the comment period, a spirited debate arose over the ability of a for profit company to carry out a regulatory mission. Some suggested that the regulatory function was incompatible with a "for profit" motive and that NYSE Regulation should be spun off. Others accepted the proposed structure but called for additional …

In-House Risk, Eli Wald

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Over the last thirty years or so, as the number of in-house counsel rose and their role increased in scope and prominence, increased attention has been given the various challenges these lawyers face under the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct, from figuring out who is the client the in-house lawyer represents, to navigating conflicts of interest, maintaining independence, and engaging in a multijurisdictional practice of law. Less attention, to date, has been given to business risk assessment, perhaps in part because that function appears to be part of in-house counsel’s role as a business person rather than as a …

The 2013 Symposium On Corporate Governance In Japan, David Makman

UC Law Business Journal

The 2013 Symposium on Corporate Governance in Japan was organized by the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, the Japan Society of Northern California, and the Pacific Pension Institute. The goal was to provide a forum where academics and practitioners could meet to exchange information and ideas relating to corporate governance. The Japan Society of Northern California and Pacific Pension Institute have been covering corporate governance issues together since 2001, and have held several conferences on the issue. The Symposium was the first joint program with the University of California, Hastings College of the Law in this area. …

The Logic And Limits Of Liens, Edward Janger

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

China's National Champions: Governance Change Through Globalization?, Li-Wen Lin

All Faculty Publications

China is regarded as the world’s leading practitioner of state capitalism in which important capitalist enterprises have a close relationship with the state. One prominent feature of China’s state capitalism is the fundamental role of about 100 large state-owned enterprises (SOEs) controlled by organs of the central government in critical industries such as oil, telecom, and transportation. These SOEs are often dubbed “China’s national champions.” They are not only important players in China’s domestic economy but also major contributors to China’s fast growing global investment. Their global expansion however often encounters political and regulatory challenges abroad, partly because their corporate …

Series Of Unincorporated Business Entities: The Mobius Strip And Klein Bottle Of Business Entity Law, Daniel S. Kleinberger

Faculty Scholarship

Back in the day – say, 1990 – limited liability companies (LLCs) were the cutting edge of business entity law. Today, LLCs dominate entity formation, and the cutting edge has moved further out – to the notion of a “series,” a quasi-separate, quasi-person existing within an LLC.

Business lawyers are generally familiar with series of stocks and bonds, but those series have nothing to do with the LLC series discussed in this article. To avoid confusion, this article refers to protected series, which, as we will see, are the Mobius strips or Klein bottles of entity law.

La Determinación Obligatoria Del Objeto Social: Una Regla Anacrónica, Alfonso Montoya Stahl, Fernando Loayza Jordán

Scholarly Articles

En el presente artículo, los autores discuten la presunta utilidad como inconvenientes de la obligación de determinar el objeto social. En ese sentido, se analiza las características exigidas al objeto social, como los supuestos beneficios que traería su regulación. Los autores proponen la eliminación de la obligación de determinar el objeto social a fin de permitir a las sociedades configurar libremente su actividad, sin verse limitadas por una norma rígida.

The authors discuss the alleged utility as well as the drawbacks of the mandatory determination of corporate purpose. They analyze and criticize the required characteristics of the corporate purpose by …

Keynote Reflections: The Public Governance Duty, Steven L. Schwarcz

Faculty Scholarship

Firms must take ever greater risks to try to innovate and create value in our increasingly competitive and complex global economy. Corporate governance law generally delegates control over excessive risk-taking to the firm’s investors, principally its risk-seeking shareholders. But this does not cover the type of risk-taking that led to the global financial crisis and that is becoming ever more common - risk-taking that could have systemic consequences to the financial system. I argue for a “public governance duty,” requiring managers of systemically important firms to assess the impact of risk-taking on the public as well as on investors, and …

Corporate Law And The Limits Of Private Ordering, James D. Cox

Faculty Scholarship

Solomon-like, the Delaware legislature in 2015 split the baby by amending the Delaware General Corporation Law to authorize forum-selection bylaws and to prohibit charter or bylaw provisions that would shift to the plaintiff defense costs incurred in connection with shareholder suits that were not successfully concluded. The legislature acted after the Boilermakers Local 154 Retirement Fund. v. Chevron Corp ATP Tour, Inc. v. Deutscher Tennis Bund, broadly empowered the board vis-à-vis the shareholders through the board’s power to amend the bylaws. Repeatedly the analysis used by each court referenced the contractual relationship the shareholders had through the articles of …

If The Question Is Chocolate-Related, The Answer Is Always Yes: Why Doe V. Nestle Reopens The Door For Corporate Liability Of U.S. Corporations Under The Alien Tort Statute, Amanda A. Humphreville

American University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Piercing The Fiduciary Veil, Colin P. Marks

Faculty Works

Limited partnerships (LPs) and limited liability companies (LLCs) permit formation with a unique management structure in that these entities may be managed by another limited liability entity, such as a corporation. Thus, the true managers are those individuals who manage the manager. It is well settled that the managing entity, such as a corporate general partner, owes default fiduciary duties, but what of these second-tier managers? Technically, it is the managing entity that owes the duties, not the managing entity's owners, officers, and directors, yet courts have struggled with strict adherence to this separation when it would seem inequitable to …

Producing Better Mileage: Advancing The Design And Usefulness Of Hybrid Vehicles For Social Business Ventures, John E. Tyler, Evan Absher, Kathleen Garman, Anthony J. Luppino

Faculty Works

Since 2008 approximately half of the states in the U.S. have enacted statutes permitting “hybrid” business forms that blend aspects of traditional for-profit ventures with characteristics normally associated with traditional non-profit entities. This article analyzes theoretical, academic, practical, legal, and regulatory questions regarding the extent to which the existing hybrids are suited to achieving social purposes objectives, including in comparison to modified traditional forms of business organization. Finding the current fleet of hybrids an innovative, useful start, but with need to evolve, this article proposes statutory language (set forth in a detailed appendix, and summarized in the article text), and …

Prawne I Ekonomiczne Aspekty Polityki Promowania Narodowych Czempionów, Rajmund Molski

Monografie CARS/CARS Monographs

Polityka promowania przez państwo tzw. narodowych czempionów budzi kontrowersje, co prowokuje ożywioną debatę w kwestii zasadności tej polityki. W debacie tej wciąż pada więcej pytań niż odpowiedzi. Kluczowy problem sprowadza się do odpowiedzi na pytanie, czy przedsiębiorstwa te powinny powstawać samoistnie, czy raczej aktywną rolę w procesie ich tworzenia i wzrostu powinny odgrywać władze państwowe, i na czym ewentualnie to wsparcie miałoby polegać? Odpowiedzi wymaga też pytanie o rzeczywisty wymiar polityki promowania narodowych czempionów realizowanej w praktyce przez różne państwa, a także o jej zgodność z szeroko rozumianym prawem i polityką ochrony konkurencji. Jakkolwiek pytania te zyskały szczególną doniosłość w …

Koncepcja Jednego Organizmu Gospodarczego W Prawie Ochrony Konkurencji, Piotr Semeniuk

Monografie CARS/CARS Monographs

W książce przeanalizowane zostało zastosowanie koncepcji jednego organizmu gospodarczego (ang. single economic unit) w prawie ochrony konkurencji. Podstawowym porządkiem prawnym analizowanym przez autora jest polskie oraz unijne prawo ochrony konkurencji (prawo antymonopolowe, antytrustowe). Z powodu wysoce ogólnikowego odwołania się do koncepcji jednego organizmu gospodarczego przez przepisy regulacji antymonopolowej, zarówno polskiej, jak i unijnej, w pracy przedstawione są też rozwiązania przyjęte przez inne porządki prawne, przede wszystkim prawo Stanów Zjednoczonych.

Autor bada różne uzasadnienia dla istnienia w prawie ochrony konkurencji koncepcji jednego organizmu gospodarczego, konfrontuje tą koncepcję z naukami ekonomicznymi (w szczególności z tzw. teorią firmy) oraz dokonuje przeglądu podstawowych poglądów …

Corporate Social Responsibility Versus Business And Human Rights: Bridging The Gap Between Responsibility And Accountability, Anita Ramasastry

Articles

This article explores the evolution of business and human rights (BHR) from a lawyer’s perspective and examines how it is contextually and conceptually different from corporate social responsibility (CSR) in its aims and ambitions. While CSR emphasizes responsible behavior, BHR focuses on a more delineated commitment in the area of human rights. BHR is, in part, a response to CSR and its perceived failure. This has led to a gap with two disciplines or strands of discourse that are diverging rather than converging. This article explores how the quest for accountability shapes a very different narrative for BHR, which takes …

White Paper: Options For A Treaty On Business And Human Rights, Anita Ramasastry, Douglass Cassell

Articles

The United Nations Human Rights Council decided in June 2014 to establish an Intergovernmental Working Group to “elaborate an international legally binding instrument to regulate, in international human rights law, the activities of transnational corporations and other business enterprises.” The first meeting of the Working Group took take place in Geneva in July 2015. The Council did not further specify what sort of instrument should be drafted. The Center for Human Rights of the American Bar Association and the Law Society of England and Wales asked the present authors to prepare a “White Paper” on possible options for a treaty …

Intermediary Influence, Kathryn Judge

Faculty Scholarship

Ronald Coase and others writing in his wake typically assume that institutional arrangements evolve to minimize transaction costs. This Article draws attention to a powerful, market-based force that operates contrary to that core assumption: Intermediary influence." The claim builds on three observations: (1) many transaction costs now take the form of fees paid to specialized intermediaries, (2) intermediaries prefer institutional arrangements that yield higher transaction fees, and (3) intermediaries are often well positioned to promote self-serving arrangements. As a result, high-fee institutional arrangements often remain entrenched even in the presence of more-efficient alternatives.

This Article uses numerous case studies from …

The Uncertain Future Of The Corporate Contribution Ban, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

Concern about the role of corporate money in democracy has been a longstanding theme in American politics. In the late nineteenth century, the states began to adopt laws restricting the use of corporate funds in elections. The first permanent federal campaign finance law – the Tillman Act of 1907 – targeted corporations by prohibiting federally-chartered corporations from making contributions in any election and prohibiting all corporations from making contributions in federal elections. Subsequently amended, continued, and strengthened by the Federal Corrupt Practices Act of 1925, the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971, and the Bipartisan …

Licensing Commercial Value: From Copyright To Trademarks And Back, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

Copyright and trademarks often overlap, particularly in visual characters. The same figure may qualify as a pictorial, graphic or sculptural work on the one hand, and as a registered (or at least used) trademark on the other. The two rights, though resting on distinct foundations, tend to be licensed together. Trademarks symbolize the goodwill of the producer, and are protected insofar as copying that symbol is likely to confuse consumers as to the source or approval of the goods or services in connection with which the mark is used. For famous marks, the dilution action grants a right against uses …

Does Google Content Degrade Google Search? Experimental Evidence, Michael Luca, Tim Wu, Sebastian Couvidat, Daniel Frank

Faculty Scholarship

While Google is known primarily as a search engine, it has increasingly developed and promoted its own content as an alternative to results from other websites. By prominently displaying Google content in response to search queries, Google is able to use its dominance in search to gain customers for this content. This may reduce consumer welfare if the internal content is inferior to organic search results. In this paper, we provide a legal and empirical analysis of this practice in the domain of online reviews. We first identify the conditions under which universal search would be considered anticompetitive. We then …

Supreme Court Amicus Brief Of 19 Corporate Law Professors, Friedrichs V. California Teachers Association, No. 14-915, John C. Coates, Iv, Lucian A. Bebchuk, Bernard S. Black, John C. Coffee Jr., James D. Cox, Ronald J. Gilson, Jeffrey N. Gordon, Lawrence A. Hamermesh, Henry Hansmann, Robert J. Jackson Jr., Marcel Kahan, Vikramaditya S. Khanna, Michael Klausner, Reinier Kraakman, Donald C. Langevoort, Edward B. Rock, Mark J. Roe, Helen S. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court has looked to the rights of corporate shareholders in determining the rights of union members and non-members to control political spending, and vice versa. The Court sometimes assumes that if shareholders disapprove of corporate political expression, they can easily sell their shares or exercise control over corporate spending. This assumption is mistaken. Because of how capital is saved and invested, most individual shareholders cannot obtain full information about corporate political activities, even after the fact, nor can they prevent their savings from being used to speak in ways with which they disagree. Individual shareholders have no “opt …

Majority Control And Minority Protection, Zohar Goshen, Assaf Hamdani

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter examines legal issues concerning majority control and minority protection in firms with concentrated ownership governance structures, with particular emphasis on the tradeoff between the goals of protecting minority shareholders and allowing controllers to pursue their vision and how corporate law should balance these conflicting goals. Focusing primarily on Delaware corporate law, it suggests that holding a control block allows majority shareholders to pursue their idiosyncratic vision in the manner they see fit, even against minority investors’ objections. Idiosyncratic vision refers to the subjective value that entrepreneurs attach to their business idea or vision, and this chapter considers its …

Convergence And Persistence In Corporate Law And Governance, Jeffrey N. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter discusses the question of “convergence or persistence” in corporate law and governance. It first considers efforts to measure convergence directly by focusing on the evolution of law-on-the-books governance provisions before analyzing capital market evidence on convergence, with particular emphasis on capital market indicators such as the decline in “cross-listings” onto US stock exchanges by firms from jurisdictions with weaker investor protection and the increase in initial public offerings (IPOs) on emerging market stock markets. The chapter proceeds by reviewing evidence of divergence, especially “divergence within convergence,” and the failure of the European Union to produce more convergent corporate …

Loser Pays: The Latest Installment In The Battle-Scarred, Cliff-Hanging Survival Of The Rule 10b-5 Class Action, John C. Coffee Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

When I was an upper-year student at Yale Law School in the late 1960s, I was sometimes as undermotivated as contemporary upper-year law students regularly appear to be. But there was then an appropriate role model for us: a graduate student, brimming with efficiency and self-discipline, who occupied a carrel in the law library, seemingly working day and night on a special research project. He had piled law review articles and cases a foot or more about his carrel, and anyone walking by could see that he seemed obsessed with something called Rule 10b-5. I had dimly heard of this …

Tax And Corporate Governance: The Influence Of Tax On Managerial Agency Costs, David M. Schizer

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter examines the influence of tax on managerial agency costs, with particular emphasis on public companies in the United States. Focusing on “C-corporations,” this chapter first considers why tax is an imperfect vehicle for mitigating managerial agency costs. It then discusses how tax influences the compensation of managers, both in ways policy makers intended, and in ways they did not. The chapter also considers how tax affects management decisions about capital structure, hedging, and acquisitions. In addition, this chapter explores the tax system’s influence on the ability and incentives of shareholders to monitor management. This chapter then concludes with …

Profiles - Chicago Literacenter, James Hagy

Rooftops Project

Business news is often filled with stories about incubator spaces and entrepreneurial hubs in which start-up companies can hang out, network, and grow. What might result when these concepts are adapted to bring together diverse not-for-profit organizations focused on similar missions? Professor James Hagy visits Stacy Ratner, Co-Founder and Creative Director of the Chicago Literacy Alliance, and Transwestern’s Larry Serota at the grand opening of Literacenter in downtown Chicago.

Shareholder Primacy And Corporate Compliance, Judd F. Sneirson

Articles

Corporations, like the rest of us, must comply with environmental and other laws or suffer the consequences. Unfortunately, these consequences can pale in comparison to the gains to be made from non-compliance. Law-and-economics scholarship recognizes this and, by treating many laws as mere costs of doing business, encourages a certain amount of deliberate non-compliance. According to this view, corporate compliance should turn on profitability or whether compliance would otherwise benefit the firm. This Article argues that the law-and-economics scholarship is wrong on the law, wrong as a matter of economics, and does not reflect how most firms in fact behave. …

Delaware’S Implied Contractual Covenant Of Good Faith And “Sibling Rivalry” Among Equity Holders, Daniel S. Kleinberger

Faculty Scholarship

An obligation of good faith and fair dealing is implied in every common law contract and is codified in the Uniform Commercial Code (“U.C.C”). The terminology differs: Some jurisdictions refer to an “implied covenant;” others to an “implied contractual obligation;” still others to an “implied duty.” But whatever the label, the concept is understood by the vast majority of U.S. lawyers as a matter of commercial rather than entity law. And, to the vast majority of corporate lawyers, “good faith” does not mean contract law but rather conjures up an important aspect of a corporate director’s duty of loyalty.

Nonetheless, …