Business Organizations Law Commons^™

Will Delaware Be Different? An Empirical Study Of Tc Heartland And The Shift To Defendant Choice Of Venue, Ofer Eldar, Neel U. Sukhatme

Faculty Scholarship

Why do some venues evolve into litigation havens while others do not? Venues might compete for litigation for various reasons, such as enhancing their judges’ prestige and increasing revenues for the local bar. This competition is framed by the party that chooses the venue. Whether plaintiffs or defendants primarily choose venue is crucial because, we argue, the two scenarios are not symmetrical.

The Supreme Court’s recent decision in TC Heartland v. Kraft Foods illustrates this dynamic. There, the Court effectively shifted venue choice in many patent infringement cases from plaintiffs to corporate defendants. We use TC Heartland to empirically measure …

The Cost Of Appraisal Rights: How To Restore Certainty In Delaware Mergers, Matthew E. Miehl

Georgia Law Review

Delaware's legislature created appraisal rights to
ensure that minority shareholders received fair
compensation for shares that were involuntarily sold in
a merger. Modern securities practices blur the line
between a share's equity interest and its voting interest,
which enables appraisal arbitrage-individuals,
particularly hedge funds, petitioning for appraisal
rights over shares that another person has the voting
rights to. Instances of appraisalarbitragein Delaware
mergers are soaring and causing corporate buyers to be
uncertain about a merger's ultimate price. This Note
contends that Delaware's legislature can ameliorate
this problem by establishing a contemporaneous
ownership requirement and by initiating efforts to
centralize share …

The Power Few Of Corporate Compliance, Todd Haugh

Georgia Law Review

Corporate compliance in most companies is carried out under the assumption that unethical and illegal conduct occurs in a more or less predictable fashion. That is, although corporate leaders may not know precisely when, where, or how compliance failures will occur, they assume that unethical employee conduct will be sprinkled throughout the company in a roughly normal distribution, exposing the firm to compliance risk but in a controllable manner. This assumption underlies many of the common tools of compliance — standardized codes of conduct, firm-wide compliance trainings, and uniform audit and monitoring practices. Because regulators also operate under this assumption, …

Crowdfunding Signals, Darian M. Ibrahim

Georgia Law Review

Entrepreneurs can now “crowdfund,” or sell securities to unaccredited investors over the Internet, to raise capital. But will these companies be able to attract the follow-on investors (angels and venture capitalists) that are necessary for long-term success? Angels and VCs face extreme levels of information asymmetry when deciding whether to fund a company. Signals can reduce this asymmetry. Early commentary argues a company only crowdfunds as a last resort for fear of sending a negative signal about the company’s quality to follow-on investors. This Article argues the inverse. This Article argues a successful crowdfunding campaign can send a positive signal …

Hyperfunding: Regulating Financial Innovations, Seth C. Oranburg

Scholarly Articles

Innovations in corporate finance are driven by frustrations with present regulations and fueled by the internet and social media. Hyperfunding is one such example: Tesla paved the way for an electric vehicle revolution by preselling hundreds of thousands of its Model 3 EV direct to consumers. Unwary consumers may not have realized that they were underwriting Tesla's bold strategy to transform multiple product markets. Risks were not disclosed. Rewards proved illusory. Investors would have been entitled to disclosures and colorable claims of fraud when Tesla missed milestones and deadlines. But consumers can only get their $1000 deposit back, without interest, …

Reforming Regulation Of Multi-Level Marketing In Myanmar, Zeyar Nyunt Oo

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

The business of multi-level marketing is prohibited in Myanmar under the Notification no 46/2018. There are not only three paragraphs but also lack of the definition of MLM in this Notification. If distributors sell any product through MLM in Myanmar, they will be punished with imprisonment for a term exceeding three years under section 5 of the Myanmar Essential Goods and Services Law 2012. The study of the provisions on the business of MLM in selected ASEAN countries, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Singapore indicates that the definition of multi-level marketing and pyramid scheme is not the same. Moreover, businessman and …

Bespoke Discovery, Jessica M. Erickson

Law Faculty Publications

The U.S. legal system gives contracting parties significant freedom to customize the procedures that will govern their future disputes. With forum selection clauses, parties can decide where they will litigate future disputes. With fee-shifting provisions, they can choose who will pay for these suits. And with arbitration clauses, they can make upfront decisions to opt out of the traditional legal system altogether. Parties can also waive their right to appeal, their right to a jury trial, and their right to file a class action. Bespoke procedure, in other words, is commonplace in the United States.

Far less common, however, are …

Hyperfunding: Regulating Financial Innovations, Seth C. Oranburg

University of Colorado Law Review

Innovations in corporate finance are driven by frustrations with present regulations and fueled by the internet and social media. Hyperfunding is one such example: Tesla paved the way for an electric vehicle revolution by preselling hundreds of thousands of its Model 3 EV direct to consumers. Unwary consumers may not have realized that they were underwriting Tesla's bold strategy to transform multiple product markets. Risks were not disclosed. Rewards proved illusory. Investors would have been entitled to disclosures and colorable claims of fraud when Tesla missed milestones and deadlines. But consumers can only get their $1000 deposit back, without interest, …

Shareholder Divorce Court, Ann Lipton

Publications

No abstract provided.

(At Least) Thirteen Ways Of Looking At Election Lies, Helen Norton

Publications

Lies take many forms. Because lies vary so greatly in their motivations and consequences (among many other qualities), philosophers have long sought to catalog them to help make sense of their diversity and complexity. Legal scholars too have classified lies in various ways to explain why we punish some and protect others. This symposium essay offers yet another taxonomy of lies, focusing specifically on election lies — that is, lies told during or about elections. We can divide and describe election lies in a wide variety of ways: by speaker, by motive, by subject matter, by audience, by means of …

Corporations As Conduits: A Cautionary Note About Regulating Hypotheticals, Douglas M. Spencer

Publications

No abstract provided.

Mandatory Quotas For Women On Boards Of Directors In The European Union: Harmful To Or Good For Company Performance?, Monika Leszczynska

Faculty Scholarship

Impact assessments are an important component of a better regulation programme—an initiative of the European Commission launched to improve the quality and transparency of the EU (European Union) law-making process. In the current article, I take a closer look at the Impact Assessment (IA) issued by the European Commission together with a Directive proposing a 40% obligatory female representation on the boards of directors in European public companies. In the IA, the Commission defined an improvement of corporate governance as one of the objectives to be achieved by the Directive. The Commission claimed that the more gender-diverse a corporate board …