Business Organizations Law Commons^™

The Failure Of Market Efficiency, William Magnuson

Faculty Scholarship

Recent years have witnessed the near total triumph of market efficiency as a regulatory goal. Policymakers regularly proclaim their devotion to ensuring efficient capital markets. Courts use market efficiency as a guiding light for crafting legal doctrine. And scholars have explored in great depth the mechanisms of market efficiency and the role of law in promoting it. There is strong evidence that, at least on some metrics, our capital markets are indeed more efficient than they have ever been. But the pursuit of efficiency has come at a cost. By focusing our attention narrowly on economic efficiency concerns—such as competition, …

How Much Do Investors Care About Social Responsibility?, Scott Hirst, Kobi Kastiel, Tamar Kricheli-Katz

Faculty Scholarship

Perhaps the most important corporate law debate over the last several years concerns whether directors and executives should manage the corporation to maximize value for investors or also take into account the interests of other stakeholders and society. But, do investors themselves wish to maximize returns, or are they willing to forgo returns for social purposes? And more broadly, do market participants, such as investors and consumers, differ from donors in the ways in which they prioritize monetary gains and the promotion of social goals?

This project attempts to answer these questions with evidence from an experiment conducted with 279 …

Corporate Innovation: One Path To More Sustainable Big Business, David Nows

University of Cincinnati Law Review

No abstract provided.

Big Three Power, And Why It Matters, Lucian Bebchuk, Scott Hirst

Faculty Scholarship

This Article focuses on the power and corporate governance significance of the three largest index fund managers commonly referred to collectively as the “Big Three.” We present current evidence on the substantial voting power of the Big Three and explain why it is likely to persist and, indeed, further grow. We show that, due to their voting power, the Big Three have considerable influence on corporate outcomes through both what they do and what they fail to do. We also discuss the Big Three’s undesirable incentives both to underinvest in stewardship and to be excessively deferential to corporate managers.

In …

Corporate Governance Reform And The Sustainability Imperative, Christopher Bruner

Scholarly Works

Recent years have witnessed a significant upsurge of interest in alternatives to shareholder-centric corporate governance, driven by a growing sustainability imperative—widespread recognition that business as usual, despite the short-term returns generated, could undermine social and economic stability and even threaten our long-term survival if we fail to grapple with associated costs. We remain poorly positioned to assess corporate governance reform options, however, because prevailing theoretical lenses effectively cabin the terms of the debate in ways that obscure many of the most consequential possibilities. According to prevailing frameworks, our options essentially amount to board-versus-shareholder power, and shareholder-versus stakeholder purpose. This narrow …

Why Corporate Purpose Will Always Matter, Lyman P.Q. Johnson

Scholarly Articles

Business persons and lawyers (and law professors) perennially struggle over the question whether a business corporation does or should have a purpose other than advancing the interests of shareholders. After briefly setting the stage by describing the dispute over what the positive law of corporate purpose really is and the normative argument over what corporate purpose should be, this short article takes a different turn. It addresses why, in a dynamic, democratic, pluralist society, the foundational issue of corporate purpose remains so important and will not (and should not) go away. However adamantly divergent descriptive and prescriptive positions are held, …

Anonymous Companies, William J. Moon

Faculty Scholarship

Hardly a day goes by without hearing about nefarious activities facilitated by anonymous “shell” companies. Often described as menaces to the financial system, the creation of business entities with no real operations in sun-drenched offshore jurisdictions offering “zero percent” tax rates remains in vogue among business titans, pop stars, multimillionaires, and royals. The trending headlines and academic accounts, however, have paid insufficient attention to the legal uses of anonymous companies that are both ubiquitous and almost infinite in their variations.

This Article identifies privacy as a functional feature of modern business entities by documenting the hidden virtues of anonymous companies—business …

Sustainability Verification, Paul Rose

American University Law Review

From the earliest stages of the sustainable finance market and of green, social, and sustainable debt as an asset class, sustainability verifiers have been essential to the market’s function. Sustainability verifiers—professional service providers who provide an external review of an issuer’s alignment with established green bond frameworks—play a crucial role in reducing information asymmetries between sustainable finance instrument issuers and investors and serve as reputational intermediaries that assure buyers of the seller’s green, social, and sustainability-centered commitments. Yet, despite their essential function in facilitating the investment of trillions of dollars in green, social, and sustainable finance investments, the role and …

Toward A Fair And Sustainable Corporate Governance System: Reflections On Leo Strine, Jr.'S Writing On Institutional Investors, Dorothy S. Lund

Faculty Scholarship

It is a privilege to contribute to this Festschrift for my friend, mentor, and co-author, Leo Strine, Jr. It is also a pleasure to revisit his vast body of work and to re-experience the breadth and depth of his scholarship, as well as reflect on his unparalleled influence on the development of corporate law that he brought about while presiding over its most influential courts for twenty-one years.

In thinking about this essay, I recalled a conversation that I had with “CJS” when I was serving as his law clerk. In this conversation, he decried (with James Taylor blasting in …

The New Public/Private Equilibrium And The Regulation Of Public Companies, Elisabeth De Fontenay, Gabriel Rauterberg

Faculty Scholarship

This Symposium Article examines how the public/private divide works today and maps out some of the potential implications for major issues in securities law. Classic debates in securities law were often predicated on the idea that public companies are a coherent class of firms that differ markedly from private companies. For more than fifty years after the adoption of the federal securities laws, this view was justified. During that period, the vast majority of successful and growing private firms eventually accepted the regulatory obligations of being public in order to access a wider and deeper pool of capital, among other …

Delaware Law For Non-Corporate Entities: A Commentary, Peter Molk

UF Law Faculty Publications

Robert Rhee’s Article, The Irrelevance of Delaware Corporate Law, poses provocative questions about why Delaware dominates the market for corporate law given the apparent irrelevance of state incorporation choice for companies’ market valuations. He shows, first, that publicly traded companies incorporated in Delaware have similar valuations to companies incorporated in other states over time, and second, that market actors do not exhibit a preference to reincorporate existing firms in Delaware.

Rhee analyzes exclusively the realm of publicly traded corporations, which is understandable given that his analysis is necessarily limited to publicly available data. Publicly traded corporations are undeniably economically …

Virtual Annual Meetings: A Path Toward Shareholder Democracy And Stakeholder Engagement, Yaron Nili, Megan Wischmeier Shaner

Faculty Scholarship

From demanding greater executive accountability to lobbying for social and environmental policies, shareholders influence how managers run modern companies. In corporate doctrine, the principal venue reserved for shareholders to influence and engage with management and each other is the annual share-holders meeting. Historically, the annual meeting was a vibrant forum for share-holder democracy and occasionally even a platform for debating pressing social issues. For decades, however, the role of the annual meeting in corporate governance has been in decline, resulting in today’s largely pro forma annual meetings. This Article explores how technological integration can resurrect the annual meeting as the …

Twitter V. Musk: The "Trial Of The Century" That Wasn't, Ann M. Lipton, Eric L. Talley

Faculty Scholarship

The months-long saga over Elon Musk's on-again, off-again acquisition of Twitter provided considerable entertainment for lawyers and laypeople alike. But for those of us who teach business law, it also provided a unique (and in certain ways, vexing) opportunity to show real-time examples of the legal principles that are the grist for courses in contracts, corporations, corporate finance, and mergers and acquisitions.

Both of us found ourselves incorporating the saga into our classroom discussions, which in turn informed our own thinking about how the dynamic played out. Although we were both relatively active on social media (indeed on Twitter itself) …

In Search Of Good Corporate Governance, Dorothy S. Lund

Faculty Scholarship

In this Forum Response, Dorothy Lund considers whether the “corporate governance gap” between large and small public companies is the product of harmful or beneficial forces, and in so doing, rejects the idea that there is a single governance framework that is optimal for all public companies.

Artificially Intelligent Boards And The Future Of Delaware Corporate Law, Christopher Bruner

Scholarly Works

The prospects for Artificial Intelligence (AI) to impact the development of Delaware corporate law are at once over- and under-stated. As a general matter, claims to the effect that AI systems might ultimately displace human directors not only exaggerate the foreseeable technological potential of these systems, but also tend to ignore doctrinal and institutional impediments intrinsic to Delaware's competitive model – notably, heavy reliance on nuanced and context-specific applications of the fiduciary duty of loyalty by a true court of equity. At the same time, however, there are specific applications of AI systems that might not merely be accommodated by …

Hidden Agendas In Shareholder Voting, Scott Hirst, Adriana Z. Robertson

Faculty Scholarship

Nothing in either corporate or securities law requires companies to notify investors what they will be voting on before the record date for a shareholder meeting. We show that, overwhelmingly, they do not. The result is “hidden agendas”: for 88% of shareholder votes, investors cannot find out what they will be voting on before the record date. This poses an especially serious problem for investors who engage in securities lending: they must decide whether the expected benefit of voting exceeds the expected benefit of continuing to lend their shares (or making them available for lending) without knowing what they will …

Delaware's Dominance, Wyoming's Dare: New Challenge, Same Outcome?, Pierluigi Matera

Faculty Scholarship

Despite increasing criticism, Delaware's dominance in corporate law has not experienced a significant decline: as of today, 67.8 percent of Fortune 500 companies are still incorporated in its jurisdiction. Nevada is known as Delaware's most important competitor, with an aggressive strategy that has overridden the efforts of any other jurisdiction. Yet, its success has been limited to a specific market segment: small firms with low institutional shareholding and high insider ownership.

Scholars suggest several explanations for both the rise and the staying power of Delaware. These explanations are essentially subsumed under the credible commitment theory and the network theory. According …

Artificially Intelligent Boards And The Future Of Delaware Corporate Law, Christopher Bruner

Scholarly Works

This article argues that the prospects for Artificial Intelligence (AI) to impact corporate law are at once over- and under-stated, focusing on the law of Delaware – the predominant jurisdiction of incorporation for US public companies. Claims that AI systems might displace human directors not only exaggerate AI’s foreseeable technological potential, but ignore doctrinal and institutional impediments intrinsic to Delaware’s competitive model – notably, heavy reliance on nuanced applications of the fiduciary duty of loyalty by a true court of equity. At the same time, however, there are discrete AI applications that might not merely be accommodated by Delaware corporate …

Shadow Contracts, Jessica S. Jeffers, Anne M. Tucker

Scholarly Works

This project explores side letters in private market funds. Side letters, separate agreements between a fund and an investor, act as an invisible amendment to the main contract. This article introduces a new use case for side letters: impact invest- ments, where funds target social, as well as financial returns. Using a hand-col- lected data set, we examine the scope and role of side letters in this growing space. Side letters as "shadow contracts" demonstrate the Easterbrook/Fischel theories in action, namely that parties "write their own tickets," tailoring agreement terms to their specific needs within the framework of corporate governance …

In Re The Walt Disney Co. Derivative Litigation Rewritten, Hillary A. Sale

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In re The Walt Disney Co. Derivative Litigation is notable for upholding the broad latitude courts afford to boards through the business judgment rule. The case addressed a $130 million termination package delivered to former Disney CEO, Michael Ovitz, after fourteen months of underperformance at the company. This rewritten opinion, to be published in “Feminist Judgements: Rewritten Corporate Law,” (Kelli Alces Williams, Anne Choike, & Usha R. Rodrigues, eds.) (Cambridge Univ. Press, forthcoming 2022), follows the style of the Delaware Supreme Court and reaches the same outcome with a different approach. The opinion expounds on the corporate governance practices in …

Taking Corwin Seriously, Itai Fiegenbaum

Lewis & Clark Law Review

Corporate law’s most important development is founded on a misunderstanding of the channels and consequences of shareholder empowerment. The Article’s title references the seminal Delaware Supreme Court decision that ruled that a positive shareholder vote effectively insulates a friendly sale from judicial oversight. Central to Corwin’s reasoning is the notion that the shareholder vote provides an effective restraint against insider overreaching. Yet every deal that includes a premium over the market price is assured of shareholder approval. The doctrinal lynchpin’s real-life insignificance exposes a baffling inconsistency in contemporary takeover jurisprudence.

This Articles makes two novel contributions to the bourgeoning scholarship …

Monitoring Facebook, Hillary A. Sale

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Few companies still in business have a track record as negative as Facebook. Facebook has paid billions of dollars in government fines and paid hundreds of millions in private settlements. Yet, the financial penalties are actually minimal relative to the harm done. Facebook seems to have been involved one way or another in privacy breaches, organized crime, election manipulation, suicide, and even genocide. Mark Zuckerberg, who still controls Facebook, appears to ignore the consequences of his choices, seemingly prioritizing profits over people. He appears to disregard the law and operate without integrity or honesty, excommunicating insiders who speak out or …

Moby-Dick As Corporate Catastrophe: Law, Ethics, And Redemption, David Yosifon

University of Cincinnati Law Review

Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick serves here as a vehicle through which to interrogate core features of American corporate law and excavate some of the deeper lessons about the human soul that lurk behind the pasteboard mask of the law’s black letter. The inquiry yields an illuminating vantage on the ethical consequences of corporate capital structure, the law of corporate purpose, the meaning of voluntarism, the ethical stakes of corporate fiduciary obligations, and the role of lawyers in preventing or facilitating corporate catastrophe. No prior familiarity with the novel or corporate law is required.

Shareholder Wealth Maximization: A Schelling Point, Martin Edwards

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

Imagine a reality television game show where two contestants begin the game in two different places in New York City. The object of the game is for the two contestants to find each other, but they do not know anything about each other and they have no way of communicating. If they succeed, both contestants win a prize. If they fail, they get nothing. With no ability to explicitly bargain over the meeting, the parties have to make an educated guess about what the other person is most likely to do. Most people, confronted with this sort of tacit …

Climate Change As Systemic Risk, Barnali Choudhury

Articles & Book Chapters

Hindsight tells us that COVID-19, thought by former President Trump and others to have come out of nowhere, is more aptly labelled a “gray rhino” event, one that was highly probable and preventable. Indeed, despite considerable evidence of the impending threats of pandemics, for the most part, governments failed to prepare for the pandemic, resulting in wide-scale social and economic losses.

The lessons from COVID-19, however, should remind us of the perils of ignoring gray rhino risks. Nowhere is this more apparent than with climate change, a highly probable, high impact threat that has largely been ignored to date. Despite …

Federal Rules Of Platform Procedure, Rory Van Loo

Faculty Scholarship

Tech platforms serve as private courthouses for disputes about speech, lodging, commerce, elections, and reputation. After receiving allegations of defamatory content in top search results, Google must decide between protecting one person's public image and another's profits or speech. Amazon adjudicates disputes between consumers and third-party merchants about defective or counterfeit items. For many small businesses, layoffs and bankruptcy hang in the balance. This Article begins to uncover the processes that these platforms use to resolve disputes and proposes reforms. Other important businesses that intermediate, such as credit card companies ruling on a disputed charge between a merchant and consumer, …

Deal Protection Devices, Albert H. Choi

Articles

In mergers and acquisitions transactions, a buyer and a seller will often agree to contractual mechanisms (deal protection devices) to deter third parties from jumping the deal and to compensate a disappointed buyer. With the help of auction theory, this Article analyzes various deal protection devices, while focusing on the two most commonly used mechanisms: match rights and target termination fees. A match right gives the buyer a right to “match” a third party’s offer so as to prevent the third party from snatching the target away, while a termination fee compensates the buyer when a third party acquires the …

Delaware's Global Competitiveness, William J. Moon

Faculty Scholarship

For about a hundred years, Delaware has been the leading jurisdiction for corporate law in the United States. The state, which deliberately embarked on a mission to build a haven for corporate law in the early twentieth century, now supplies corporate charters to over two thirds of Fortune 500 companies and a growing share of closely held companies. But Delaware’s domestic dominance masks the important and yet underexamined issue of whether Delaware maintains its competitive edge globally.

This Article examines Delaware’s global competitiveness, documenting Delaware’s surprising weakness competing in the emerging international market for corporate charters. It does so principally …

The Corporate Contract And The Internal Affairs Doctrine, Mohsen Manesh

American University Law Review

In the landmark case Salzberg v. Sciabacucchi, the Delaware Supreme Court upheld the validity of a corporate charter provision restricting the rights of shareholders to bring federal securities law claims. Although rights arising under federal securities law lie beyond the internal affairs doctrine, which has traditionally defined the boundaries of state corporate law, the Salzberg court ruled that such rights may be regulated by the “corporate contract,” created by state corporate law and comprised of a corporation’s charter and bylaws. Embracing contractarian precepts, the Salzberg court rejected the lower Chancery Court’s concession theory of the corporate contract as inextricably bound …

Corporate Crime And Punishment: An Empirical Study, Dorothy S. Lund, Natasha Sarin

Faculty Scholarship

For many years, law and economics scholars, as well as politicians and regulators, have debated whether corporate punishment chills beneficial corporate activity or, in the alternative, lets corporate criminals off too easily. A crucial and yet understudied aspect of this debate is empirical evidence. Unlike most other types of crime, the government does not measure corporate crime rates; therefore, the government and researchers alike cannot easily determine whether disputed policies are effectively deterring future incidents of corporate misconduct. In this Article, we take important first steps in addressing these questions. Specifically, we use three novel sources as proxies for corporate …