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Full-Text Articles in Contracts
Stealth Governance: Shareholder Agreements And Private Ordering, Jill E. Fisch
Stealth Governance: Shareholder Agreements And Private Ordering, Jill E. Fisch
All Faculty Scholarship
Corporate law has embraced private ordering -- tailoring a firm’s corporate governance to meet its individual needs. Firms are increasingly adopting firm-specific governance through dual-class voting structures, forum selection provisions and tailored limitations on the duty of loyalty. Courts have accepted these provisions as consistent with the contractual theory of the firm, and statutes, in many cases, explicitly endorse their use. Commentators too support private ordering for its capacity to facilitate innovation and enhance efficiency.
Private ordering typically occurs through firm-specific charter and bylaw provisions. VC-funded startups, however, frequently use an alternative tool – shareholder agreements. These agreements, which have …
Coin-Operated Capitalism, Shaanan Cohney, David A. Hoffman, Jeremy Sklaroff, David A. Wishnick
Coin-Operated Capitalism, Shaanan Cohney, David A. Hoffman, Jeremy Sklaroff, David A. Wishnick
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This Article presents the legal literature’s first detailed analysis of the inner workings of Initial Coin Offerings. We characterize the ICO as an example of financial innovation, placing it in kinship with venture capital contracting, asset securitization, and (obviously) the IPO. We also take the form seriously as an example of technological innovation, where promoters are beginning to effectuate their promises to investors through computer code, rather than traditional contract. To understand the dynamics of this shift, we first collect contracts, “white papers,” and other contract-like documents for the fifty top-grossing ICOs of 2017. We then analyze how such projects’ …
Independent Legal Significance, Good Faith, And The Interpretation Of Venture Capital Contracts, D. Gordon Smith
Independent Legal Significance, Good Faith, And The Interpretation Of Venture Capital Contracts, D. Gordon Smith
Faculty Scholarship
Venture capital contracts are inherently incomplete. When interpreting such contracts, courts could deal with the expectations of parties formally by inquiring only about the plain meaning of the contract or qualitatively by enforcing the presumed expectations of the parties, regardless of whether those expectations are expressed in the contract. The Delaware courts have opted for a formal approach. In doing so, they appear to be engaged in an effort to force contracting parties toward completeness. While the duty of good faith appears to respond to the inevitable incompleteness of contracts, the courts largely ignore this duty in preferred stock cases. …