Jurisprudence Commons^™

Voting Matters: Materiality Considerations And The Shareholder Vote, Renee M. Jones

Seattle University Law Review

For the shareholder franchise to have meaning, shareholders must have access to relevant information to inform their voting decisions. The securities laws’ disclosure requirements play an essential role in informing the shareholder vote.

This Essay focuses on the question of the materiality of information in the context of shareholder voting. It addresses the question of whether ESG-related information is material, positioning the materiality inquiry within the context of shareholders’ voting decisions. It explores the definition of materiality with a focus on the “reasonable investor” concept embedded within the definition. The Essay argues that the implicit expectations of many commentators that …

Through A Glass Darkly: How Securities Disclosures Give A Distorted View Of The Economy, Gerald F. Davis

Seattle University Law Review

Our understanding of the American economy often relies on stylized facts derived from mandatory disclosures by listed corporations. Data vendors like Standard & Poor’s vacuum up 10Ks and proxy statements into databases, and scholars distill these into tentative maps. This may have been adequate for a postwar economy centered on asset-heavy manufacturers, but it is increasingly out of step with an information-based economy. Companies listed on the stock market are fewer in number and less representative than they were, light in tangible assets and people, and heavy on IP. Basic facts such as what industry they are in are increasingly …

Shareholder Expression In A Time Of Heightened Political Tension, Aaron A. Dhir

Seattle University Law Review

In this article, I provide context for my forthcoming research project on shareholder proposals and racial equity audits. Since the murder of George Floyd in May of 2020, progressive shareholder actors have increasingly used the proposal mechanism to advance diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice-related goals. These proposals have frequently gone beyond requesting the usual corporate fare of diversity trainings, intersectionality workshops, affinity groups, etc. Instead, a more ambitious type of proposal asks corporate America to conduct racial equity audits, defined as “an independent, objective and holistic analysis of a company’s policies, practices, products, services and efforts to combat systemic racism …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

Corporate Governance Speech, Sarah C. Haan

Seattle University Law Review

The State has always regulated the intra-firm communications that make corporate governance possible, most commonly by mandating disclosures of information by a corporation to its shareholders. Some such laws are labeled “securities regulation,” but securities regulation is a broad category that extends to speech by actors who are outside the corporate enterprise as well. Also, the conventional securities regulation category does not capture all such laws; other examples, including informationforcing mandates, can be found in state corporate law. This Article uses the term “corporate governance speech” to describe the communications among shareholders, directors, and officers through which corporate governance is …

Green Dividends: A Case Study In Green Dividends And The Conditions For Private Ordering Solutions, Anne M. Tucker

Seattle University Law Review

This Essay introduces a novel private ordering solution to facilitate corporate investments in pro-social and environmental initiatives: Green dividends. Green dividends are an optional increase in shareholder dividends that are returned to the company to be reinvested in environmental initiatives or kept by a shareholder.

Green dividends pose an alternative to the current gridlocked debate that corporations can’t, won’t, shouldn’t, and shouldn’t even try to act in pro-social or environmental ways. Turning the common refrains on their head converts each narrative into an element for a successful private ordering solution: authority, accountability, shareholder buy-in, and government- backed enforcement. With Green …

Does Climate Disclosure Work To Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions? Emerging Evidence Suggests Cautious Optimism, Cynthia A. Williams

Seattle University Law Review

Significant regulatory resources have been spent developing global, voluntary climate and sustainability disclosure standards, such as the TCFD, TNRD, and ISSB’s Sustainability and Climate Disclosure standards, or domestically required disclosures, such as in the EU and in the U.S. Thus, it is important to evaluate whether this disclosure, particularly voluntary, qualitative disclosure, will have the power to shift the allocation of capital, will have a significant effect on the management of climate risk within firms, and ultimately will reduce climate change risk and biodiversity loss.

In this Article, several interrelated questions will be discussed. First, what does the empirical evidence …

Volume 48 Masthead, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Volume 48 Masthead

Volume 48 Masthead, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Volume 48 Masthead

Corporate Scenarios: Drawing Lessons From History, Madison Condon

Seattle University Law Review

As corporations are increasingly pressed to reveal information about their exposure to climate-related risks, they are often asked to undertake and disclose the outcome of “scenario analysis.” In this exercise, corporations, including financial institutions, examine how their business would fare under different pathways the future may take. One oft-used scenario, for example, is the International Energy Agency’s “Net-Zero by 2050: A Roadmap for the Energy Sector.” This Essay presents a history of the use of scenarios as a corporate planning tool, particularly in the oil industry, arguing that it is key for understanding our present moment and the role of …

Dark Accounting Matter, Colleen Honigsberg

Seattle University Law Review

Physicists calculate that approximately 85% of the matter in the universe is composed of “dark matter” that “does not absorb, reflect, or emit electromagnetic radiation and is therefore difficult to detect.” The S&P 500 currently trades at a price-to-book value of 4.2, suggesting that book value accounts for less than 20% of the S&P 500’s market value. The remaining 80% appears nowhere in these firms’ balance sheets—it is invisible to contemporary accounting techniques and constitutes “dark accounting matter.”

Some “dark accounting matter” is composed of factors commonly described as components of “ESG.” Human capital, for example, is an intangible asset …

Unmasking The Rhetoric Of Reform – The Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam 2023 In Context, Pranav Verma

National Law School of India Review

This legislative comment is a critical analysis of the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam 2023 (‘BSA’), which has replaced the Indian Evidence Act, 1872 (‘IEA’). It analyses the major changes brought in by the BSA and discusses their implications. It further highlights the existing interpretive disputes within the IEA that the BSA leaves unaddressed. The BSA makes only a few substantive changes in improvement to the IEA, such as streamlining the rules on electronic evidence and expanding the scope of secondary evidence. Apart from this, most changes pertain to the renumbering of existing provisions and the deletion of obsolete colonial references. These …

Volume 48 Masthead, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Volume 48 Masthead

The Employees’ Dilemma: Balancing Internal Reporting, Whistleblowing, And Insider Trading Risks, Geeyoung Min

Seattle University Law Review

The Essay examines how recent developments in insider trading regulations and whistleblower reward programs can lead to unintended and counterproductive results of discouraging employees from using internal reporting channels within corporate compliance programs. While the presence of a robust and well-functioning corporate compliance program is a critical factor both in mitigating the level of public enforcement actions against companies and in protecting corporate managers from liability in private litigation, these programs often provide little incentive for employees to report potential misconduct internally.

Corporate compliance programs are designed to promote the upward information flow within the company, which is essential for …

Understanding The Big Three’S Wavering Support Of Environmental And Social Shareholder Proposals, Jeff Schwartz, Jefferson Jensen

Seattle University Law Review

Because of their substantial equity portfolios, BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street (the Big 3) are central players in corporate governance. It is, therefore, critical to understand how they vote. One puzzle is that their support for shareholder proposals on environmental and social matters appears to waiver. In 2020, for instance, BlackRock supported 11.1% of environmental proposals at S&P 500 firms. In 2021, it seemingly reversed course, supporting 55.2%. It then flipped again, supporting 32.1% in 2022. Such statistics suggest that the Big 3 are constantly changing their views on these topics. This Article seeks to better understand whether this is …

How The Antidiscrimination Law Of Commercial Transactions Really Works, Helen Norton

Seattle University Law Review

A variety of businesses now cite 303 Creative when seeking First Amendment protection for their refusal to serve certain customers based on those customers’ protected class status. How this litigation will play out remains to be seen. But future courts need not, and should not, repeat the 303 Creative Court’s misunderstanding of how the antidiscrimination law of commercial transactions actually works.

Part I of this Essay explains the Court’s longstanding understanding of the antidiscrimination law of commercial transactions, and then describes the Court’s failure to engage with this precedent in 303 Creative. Part II then identifies the 303 Creative decision’s …

The Great Unsettling: Administrative Governance After Loper Bright, Cary Coglianese, Daniel E. Walters

Faculty Scholarship

“Chevron is overruled.” These three words surely captured more attention than any others in the U.S. Supreme Court’s thirty-five-page opinion in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. For forty years, the Chevron doctrine had been virtually synonymous with administrative law. Now that the Court has taken a step that many scholars thought unfathomable even just a few years ago, speculation abounds about the possible downstream impacts of Loper Bright on both what agencies will be able to do in the future and how lower courts will respond when reviewing agency action. The vast majority of early expert commentaries suggest …

Doubting Thomas And Questioning Stare Decisis Under The Roberts Court, Wilfred U. Codrington Iii

Articles

The article critically examines the erosion of stare decisis under the Roberts Court, highlighting concerns about the Supreme Court's increasing willingness to overturn established precedents. While acknowledging the importance of stare decisis in maintaining stability and equality, the author argues that its practical value is being undermined by ideological polarization and a departure from traditional legal reasoning. The article questions the Court's recent approach to precedent, particularly in cases like Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization and Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, and critiques the conservative majority's aggressive use of judicial power.

Ghost Guns: A Case Study On The Tension Between Public Exigencies And Statutory Construction, Bradley Krause

Catholic University Law Review

Administrative agencies often navigate public policy issues while simultaneously handling complex and highly technical matters. When facing a public emergency, how should courts interpret these agencies’ authorizing statutes? What rules of thumb exist to guide the courts? This Comment answers these questions through a case study on ongoing litigation pertaining to a recent ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms) regulation. The regulation, targeted towards ghost guns (also known as “privately manufactured firearms”), seeks to incorporate these weapons within pre-existing definitions in the ATF’s authorizing statute, the Gun Control Act of 1968 (GCA). In spite of challenges to the regulation, …

The Enduring Relevance Of Congress Despite The Court's Shift To “Ordinary Reader” Statutory Interpretation, Abbe R. Gluck, Laila M. Robbins

Journal of Law and Policy

Has Congress become irrelevant to statutory interpretation? The dominant theoretical and doctrinal paradigm in American statutory interpretation has always been the conversation between Congress and the courts. Today, however, the Court’s new, second-generation textualists claim they have left Congress behind. They argue they have changed textualism’s perspective, from an “insider” perspective focused on Congress’s textual choices, to an “outsider” perspective based on how “ordinary people” read statutes. The Court’s self-professed shift away from a legiscentric approach, if true, would be a seismic shift in the conception of the judicial role. Whereas judges and scholars—including first-generation textualists—had for a century focused …

The Broad Church Of Modern Textualism, Nicole Steitz, Brian G. Slocum, Kevin Tobia

Journal of Law and Policy

Nearly thirty years ago, Justice Scalia’s Tanner lectures branded Holy Trinity Church v. United States (1892) as the anti-textualist archetype, a decision trumping the text’s plain meaning with a suspect judicial investigation of the law’s purpose or spirit. And so Holy Trinity seemed, until Gales and Solan’s groundbreaking empirical study supported an alternative reading of the key statutory term (“labor or service”) that would avoid this conflict between text and purpose. Taking inspiration from Gales and Solan, we reconsider Holy Trinity using the precepts of modern textualism, with its increased emphasis on context, pragmatics, anti-literalism, legal meaning, holistic meaning, non-compositionality, …

The Pet Fish Canon, William N. Eskridge Jr.

Journal of Law and Policy

Inspired by the work of the late Professor Larry Solan, this article proposes that judges recognize as one of the textualist canons of statutory construction a “pet fish” canon. Such a canon would posit that when an ordinary reader would understand two or more words to yield a meaning that is different than the sum of the two words defined separately, the statutory interpreter should not disaggregate them. The Roberts Court has already followed such a linguistic precept in some statutory cases, and this article proposes that the Court recognize this as a canon considered at least as seriously as …

Grammar & Syntax Arguments On The Roberts Court, Anita S. Krishnakumar

Journal of Law and Policy

In his excellent book, The Language of Judges, Professor Solan demonstrates how judges use grammatical or linguistic arguments to avoid acknowledging statutory ambiguity—and how they often get the grammar or linguistics wrong. Since his book was published, textualism has become the dominant interpretive approach on the U.S. Supreme Court—and we have seen increasingly prominent battles involving grammatical devices and rules. This comment takes Professor Solan’s analysis as a jumping off point to evaluate how grammar and linguistic arguments are employed on the modern Supreme Court, in the age of textualism. The comment offers a brief empirical and doctrinal assessment of …

Separation Of Powers Restrictions On Judicial Rulemaking: A Case Study Of Federal Rule 4, Ralph U. Whitten

Maine Law Review

Debates over the validity of Federal Rules of Civil Procedure have historically centered on the "substantive rights" restriction of the Rules Enabling Act of 1934. While Supreme Court decisions from Sibbach v. Wilson & Co. through Hanna v. Plumer and beyond have arguably deprived the restriction of any practical force, scholars have consistently favored a more rigorous interpretation of the directive that federal rules not "abridge, enlarge, or modify any substantive rights." Despite the historic impotence of the substantive rights restriction, discussions of the validity of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure continue, even today, to center on the substantive …

Major Questions, Common Sense?, Kevin Tobia, Daniel E. Walters, Brian Slocum

Faculty Scholarship

The Major Questions Doctrine (“MQD”) is the newest textualist interpretive canon, and it has driven consequential Supreme Court decisions concerning vaccine mandates, environmental regulation, and student loan relief. But the new MQD is a canon in search of legitimization. Critics allege that the MQD displaces the Court’s conventional textual analysis with judicial policymaking. Textualists have now responded that the MQD is a linguistic canon, consistent with textualism. Justice Barrett recently argued in Biden v. Nebraska that the MQD is grounded in ordinary people’s understanding of language and law, and scholarship contends that the MQD reflects ordinary people’s understanding of textual …

University Of The District Of Columbia Law Review, University Of The District Of Columbia Law Review

University of the District of Columbia Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Incoherence Of Evidence Law, G. Alexander Nunn

Faculty Scholarship

What is the purpose of evidence law? The answer might seem intuitive. Evidence law exists, of course, to foster verdict accuracy, legitimacy, and efficiency. But these kindred aims often come into conflict. Policy tradeoffs are inescapable in evidence law, meaning that an evidentiary regime must clarify how its normative objectives cohere. Do accuracy, legitimacy, and efficiency work together on equal footing, such that the goal of a code is to maximize each objective to the extent possible? Or does one of evidence law’s aims take precedence over the rest? And if one goal takes priority, what is the role of …

Interpretive Divergence In The New York Court Of Appeals, Ethan J. Leib

Journal of Legislation

This Article focuses attention on the New York Court of Appeals, which is decidedly formalist about contract interpretation but decidedly contextualist about statutory interpretation. It explores some recent exemplary cases to show where the New York Court of Appeals tends to land in what turns out to be, for this court at least, two different battlefields in the law of interpretation. Finding that there is “interpretive divergence” between statutory and contract cases, the Article then reflects on the practice of divergence more generally, revisiting assumptions about why anyone might have thought harmonization was sensible in the first place.

How Close Is Close Enough: A Step-By-Step Analysis To Resolve The Circuit Split Created By Misunderstanding The Spokeo Ruling, Cason Shipp

St. Mary's Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Rethinking Legislative Facts, Haley N. Proctor

Notre Dame Law Review

As the factual nature of legal inquiry has become increasingly apparent over the past century, courts and commentators have fallen into the habit of labeling the facts behind the law “legislative facts.” Loosely, legislative facts are general facts courts rely upon to formulate law or policy, but that definition is as contested as it is vague. Most agree that legislative facts exist in some form or another, but few agree on what that form is, on who should find them, and how. This Article seeks to account for and resolve that confusion. Theories of legislative fact focus on the role …