Securities Law Commons^™

Segmented Settlements Are Not The Answer: A Response To Professor Squire’S Article, How Collective Settlements Camouflage The Costs Of Shareholder Lawsuits, Christopher C. French

Faculty Scholarship

In his recent article, Professor Richard Squire offers a provocative theory in which he claims the underlying claimants in shareholder litigation against corporate policyholders are overcompensated due to what he describes as “cramdown” settlements, under which insurers are forced to settle due to the “duty to contribute” that arises under multi-layered directors and officers (“D&O”) insurance programs. He also offers a novel idea regarding how this problem could be fixed by what he refers to as “segmented” settlements in which each insurer and the policyholder would be allowed to settle separately and consider only its own interests in doing so. …

Issuing New Shares And Preemptive Rights: A Comparative Analysis, Marco Ventoruzzo

Faculty Scholarship

The question of whether the corporate law of Europe and America are converging is still largely unanswered. One fundamental area in which the two systems diverge concerns how they regulate the issuing of new shares, in particular preemptive rights, a problem rarely addressed by comparative corporate law scholars. This essay fills that gap by examining the major comparative differences between the approaches followed on the two sides of the Atlantic, and offers some possible explanations for this divergence.

Ring-Fencing, Steven L. Schwarcz

Faculty Scholarship

“Ring-fencing” is often touted as a regulatory solution to problems in banking, finance, public utilities, and insurance. However, both the precise meaning of ring-fencing, as well as the nature of the problems that ring-fencing regulation purports to solve, are ill defined. This article examines the functions and conceptual foundations of ring-fencing. In a regulatory context, the term can best be understood as legally deconstructing a firm in order to more optimally reallocate and reduce risk. So utilized, ring-fencing can help to protect public-benefit activities performed by private-sector firms, as well as to mitigate systemic risk and the too-big-to-fail problem inherent …

Maritime Piracy: A Sustainable Global Solution, Paul Williams, Lowry Pressly

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Maritime piracy is a complex transnational security concern characterized by emerging international finance operations and organization, an oversupply of labor, and a low cost of market entry. This article provides a realistic picture of the driving forces behind maritime piracy in areas such as Southeast Asia, the Gulf of Aden, and the Gulf of Guinea. By examining some of the assumptions and proposed solutions in counter-piracy literature and policy, this article exposes some piracy illusions and proposes a sustainable, global response that addresses the persistent threat of modern maritime piracy. Today's manifold piracy challenges call for a multifaceted approach. Accordingly, …

On The Rise Of Shareholder Primacy, Signs Of Its Fall, And The Return Of Managerialism (In The Closet), Lynn A. Stout

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

A Private Ordering Solution To Blockholder Disclosure, Joshua Mitts

Faculty Scholarship

The recent debate over reforming the Securities Exchange Act section 13(d) ten-day filing window demonstrates the importance of balancing the costs and benefits of delayed blockholder disclosure. While hedge fund activism may create shareholder value, short-termism is a very real problem for firms today. Rather than a rigid mandatory rule, the duration of the blockholder disclosure window should be set through a shareholder amendment to the corporate bylaws that empowers shareholders to set an optimal maximum length for each firm. To internalize the economic and moral costs to society of permitting trading on asymmetric information, the SEC should impose a …

Revolution In Manipulation Law: The New Cftc Rules And The Urgent Need For Economic And Empirical Analyses, Rosa M. Abrantes-Metz, Gabriel Rauterberg, Andrew Verstein

Faculty Scholarship

Three major banks have now admitted that their employees manipulated worldwide interest rates through the London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor), the most widely used interest rate index. Libor is the interest rate term for trillions of dollars of swaps and loans, and its manipulation may have been used to extract billions of dollars. These allegations come just as commodities manipulation law has been dramatically reformed and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) given vast new regulatory powers. This Article provides the first extended, scholarly analysis of the CFTC’s new anti-manipulation rules. We consider the difficulty the rules address: Commodities manipulation …

Index Theory: The Law, Promise And Failure Of Financial Indices, Gabriel Rauterberg, Andrew Verstein

Faculty Scholarship

Financial indices, like the S&P 500 or the Consumer Price Index, have become a ubiquitous feature of our financial markets. One index, the London InterBank Offered Rate ("Libor"), may be the world's most important number, an interest rate benchmark upon which hundreds of trillions of dollars depend. Yet, almost every day new revelations emerge that Libor was tampered with during the height of the financial crisis by one or many of the world's most prominent banks, with billions of dollars potentially misappropriated. This index disruption has attracted tremendous interest from regulators, private litigants, and market observers. Despite their importance, however, …

Mapping The Future Of Insider Trading Law: Of Boundaries, Gaps, And Strategies, John C. Coffee Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

The current law on insider trading is remarkably unrationalized because it contains gaps and loopholes the size of the Washington Square Arch. For example, if a thief breaks into your office, opens your files, learns material nonpublic information, and trades on that information, he has not breached a fiduciary duty and is presumably exempt from insider trading liability. But drawing a line that can convict only the fiduciary and not the thief seems morally incoherent. Nor is it doctrinally necessary.

The basic methodology handed down by the Supreme Court in SEC v. Dirks and United States v. O'Hagan dictates (i) …

The Social Network And The Crowdfund Act: Zuckerberg, Saverin, And Venture Capitalists' Dilution Of The Crowd, John S. (Jack) Wroldsen

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

By virtue of Title III of the JOBS Act, signed into law on April 5, 2012, crowdfunding could become a powerful, even revolutionary, force to finance start-up companies. It democratizes entrepreneurs' access to seed capital and converts the masses of Internet users into potential retail venture capitalists. Many have cautioned, though, that crowdfunding poses serious investment risks of start-up companies failing, committing fraud, and being mismanaged. Accordingly, the JOBS Act includes numerous disclosure obligations designed to mitigate such downside risks.

But what has been overlooked, and what this Article analyzes from a venture capitalist perspective, is that even if a …

Employers United: An Empirical Analysis Of Corporate Political Speech In The Wake Of The Affordable Care Act, Elizabeth Weeks Leonard, Susan Scholz, Raquel Meyer Alexander

Scholarly Works

Is the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) bad for business? Did the countries' most prominent companies game the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) disclosure process to make negative political statements about ObamaCare? Immediately following the ACA's enactment on March 23, 2010, a number of companies drew scrutiny for issuing SEC filings writing off millions – and in AT&T's case, one billion dollars – against expected earnings for 2010 alone, based on a single, discrete tax-law change in the ACA. Congressional and Administration officials accused the firms of being "irresponsible" and using "big numbers to exaggerate the health reform's …

Is The Corporate Director's Duty Of Care A "Fiduciary' Duty? Does It Matter?, Christopher M. Bruner

Scholarly Works

While reference to "fiduciary duties" (plural) is routinely employed in the United States as a convenient short-hand for a corporate director's duties of care and loyalty, other common-law countries generally treat loyalty as the sole "fiduciary duty." This contrast prompts some important questions about the doctrinal structure for duty of care analysis adopted in Delaware, the principal jurisdiction of incorporation for U.S. public companies. Specifically, has the evolution of Delaware's convoluted and problematic framework for evaluating disinterested board conduct been facilitated by styling care a "fiduciary" duty? If so, then how should Delaware lawmakers and judges respond moving forward?

In …

Restructuring A Sovereign Debtor’S Contingent Liabilities, Mitu Gulati, Lee C. Buchheit

Faculty Scholarship

How should the contingent liabilities of a sovereign be treated in a general restructuring of the debts of that sovereign? This question has played only a minor role in past sovereign debt restructurings because the size of such contingent liabilities has in most cases been small. In recent years, however, slathering government guarantees on third party debt has become the tool of choice for many countries in their efforts to quell an incipient panic in their financial markets. Some of those sovereigns are now, or may soon be, in the position of needing to restructure their debts. Ignoring large contingent …

The Problem Of Holdout Creditors In Eurozone Sovereign Debt Restructuring, Mitu Gulati, Lee C. Buchheit, Ignacio Tirado

Faculty Scholarship

The Eurozone official sector has declared that the belated restructuring of Greek bonds held by private sector creditors in 2012 was a “unique and exceptional” event, never, ever to be repeated in any other Eurozone country. Maybe so. But if this assurance proves in time to be as fragile as the official sector’s prior pronouncements on the subject of “private sector involvement” in Eurozone sovereign debt problems, any future Eurozone debt restructuring will be surely plagued by the problem of non-participating creditors --- holdouts. Indeed, it is the undisguised fear of holdouts and the prospect of a messy, Argentine-style debt …

Strengthening Financial Reporting: An Essay On Expanding The Auditor’S Opinion Letter, James D. Cox

Faculty Scholarship

Users of financial statements, foremost of which are investors, have a voracious appetite for information that better enables them to assess the financial position and performance of the reporting firm. Even though financial statements purport to address their needs, because the statements, which are prepared by the firm’s managers, conceal a range of managerial estimates, assumptions, judgments, and choices, investors are deprived of the most fundamental kernel of information they seek, namely the overall quality of the financial reports themselves. In this Article, the author sets forth several modest steps that would enhance the overall quality of financial reporting by …

Lawyers In The Shadows: The Transactional Lawyer In A World Of Shadow Banking, Steven L. Schwarcz

Faculty Scholarship

This article examines how the role of transactional lawyers should change in the new world of shadow banking. Although transactional lawyers should consider the potential systemic consequences of their client's actions, their actions should be tempered by their primary duties to the client and by their responsibilities to the l,egal system more broadly.

Understanding Causation In Private Securities Lawsuits: Building On Amgen, James D. Cox

Faculty Scholarship

With Amgen, the Supreme Court’s majority once again holds that inquiry into the alleged market impact of a misrepresentation is not required to invoke fraud on the market approach to causation so that the class can be certified. Rather than just leaving matters where they have been since the Supreme Court’s muddled encounter with causation in Basic Inc. v. Levinson, the Supreme Court’s most recent decision appears to relax some earlier-held tenets with respect to markets believed sufficiently efficient for fraud on the market to be invoked. This Article not only identifies the central flaw of Basic that has over …

Revisiting Sovereign Bankruptcy, Lee C. Buchheit, Anna Gelpern, Mitu Gulati, Ugo Panizza, Beatrice Weder Di Mauro, Jeromin Zettelmeyer

Faculty Scholarship

Sovereign debt crises occur regularly and often violently. Yet there is no legally and politically recognized procedure for restructuring the debt of bankrupt sovereigns. Procedures of this type have been periodically debated, but so far been rejected, for two main reasons. First, countries have been reluctant to give up power to supranational rules or institutions, and creditors and debtors have felt that there were sufficient instruments for addressing debt crises at hoc. Second, fears that making debt easier to restructure would raise the costs and reduce the amounts of sovereign borrowing in many countries. This was perceived to be against …

Securitization, Structured Finance, And Covered Bonds, Steven L. Schwarcz

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Keep It Light, Chairman White: Sec Rulemaking Under The Crowdfund Act, Andrew A. Schwartz

Publications

Title III of the JOBS Act, known as the CROWDFUND Act, authorizes the “crowdfunding” of securities, defined as raising capital online from many investors, each of whom contributes only a small amount. The Act was signed into law in April 2012, and will go into effect once the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) promulgates rules and regulations to govern the new marketplace for crowdfunded securities. This Essay offers friendly advice to the SEC as to how to exercise its rulemaking authority in a manner that will enable the Act to achieve its goals of creating an ultralow-cost method for raising …

When The Government Attempts To Change The Board, Investors Should Know, William O. Fisher

Law Faculty Publications

In 2008 and 2009, the federal government effectively hired and fired directors at American International Group and Bank of America. At AIG, the government exercised its power through the ownership of voting stock, which meant that the company’s public securities filings revealed the government influence, though at times slowly and at times only by inference. At BofA, by contrast, the government imposed its will through an unpublished bank regulatory action, and no securities filing provided even a hint of the federal role. The fact that current law allows the government to secretly reconstitute the governing bodies of multi-billion-dollar, publicly traded …

Don’T ‘Screw Joe The Plummer’: The Sausage-Making Of Financial Reform, Kimberly D. Krawiec

Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines agency-level activity during the preproposal rulemaking phase—a time period about which little is known despite its importance to policy outcomes—through an analysis of federal agency activity in connection with section 619 of the Dodd–Frank Act, popularly known as the Volcker Rule. By capitalizing on transparency efforts specific to Dodd–Frank, I am able to access information on agency contacts whose disclosure is not required by the Administrative Procedure Act and, therefore, not typically available to researchers.

I analyze the roughly 8,000 public comment letters received by the Financial Stability Oversight Council in advance of its study regarding Volcker …

The Greek Debt Restructuring: An Autopsy, Jeromin Zettelmeyer, Christoph Trebesch, Mitu Gulati

Faculty Scholarship

The Greek debt restructuring of 2012 stands out in the history of sovereign defaults. It achieved very large debt relief—over 50 percent of 2012 GDP—with minimal financial disruption, using a combination of new legal techniques, exceptionally large cash incentives, and official sector pressure on key creditors. But it did so at a cost. The timing and design of the restructuring left money on the table from the perspective of Greece, created a large risk for European taxpayers, and set precedents—particularly in its very generous treatment of holdout creditors—that are likely to make future debt restructurings in Europe more difficult.