Business Organizations Law Commons^™

Board Governance For The Twenty-First Century, Faith Stevelman, Sarah C. Haan

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

What Corporate Veil?, Joshua C. Macey

Michigan Law Review

Review of Adam Winkler's We the Corporations: How American Business Won Their Civil Rights.

Economic Democracy And Enterprise Form In Finance, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

This article considers the relative advantages of alternative enterprise forms in finance from the point of view of public accountability. The business corporation is compared to the state agency or authority, the cooperative, the state corporation, and the charitable nonprofit. These forms can be distinguished according to whether they aspire to enhance general electoral democracy or stakeholder democracy and whether their democratic controls operate directly or indirectly. The article suggests that the indirect democratic forms may be more promising than the direct ones. It also argues that the project of democratizing finance depends on the development of practices of multifactor …

Online Terms As In Terrorem Devices, Colin P. Marks

Faculty Works

Online shopping has quickly replaced the brick-and-mortar experience for a large portion of the consuming public. The online transaction itself is rote: browse items, add them to your cart, and check out. Somewhere along the way, the consumer is likely made aware of (or at least exposed to) the merchant's terms and conditions, via either a link or a pop-up box. Such terms and conditions have become so ubiquitous that most consumers would be hardpressed to find a merchant that doesn't try to impose them somewhere on their website. Though such terms and conditions are pervasive, most consumers do not …

From Governess To Governance: Advancing Gender Equity In Corporate Leadership, Kellye Y. Testy

Articles

Even as corporate influence on every aspect of life continues to grow, women (overall, and especially women of color) remain woefully underrepresented in corporate governance roles, particularly on boards of directors. This lack of gender diversity in the corporate boardroom is prevalent not only in more established companies but also persists—often at even higher levels— in new ventures as well. This Essay details the persistent lack of progress over more than a half century in diversifying leadership in corporate governance. This progress is especially concerning given that the benefits of diversity for sound decisionmaking and overall corporate welfare have been …

Employees As Regulators: The New Private Ordering In High Technology Companies, Jennifer S. Fan

Articles

There is mounting public concern over the influence that high technology companies have in our society. In the past, these companies were lauded for their innovations, but now as one scandal after another has plagued them, from being a conduit in influencing elections (think Cambridge Analytica) to the development of weaponized artificial intelligence, to their own moment of reckoning with the #MeToo movement, these same companies are under scrutiny. Leaders in high technology companies created their own sets of norms through private ordering. Their work was largely unfettered by regulators, with the exception of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s oversight …

Learning To Be More Than A Lawyer, Carol Morgan

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Asking The Right Question: The Statutory Right Of Appraisal And Efficient Markets, Jonathan Macey, Joshua Mitts

Faculty Scholarship

In this article, we make several contributions to the literature on appraisal rights and cases in which courts assign values to a company's shares in the litigation context. First, we applaud the recent trend in Delaware cases to consider the market prices of the stock of the company being valued if that stock trades in an efficient market, and we defend this market-oriented methodology against claims that recent discoveries in behavioral finance indicate that share prices are unreliable due to various cognitive biases. Next, we propose that the framework and methodology for utilizing market prices be clarified. We maintain that …

Dark Trading At The Midpoint: Does Sec Enforcement Policy Encourage Direct Feed Arbitrage?, Robert P. Bartlett Iii, Justin Mccrary

Faculty Scholarship

Prevailing research in market microstructure posits that liquidity providers bypass queue lines on exchanges by offering liquidity in dark venues with de minimis sub-penny price improvement, thus exploiting an exception to the penny quote rule. We show that (a) the SEC enforces the quote rule to prevent sub-penny queuejumping in dark pools unless trades are “pegged” to the NBBO midpoint and (b) the documented increase in dark trading due to investor queue-jumping stems from increased midpoint trading. Although encouraging pegged midpoint orders can subject traders to direct feed arbitrage, we estimate that less than 2% of shares traded per year …

Corporate Control And The Regulation Of Controlling Shareholders, Zohar Goshen, Assaf Hamdani

Faculty Scholarship

In this chapter, we outline the theory of idiosyncratic vision and explored its implications. Our theory can be summarized as follows: First, while investors value control because it offers them protection from agency costs, entrepreneurs value control because it allows them to pursue their idiosyncratic vision. Second, any contract between entrepreneurs and investors represents a balance between the entrepreneurs’ freedom to secure their idiosyncratic vision and the investors’ protection against agency costs. Third, the investors and entrepreneurs will allocate cash-flow and control rights through the bargaining process to achieve this balance.

In addition, this chapter demonstrates that ownership structures are …

Nonvoting Shares And Efficient Corporate Governance, Dorothy S. Lund

Faculty Scholarship

A growing number of technology companies, including Google, Zillow, and Snap, have issued stock that does not allow investors to vote on corporate decisions. But there is fundamental disagreement among scholars and investors about whether nonvoting stock is beneficial or harmful. Critics argue that nonvoting shares perpetually insulate corporate insiders from influence and oversight, and therefore increase agency costs. By contrast, proponents contend that nonvoting shares may provide benefits that exceed these agency costs, such as enabling corporate insiders to pursue their long-term vision for the company without interference from outside shareholders.

This Article offers a novel perspective on this …

The Death Of Corporate Law, Zohar Goshen, Sharon Hannes

Faculty Scholarship

For decades, corporate law played a pivotal role in regulating corporations across the United States. Consequently, Delaware, the leading state of incorporation, and its courts came to occupy a central and influential position in corporate law and governance. This, however, is no longer the case: The compositional shift in equity markets from retail to institutional ownership has relocated regulatory power over corporations from courts to markets. Corporate law has, as a result, and as illustrated by the declined role of the Delaware courts, lost its pride of place and is now eclipsed by shareholder activism.

What explains the connection between …

Asset Partitioning And Financial Innovation, Christopher Bruner

Scholarly Works

Review of the article by Ofer Eldar and Andrew Verstein titled “The Enduring Distinction between Business Entities and Security Interests”, 92 Southern California Law Review, no. 2 (2019).

There's A Problem With Buybacks, But It's Not What Senators Think, Daniel J. Hemel, Gregg D. Polsky

Scholarly Works

In a deeply divided Washington, one of the few issues on which leading lawmakers on both sides of the aisle appear to agree is that corporations should be discouraged from buying back their stock from shareholders. This short article argues that, while this anti-buyback sentiment is misguided, there nevertheless are good tax policy arguments for reforming the tax treatment of buybacks. The article recommends adoption of a 1969 proposal made by Professor Marvin Chirelstein that would recharacterize (for tax purposes) buybacks as a pro rata cash dividend, followed by sales of shares from the shareholders who participate in the buyback …

Do Conflicts Of Interest Require Outside Boards? Yes. Bsps? Maybe., Usha Rodrigues

Scholarly Works

From the Symposium: Outsourcing the Board: How Board Service Providers Can Improve Corporate Governance

Boards of directors are curious creatures. The law generally requires corporations to have them—indeed, they are the focus of the corporate law we teach in Business Associations in U.S. law schools. The corporation is managed by directors or under their direction; directors hire and fire officers; directors are necessary for fundamental transactions.

But the reason why corporations have directors is not entirely clear. In the prototypical privately held corporation, the family firm, the same individuals serve both as directors and officers. The CEO (better known as …

Corporate Governance Reform In Post-Crisis Financial Firms: Two Fundamental Tensions, Christopher Bruner

Scholarly Works

The manner in which financial firms are governed directly impacts the stability and sustainability of both the financial sector and the "real" economy, as the financial crisis and associated regulatory reform efforts have tragically demonstrated. However, two fundamental tensions continue to complicate efforts to reform corporate governance in post-crisis financial firms. The first relates to reliance on increased equity capital as a buffer against shocks and a means of limiting leverage. The tension here arises from the fact that no corporate constituency desires risk more than equity does, and that risk preference only tends to be stronger in banks, and …

Trade Openness And Antitrust Law, Anu Bradford, Adam S. Chilton

Faculty Scholarship

Openness to international trade and adoption of antitrust laws can both curb anti-competitive behavior. But scholars have long debated the relationship between the two. Some argue that greater trade openness makes antitrust unnecessary, while others contend that antitrust laws are still needed to realize the benefits of trade liberalization. Data limitations have made this debate largely theoretical to date. We study the relationship between trade and antitrust empirically using new data on antitrust laws and enforcement activities. We find that trade openness and stringency of antitrust laws are positively correlated from 1950 to 2010 overall, but the positive correlation disappears …

Activist Directors And Agency Costs: What Happens When An Activist Director Goes On The Board?, John C. Coffee Jr., Robert J. Jackson Jr., Joshua Mitts, Robert Bishop

Faculty Scholarship

We develop and apply a new and more rigorous methodology by which to measure and understand both insider trading and the agency costs of hedge fund activism. We use quantitative data to show a systematic relationship between the appointment of a hedge fund nominated director to a corporate board and an increase in informed trading in that corporation’s stock (with the relationship being most pronounced when the fund’s slate of directors includes a hedge fund employee). This finding is important from two different perspectives. First, from a governance perspective, activist hedge funds represent a new and potent force in corporate …

Informed Trading And Cybersecurity Breaches, Joshua Mitts, Eric L. Talley

Faculty Scholarship

Cybersecurity has become a significant concern in corporate and commercial settings, and for good reason: a threatened or realized cybersecurity breach can materially affect firm value for capital investors. This paper explores whether market arbitrageurs appear systematically to exploit advance knowledge of such vulnerabilities. We make use of a novel data set tracking cybersecurity breach announcements among public companies to study trading patterns in the derivatives market preceding the announcement of a breach. Using a matched sample of unaffected control firms, we find significant trading abnormalities for hacked targets, measured in terms of both open interest and volume. Our results …

Legal Analysis On Bankability Of Hydro Floating Solar Project In Thailand, Natdanai Aramtiantamrong

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

In comparison to other types of renewable energy projects, hydro floating solar projects are more complicated as public water resources are used as the location of the project but the electricity is generated from solar power. Accordingly, it is unclear whether the operation of the project falls within the definition of water use that is subject to the Water Resources Act B.E.2561(2018) or not. Several interpretations on the definition of water use in Section 4 of this Act may cause challenges in the bankability of the project. In order to fund the project, the project company generally relies on the …