January 2015

Jonas Heese has posted an interesting paper to SSRN, Government Preferences and SEC Enforcement, where he argues that the SEC goes easy on firms that contribute significantly to employment in a particular area.  He finds that the effect is magnified in presidential election years in swing states, and for firms that are headquartered in districts senior congresspersons who have SEC oversight responsibilities.  This effect cannot be explained by the hypothesis that labor-intensive firms simply have better accounting; according to Hesse, they actually have worse accounting than other comparable businesses (which may in fact reflect their knowledge that the SEC is less likely to target them).  He concludes, essentially, that the SEC is responding to political/voter pressures to take a hands-off approach to firms that are responsible for providing jobs.

One of the interesting points he makes is that this kind of pressure is independent of “special interest” lobbying; rather, this kind of pressure is a result of government actors responding to voter preferences.

The paper is available for download here.

I recently purchased and read two Cass Sunstein (Harvard) books: Simpler: The Future of Government and Wiser: Getting Beyond GroupThink to Make Groups Smarter (with Reid Hastie (Chicago))

Cass Sunstein is a enjoyable writer to read, and Simpler was an easy, relatively short read (though he admits that his editor prompted the cutting of 30,000 words from the original manuscript). I may do a separate post on Wiser at a later date.

Simpler provides an inside look at Cass Sunstein’s time at the head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (“OIRA”) from 2009-2012. Supposedly, OIRA was created by the Paperwork Reduction Act in 1980. OIRA plays an important role in overseeing federal regulation.

A few random thoughts about Simpler:

  • If you have read Sunstein’s earlier work, Kahneman (Princeton), and Ariely (Duke) much of Simpler will be familiar behavioral economics;
  • Sunstein’s political confirmation process sounds absolutely awful. I wonder how many qualified potential civil servants are scared away by processes like this;
  • The Food Plate (below) is much simpler than the Food Pyramid I grew up with;
  • Sunstein reminded me that sometimes rule-makers (including professors – e.g. with our syllabi) can become experts in rule systems,

…

I oppose the Dodd-Frank conflict minerals rule, which requires companies to conduct due diligence and report on their sourcing of certain minerals from the war-ravaged Democratic Republic of Congo and surrounding countries. As I have written before repeatedly on this blog, a law review article, and an amicus brief, it is a flawed “name and shame law” that assumes that consumers and investors will change their purchasing decisions based upon a corporate disclosure, which they may not read, understand, or care about. The name and shame portion of the law was struck down on First Amendment grounds, and the business lobby, the SEC, and the NGO community are eagerly awaiting a decision by the full DC Circuit Court of Appeals.

A disclosure law that does not take into account the true causes for the violence that has killed millions is not the most effective way to have a meaningful impact for the Congolese people. The Democratic Republic of Congo needs outside governments to provide more aid on security sector, criminal justice, education, and judicial reform at the very least. Indeed, the Congolese government is still trying to defeat the rebels that this law was meant to weaken…

There’s a very interesting sentence in a New York Times story today about the Chinese company Alibaba.  China’s State Administration for Industry and Commerce has released a report criticizing illegal practices on Alibaba’s shopping web sites. Here’s the sentence that I as a securities lawyer found most interesting:

“The agency said that it had presented the findings to unidentified top Alibaba executives in a July 17 meeting at the company’s headquarters . . . , but that it had kept the results confidential at the time so as ‘not to affect Alibaba’s preparations for a stock market listing.’”

Alibaba made an initial public offering in the United States in September. If the story’s accurate, it means: (1) a Chinese government regulator deliberately withheld a government report so a Chinese company could sell its stock to U.S. investors at a higher price; (2) the Chinese company, knowing the Chinese regulator was going to issue an unfavorable report, intentionally withheld that information from offerees.

New reading recommendation:  The (Un)Enforcement of Corporate Officers’ Duties, by Megan Shaner at Univ. of Oklahoma COL, published in UC Davis Law Review, November 2015.

Abstract:  

Over the past few decades, officers have arguably become some of the most important individuals in the corporation. From the implosions of Enron and WorldCom, to the success of companies like Apple and Microsoft, to the Wall Street crisis that sunk the world into near global recession, corporate officers have played a role in each of these storylines and countless (albeit lesser known) others. In spite of the well-publicized scandals, officers continue to be given wide latitude to carry out their role of managing the day-to-day operations of their companies. The primary constraint on this power under state corporate law is the imposition of fiduciary obligations. Fiduciary duties thus play a vital role in checking the considerable power and authority of officers. Fiduciary duties will only affect officer behavior, however, if there is an effective enforcement scheme that holds officers accountable. This Article discusses how the development of corporate doctrine, coupled with the dynamic in today’s corporate management has created impediments and disincentives for the enforcement of officer fiduciary

…

Lawrence Cunningham has written an interesting piece for the Wall Street Journal, The Secret Sauce of Corporate Leadership: Splitting the CEO and chairman jobs is beside the point. What’s needed is a skeptical No. 2.

Cunningham argues that measures to split the role of board chair and CEO largely miss the point because such a move, and similar moves, don’t clearly lead to the desired goal.  He explains:

Research on the effects of splitting the chief and chairman roles shows that results can depend on where the split takes place: It tends to improve performance at struggling companies—but it impairs prosperous firms. Yet exact effects vary depending on the circumstances, such as whether the switch happened with the appointment of a new CEO or with the demotion of an incumbent.

The movement to split the two roles is part of corporate America’s tendency to address problems with procedural remedies such as expanding board size, adding independent directors, adopting a new code of ethics, updating firm compliance programs, and appointing a monitor to oversee it all. While such steps get attention and can improve an organization’s health, the informal norms that define a corporate culture are more powerful, and Bank of

…

As some of you know, my beloved cat, Meowth (yes, named after the Pokemon character) has been battling squamous cell carcinoma.  Today, he went on to the everlasting life beyond this Earth.  This post is dedicated to his memory.  Here he is, meowing with me and my daughter a bit over a week ago.

Get-attachment.aspx

One of the things that we have been blessed with over the years–in Massachusetts and here in Knoxville–is great veterinary medical care.  Since The University of Tennessee’s College of Veterinary Medicine (CoVM) is located on the West (agricultural) campus in Knoxville, it is a stone’s throw from the College of Law, where I teach.  We have been assisted in various ways, including with Meowth, by veterinarians and veterinary technicians from the CoVM.   The CoVM also boast a veterinary social work program, and we were helped in Meowth’s end-of-life care by one of the veterinary social workers in the CoVM program.  Many of the local veterinarians were trained at our CoVM.  We have worked with several private practice groups in Knoxville.

All this interaction with veterinarians has made me wonder how private veterinary medical practice groups are organized, from a legal entity point of view.  (Yeah, I know.  I am a true law nerd.  I admit that.)  My impression (although many practice groups are not very transparent about their form of legal organization) is that many of these practice groups are professional corporations (PCs) or professional limited liability companies (PLLCs).  I suppose this makes sense to me.  

But it reminds me of a question commonly asked by astute Business Associations students: “Why do professionals form professional business entities, given that the owners of limited liability entities already enjoy protection from liability for the obligations of the entity?”  I am sure many of you have been asked this same question.  If not, you soon may be.

PrawfsBlawg has posted its Submission Angsting thread, which prompted me to write this post to ask our readers (including my co-bloggers) two questions:

  1. In your opinion, what is the ideal date to submit a spring law review article?
  2. When deciding between offers, how do you evaluate specialty law reviews?

Ideal Submission Date. When I first started as a professor, I heard that March 1 was the date most people thought was the best for spring submissions. The ideal date seems to be moving earlier and earlier, and I have heard February 1 or February 15 mentioned with increasing frequency. Some might suggest not worrying about the submission date — just submit when your article when it is ready. While I agree that you should wait to submit an article until it is ready (whenever “ready” is…), I have had colleagues who seemed to seriously under-place articles because they submitted at a poor time. Admittedly, most of these professors submitted well outside of the traditional windows.

Evaluating Specialty Law Reviews. The question about how to evaluate specialty law reviews reoccurs every time I submit an article. The conventional wisdom is – find out how your P&T committee values those journals and…

For the last three years, I have been teaching my Accounting for Lawyers course as a distance education course. It’s only available to students at my law school, but everything except the final exam is online; there are no in-person classes. I think it’s worked well, better than the in-person accounting class I used to teach, but that’s a topic for another day. Today, I want to talk about four things I’ve learned teaching the course.

1. Law students are not used to “learning as they go.”

The typical law school class involves a single end-of-semester exam, and law students get used to pulling things together by cramming at the end of the semester. Almost all of my students read the daily assignments, but many of them, even some of the most conscientious students, really haven’t actively wrestled with the material.

I usually teach by the problem method, and I use books with a large number of problems. I strongly urge students to answer those problems before class. Almost all of my students read the problems before class; many of them think about the problems before class; but it’s clear that few of them have thoroughly worked their way through…