November 2016

Wharton’s Legal Studies & Business Ethics Department invites submissions for its inaugural Conference on Business Law and Ethics, to take place March 31-April 1, 2017.

This is the first meeting of what will be a recurring conference: we aim to gather together each year the most cutting-edge work on law, ethics and business. Papers are invited from scholars both senior and junior, and from diverse disciplines, on the theme of “The Ethical Lives of Corporations.” Submit an abstract of an unpublished paper to Phil Nichols (nicholsp@wharton.upenn.edu ) and Gwendolyn Gordon (gwgordon@wharton.upenn.edu). The deadline for abstract submissions is January 6th, 2017.

When it comes to regulations and economic policy, I am quite conservative.  Not a Republican-type conservative (probably more Libertarian in a political sense), but in the sense that I often advocate for less regulation, and even more often, for less changes to laws and regulations. People need to be able to count on a system and work within it. As such, whether it is related to securities law, energy and environmental law, or other areas of the law, I find myself advocating for staying the course rather than adding new laws and regulations.  

For example, a while back, co-blogger Joan Heminway quoted one of my comments about securities law, where I noted “my ever-growing sense that maybe we should just take a break from tweaking securities laws and focus on enforcing rules and sniffing out fraud. A constantly changing securities regime is increasingly costly, complex, and potentially counterproductive.” 

After the BP oil blowout of the Deepwater Horizon well in the Gulf of Mexico, I similarly argued that we should approach new laws with caution, and that we might be better served with existing law, rather than seeking new laws and regulation in a hasty manner. I explained, 

[T]here are times when new laws and regulations are

…

Today, I share a quick teaching tip/suggestion.

I taught my last classes of the semester earlier today.  For my Business Associations class, which met at 8:00 am, I was looking for a way to end the class meeting, tying things from the past few classes up in some way.  I settled on using the facts from a case that I used to cover in a former casebook that is not in my current course text:  Coggins  et al. v. New England Patriots Football Club, Inc., et al.  Here are the facts I presented:

  • New England Patriots Football Club, Inc. (“NEPFC”), the corporation that owns the New England Patriots, has both voting and nonvoting shares of stock outstanding.
  • The former president and owner of all of the voting shares of NEPFC, Sullivan, takes out a personal loan that only can be repaid if he owns all of the NEPFC stock outstanding.
  • The board and Sullivan vote to merge NEPFC with and into a new corporation in which Sullivan would own all the shares.
  • In the merger, holders of the nonvoting shares receive $15 per share for their common stock cashed out in the merger.

From this, I noted that three legal actions are common…

KKS

For the next few weeks, we will be joined by Clemson University Legal Studies Professor Kathryn Kisska-Schulze. I met Professor Kisska-Schulze at the SEALSB Annual Conference earlier this month and enjoyed her presentation on the appropriate tax home for college athletes (if and when they are paid).

In addition to a JD, Professor Kisska-Schulze has an LLM in Taxation. She has published extensively in the tax law area, intersecting most frequently with sports law and environmental law. I look forward to her posts, and welcome her to the blog.

Okay, this post has nothing to do with the subject line; given the time of year, I just couldn’t resist.

(Maybe we’ll just characterize that episode of WKRP in Cincinnati as a demonstration of PR tactics gone wrong.  See?  There’s a business law hook).

Anyhoo, today I want to call attention to the phenomenon of the fake whistleblowing hotline. 

As compliance becomes an increasingly large part of corporate operations – and a de facto reconfiguration of corporate governance standards – it seems that companies are fond of creating “whisteblowing hotlines” to demonstrate their commitment to compliance with the law.  Public companies, in fact, are required to do so under Sarbanes-Oxley.

Which is why two recent news items are so disturbing.  First, in connection with the Wells Fargo fake account scandal – on which both Anne Tucker and Marcia Narine Weldon recently posted– it turns out that employees who offered tips on the Wells Fargo whistleblowing hotline were quickly fired; meaning that the hotline itself operated as a kind of reverse-ethics test to weed out employees most likely to object to Wells Fargo’s practices.

And it turns out that Wyndham Vacation Ownership did the same thing.  This company, which sells…

It is not secret that Patagonia is one of the companies that I admire most; it may be my favorite company and is certainly in my top-five.

Patagonia’s decision regarding its Black Friday sales adds to the reason I like the company. Patagonia will donate 100% of its Black Friday sales to grassroots environmental groups.

As I read it, the donations will be 100% of revenue, not profits, and the donations are estimated to be millions of dollars.

Patagonia is both a California benefit corporation and B corporation certified, but unlike many social enterprises, Patagonia often does things like the above that don’t appear to be done just for the PR, and may actually hurt the company in the very short-term.

That said, Patagonia definitely has a good PR team and is probably getting millions of dollars of exposure out of this decision. And their apparel is quite expensive, so they may be able to afford to do things like this, based, in part, on the margins and goodwill built over time.  

Happy Thanksgiving from the Dominican Republic. I’m blogging from the Fathom Adonia, Carnival’s fledgling social impact cruise line. I’ve spent the past few days in Puerto Plata teaching English in schools and local communities. Other passengers worked on reforestation projects, built water filtration systems, installed concrete floors in homes, worked with women on cocoa farms, and learned how to recycle paper with local workers. Passengers can  also do typical excursions such as zip lining and snorkeling, or can lounge around in the $80 million dollar Amber Cove built up like a resort. But most people come on this cruise for the volunteer activities and don’t expect frills (our bus got stuck in the mud and we needed pig farmers in a truck to help push us out on the way back from teaching English 75 minutes outside of town). Fathom has restaurants, a spa, dancing, bars, onboard activities such as wine and paint, extremely friendly staff, and enthusiastic, young “impact guides” but no Vegas-style shows and only carries approximately 700 passengers.

Carnival has banked on profiting from people’s stated desire to do good in the world. Lots of surveys support this idea in theory. However, as regular readers of this…

I have been thinking about the long-short term investment horizon debate, definitions, empirics and governance design consequences for some time now (see prior BLPB post here and also see Joshua Fershee’s take on the topic).  This has been on mind so much  that I am now planning a June, 2017 conference on that very topic in conjunction with the Adolf A. Berle Jr. Center on Corporations, Law & Society (founded by Charles “Chuck” O’Kelley at Seattle University School of Law). In planning this interdisciplinary conference where the goal is to invite corporate governance folks, finance and economics scholars, and psychologists and neuroscientist, I have had the pleasure of reading a lot of out-of-discipline work and talking with the various authors.  It has been an unexpected benefit of conference planning.   I also want some industry voices represented so I have reached out to Aspen Institute, Conference Board and a new group, Focusing Capital on the Long Term (FCLT), which I learned about through this process.

I share this with BLPB readers for several reasons.  The first is that the FCLT, is a nonprofit organization, a nonprofit organization for BUSINESS issues created and funded by BUSINESSES.  In July 2016, the…

Back in May, I discussed Donald Trump’s campaign dubious promises to bring back coal jobs to places like West Virginia and Kentucky.  He promised (and continues to promise) that reduced regulation and elimination of the Clean Power Plan will bring back job.  Voters in West Virginia bought the claim, and they believed it from incoming governor, Democrat Jim Justice, a billionaire coal magnate.   

Trump and Justice spoke the other day, with the Governor-Elect saying in a statement:

“It’s an exciting day for West Virginia because we now have a pathway to the White House and a president-elect who is totally committed to putting our coal miners back to work. President-elect Trump made it clear that he won’t forget about West Virginia when it comes to our nation’s energy policies. I will work closely with the President-elect and his administration on clean coal technology, rolling back the job-killing EPA regulations on coal, and growing West Virginia’s other job opportunities.”

How this will work to improve coal jobs remains an open question.  Trump has yet to announce his energy-related appointments, which will include the EPA, Department of Energy, and Department of Interior.  His energy secretary short list (and possibly…