February 2024

Senator Sanders recently released the Majority Report for the Senate’s Health, Labor, Education, and Pensions Committee.  That report has some grim findings about American retirements.  About half of people 55 and older have no retirement savings.  As we all know, defined-benefit pensions have become increasingly rare.  Unfortunately, defined-contribution pensions are often unavailable for a huge chunk of the workforce.  About 50 million workers don’t have a way to save for retirement through their payroll.

The report and its figures has to be part of any conversation now about how to think about efforts to improve the quality of financial advice and retirement savings.

There is much more in the report than this quick summary, and if you write or think about retirement issues, you should check it out.

Check out High-Status Versus Low-Status Stakeholders, an intriguing paper authored by one of our business school brethren, Justin Pace.  In this work, Justin approaches an important, yet difficult, topic at the intersection of corporate governance and the class divide.  The SSRN abstract follows.

The literature on stakeholder theory has largely ignored the difficult and central issue of how judges and firms should resolve disputes among stakeholders. When the issue is addressed, focus has largely been on the potential for management to use stakeholder theory as cover for rent seeking or on disputes between classes of stakeholders. Sharply underappreciated is the potential for disparate interests within a stakeholder class.

That potential is particularly acute due to a (largely education-driven) stark and growing class divide in the United States. There is a substantial difference between the interests of a highly educated professional and managerial elite and a pink-collar and blue-collar working class who mostly do not hold four-year degrees. Despite their smaller numbers, the professional and managerial elite will frequently win out in intra-stakeholder disputes with working class stakeholders due to their greater status, power, and influence.

Because this class divide is cultural, social, and political as well as economic, these…

If you happen to be in Miami or think it’s worth it to fly there next week, this is for you. I’ll be moderating the panel on regulatory considerations for promoters and influencers and we have student teams competing from all over the country. 

February 29 – March 1
University of Miami

Content is king. We live in the golden age where content creators, artists, and influencers wield power and can shift culture. Brands want to collaborate. Creators need to be sophisticated, understand deal points and protect their brand and intellectual property. Miami Law will be the first law school in the country to pull together law students with leading lawyers, influencers, artists, creatives and trendsetters for a negotiation competition and conference.  

Negotiation Competition – Thursday, February 29 

Where

Shalala Student Center, 1330 Miller Drive, Coral Gables, FL 33146

Who Should Participate

This competition is ideal for law and business students. THE. TEAMS ARE FINALIZED ALREADY.

What to Expect

Participants will have the chance to represent influencers, brands, artists, fashion companies and other creators in the first ever Counseling Creators: Influencers, Artists and Trendsetters Negotiation Competition

  • Register a team of law students (can include business school students)
    1. Team of

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A while back, I posted about an eyebrow-raising opinion out of the Second Circuit holding that clean audit opinions may not be material to investors because they use generic language.  Happily, the Second Circuit has agreed to take a second look at the issue, and invited the SEC to file an amicus brief, which it did.  (Alison Frankel has a column on the case here; the brief is linked here)

The brief is simple and makes the obvious point that the language of a clean audit opinion may be standardized, but its use reflects an industry understanding regarding the procedures used in the audit and the auditor’s conclusions.

One thing worth highlighting: As I explained in my original post, the way we seem to have gotten here is that the defendant auditor conducted a shoddy audit, but then argued that there was no link between its own audit deficiencies and the actual flaws in the underlying financial statements – i.e., even a proper audit would not have caught the problems.

The SEC argues that, even if true, that would not make the audit opinion immaterial; it might, however, affect the analysis of loss causation.  The distinction matters a…

Vice Chancellor Laster has issued his opinion in the TripAdvisor case.  I’m still digesting it, but the overall framework does not surprise me.  As I can’t improve on the opinion’s recitation of the basic factual situation, here it is:

A Delaware corporation has two classes of stock. The CEO/Chair owns highvote shares carrying a majority of the outstanding voting power, giving him hard majority control. The board decides to convert the Delaware corporation into a Nevada corporation, and the CEO/Chair delivers the necessary stockholder vote. The board does not establish any protections to simulate arm’s length bargaining. The conversion is not conditioned on either special committee approval or a majority-ofthe-minority vote.

A stockholder plaintiff challenges the conversion.1 The plaintiff argues that Nevada law offers fewer litigation rights to stockholders and provides greater litigation protections to fiduciaries like the directors and the CEO/Chair. The plaintiff alleges that the directors and the CEO/Chair approved the conversion to secure the litigation protections for themselves. In support of those assertions, the plaintiff cites the materials the board considered, disclosures in the company’s proxy statement, the work of distinguished legal scholars about the content of Nevada law, and public statements by Nevada policy makers about

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Dear BLPB Readers:

For those of you who might be interested in strengthening your knowledge of empirical methods, Northwestern Law School is offering two summer workshops on Research Design for Causal Inference.  An overview of the main workshop and its target audience is below.  The complete details of the main and advanced workshops are here.

“Main Workshop Overview

We will cover the design of true randomized experiments and contrast them to natural or quasi experiments and to pure observational studies, where part of the sample is treated, the remainder is a control group, but the researcher controls neither which units are treated vs. control, nor administration of the treatment. We will assess the causal inferences one can draw from specific “causal” research designs, threats to valid causal inference, and research designs that can mitigate those threats.

Most empirical methods courses survey a variety of methods. We will begin instead with the goal of causal inference, and how to design a research plan to come closer to that goal, using messy, real-world datasets with limited sample sizes. The methods are often adapted to a particular study.

Target Audience

Quantitative empirical researchers (faculty and graduate students) in social science, including law…

From friend-of-the-BLPB Jessica Erickson:

The University of Richmond School of Law is looking for a visitor next spring (2025) in the business law area.  Specifically, we are looking for coverage for our Mergers & Acquisitions course, as well as either Securities Regulation or Business Associations. If you might be interested, please reach out to Kristen Osenga, our Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, at kosenga@richmond.edu.  I am also happy to answer any questions about the school and our fabulous students and faculty.

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I have the privilege and honor to be in Detroit today to present the second annual Baiardi lecture at Wayne State University Law School.  Wayne Law is a bit of a second home for me (a status it enjoys with several other law schools).  I have presented at two symposia here (publishing twice, as a result, with the Wayne Law Review).  Also, Wayne Law was the academic pied à terre of Peter Henning, who was a trusted and dear mentor (and an accomplice in reasoning through insider trading and applied corporate governance questions) until his untimely death.

My lecture addresses aspects of a joint project I previewed at the National Business Law Scholars Conference at Tennessee Law last June.  The project is the brainchild of my Tennessee Law colleague Tomer Stein and involves taking a new approach to the ongoing debate about federalizing corporate law.  The talk offers some practical applied thoughts on the project and is entitled “Visioning (Not Advocating or Discounting) Federal Corporate Law.” I undoubtedly will have more to say on this topic as our work on the project progresses.  But if you think of or come across anything you deem relevant to the cause…

POSITION OVERVIEW

Position title: Executive Director of the Lowell Milken Institute for Business Law and Policy

Salary range: A reasonable estimate for this position is $200,000 to $250,000

APPLICATION WINDOW

Open date: October 30, 2023

Most recent review date: Sunday, Jan 7, 2024 at 11:59pm (Pacific Time)
Applications received after this date will be reviewed by the search committee if the position has not yet been filled.

Final date: Sunday, Mar 31, 2024 at 11:59pm (Pacific Time)
Applications will continue to be accepted until this date, but those received after the review date will only be considered if the position has not yet been filled.

POSITION DESCRIPTION

The Lowell Milken Institute for Business Law and Policy (“Institute”) is seeking an Executive Director with substantial practical experience in business law and policy to plan, oversee and execute the work of the Institute. The Institute is, by design, a dynamic one and the Executive Director will have significant opportunity to creatively shape the Institute’s mission and initiatives together with key faculty and leaders at UCLA School of Law. The Institute supports and expands educational opportunities, job-search support, academic scholarship, and policy analysis in business law and tax law. The goals of

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