June 2024

Like so many others, I have wanted to say a word about West Palm Beach Firefighters’ Pension Fund v. Moelis & Company, 311 A.3d 809 (Del. Ch. 2024).  My angle is a bit different from that of many others.  It derives from my 15-year practice background, my 24-year law teaching background, and my 39-year bar service background.  It focuses on a doctrinal analysis undertaken through a policy lens.  But I want to note here the value of Ann Lipton’s existing posts on Moelis and the related proposed addition of a new § 122(18) to the General Corporation Law of the State of Delaware (DGCL).  Her posts can be found here, here, here, and here.  (Sorry if I missed one, Ann!)  Ben Edwards also published a related post here.  They (and others offering commentary that I have read) raise and touch on some of the matters I address here, but not with the same legislative policy focus.

I apologize at the outset for the length of this post.  As habitual readers know, long posts are “not my style” as a blogger.  This matter is one of relatively urgent legislative importance, however, and I am eager…

Corporate redomestication has been in the news.  Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed I penned with Nevada’s Secretary of state, Francisco Aguilar, explaining why some corporations seek to redomesticate from Delaware to Nevada or elsewhere.  Ann also covered the issue today in the context of Tesla’s redomestication to Texas.  

Although the Tesla redomestication proposal apparently passed at the shareholder meeting, not all redomestication proposals will pass.  Notably, Glass Lewis recommended against the Texas reincorporation.  I have some faith that states like Nevada will react and legislatively change their laws if they prove a barrier to securing additional incorporations.  After all, Delaware has been changing its laws to ensure it remains attractive for decades.  Indeed, much of the movement in Delaware around proposed amendments to Delaware’s corporate law seems aimed at maintaining Delaware’s dominance and securing continued incorporations.

The key will be striking the right balance between investor protection and shielding managers from possibly unwarranted and value-destroying litigation costs. Ultimately, striking the right balance is hard.  Under a too lenient standard for litigation, corporations and shareholders will suffer from costs driven by excess litigation.  Under too demanding a regime, shareholders may suffer losses from uncompensated…

Whenever I talk about Elon Musk and corporate governance, an objection is raised to the effect of, “Isn’t Musk sui generis?  Can we really take any lessons from him?”

It’s a fair question, but if Musk is sui generis, there is no meaning in any of this, and that’s no fun at all.  So, for the purposes of this post, I’m putting it aside.

Take One:  What a supreme failure of the SEC

I’m sorry, I have to start here.  Sometime in the middle of the night (I was asleep), Elon Musk tweeted an extremely informal spreadsheet screencapture of the purported shareholder vote, and for the next several hours – including during actual trading – no one knew if he was telling the truth.  I spoke to reporters, which is a thing I do now whenever Musk is in the news (i.e., on days that end in “y”), and they were simply not sure whether to take the tweet seriously.  Initial headlines read “Elon Musk says” rather than “The vote is.”

It is unacceptable that the CEO of an S&P 500 company could publicly release extremely material information and have the entire world spend multiple hours wondering if he…

I just came back on Sunday from the 2024 Law and Society Association Annual Meeting in Denver.  It was, as always, a stimulating few days.  A number of us business law profs were in attendance.  The corporate and securities law collaborative research network (CRN46) habitually organizes several programs.  This year was no exception.  I was privileged to be featured in two.  But I will say more on my participation in the conference later.

Today, I want to highlight an interesting piece that was presented at the conference during one of the CRN46 paper panels: “The Original Meaning of Equity “ by Asaf Raz (forthcoming in the Washington University Law Review).  The SSRN abstract follows:

Equity is seeing a new wave of attention in scholarship and practice. Yet, as this Article argues, our current understanding of equity is divided between two distinct meanings: on one side, the federal courts, guided by the Supreme Court, tend to discuss equity as the precise set of remedies known at a fixed point in the past (static equity). On the other, state courts—most prominently, in Delaware—administer equity to preserve the correct operation of law in unforeseeable situations (substantive equity). Only the latter…

Transactions: The Tennessee Journal of Business Law recently published the proceedings of the 2023 Business Law Prof Blog symposium, held at UT Law in Knoxville back in October.  The proceedings can be found here.  As is customary, the issue includes articles written by the principal presenters—bloggers from here at the BLPB—and related commentary from UT Law faculty and students.

My contribution to the symposium was a piece called Business Lawyer Leadership: Valuing Relationships.  The abstract is set forth below.

Business lawyers are surrounded by relationships because of the nature of their work. Businesses are relational; business associations law is relational; business lawyering is relational. Business lawyering, in all its manifestations, is a practice steeped in the lawyer’s awareness and management of, as well as their participation in, the layered sets of relationships found in businesses and business associations law.

This article recognizes these important connections between business law practice and relationships. It approaches each of them in turn. The substantial take-away is that a business lawyer can best lead by understanding the inherent value of relationships to business lawyering and leveraging that understanding through focused effort that includes the employment of, among other things, relationship management skills. Relationship…

I swear I wasn’t going to blog about Elon Musk this week; I had several other ideas planned, but then someone went ahead and filed a new complaint in Delaware and I just can’t help myself.

In Ball v. Tesla, the plaintiff challenges both the upcoming pay ratification vote, and the Texas redomestication.  The arguments against pay ratification are pretty much the ones you’ve already heard in this space (as well as ones advanced by Prof. Elson in his proposed amicus brief), and we’ve pretty much exhausted those so I’ll skip it.

As for the Texas redomestication vote, the plaintiff claims that the required threshold to leave Delaware is 2/3 rather than a simple majority of outstanding shares due to certain provisions in Tesla’s charter.

I’ve previously blogged about this issue at Tesla; it has a staggered board and keeps trying reduce the stagger, but it can’t get the required 2/3 outstanding vote, because so many shareholders do not cast ballots at all. 

When Tesla drafted its charter way back when, it set about minimizing shareholder rights as much as it could under Delaware law.  It instituted a staggered board, it prohibited shareholders from acting by written…

We’ve covered the TripAdvisor litigation here for some time.  With the case before the Delaware Supreme Court, Nevada has weighed in with an amicus brief.  Nevada, on behalf of Francisco Aguilar, Nevada’s Secretary of State, was represented by its Office of the Attorney General,  friend of the BLPB, Anthony Rickey, and DLA Piper’s John Reed.  Ann’s Tweet even makes an appearance.

Nevada argues that Delaware’s Chancery Court should not accept allegations in a complaint about Nevada law instead of analyzing Nevada law itself.  It also argues that the decision risks creating an exit tax on any corporation that seeks to leave Delaware for Nevada–or some other state.  To the extent that any other state arguably offers benefits that wouldn’t be available to a controlling shareholder in Delaware, the same standards would apply.  Thus, a reincorporation to Texas, Florida, or California might even be covered.  Depending on how far you take it, any corporation seeking to redomesticate to any of the many states with constituency statutes might face the same kind of challenge.

The amicus also points out that claims that Nevada has “raced to the bottom” should sound familiar to Delaware because Delaware itself has faced this…

Dear BLPB Readers:

I’m excited to share a Call for Papers from the Journal of Financial Markets Infrastructures, where I am an Associate Editor.  Here is a brief description of the Journal from its website:

“The economic and technological landscape of financial market infrastructures (FMIs) is rapidly evolving and changing how we conduct transactions globally. Efforts to renew and strengthen payment, clearing and settlement systems have been undertaken internationally and the role of new technologies, including digital money, CBDCs, blockchains and smart contracts, is being continuously reassessed.

The Journal of Financial Market Infrastructures was the first journal to specialize in publishing peer-reviewed research in FMIs. Today, over a decade after its first publication, the journal continues to offer its readers a selection of the best ideas, developments and analysis in this dynamic and exciting sector of the economy.”

The call for papers is here: Download JFMI Call for Papers

At Emory Law’s Eighth Biennial Conference on the Teaching of Transactional Skills back in the fall of 2023, I had the privilege of presenting with my UT Law clinical teaching colleague, Brian Krumm.  (Congratulations are due to Brian, who was recently appointed the Interim Director of our Clayton Center for Entrepreneurial Law!)  The title of this post is also the title of our presentation.  An edited transcript of the presentation was recently published by Transactions: The Tennessee Journal of Business Law and can be found here. The abstract is as follows:

In this edited transcript, we explain how each of us–a doctrinal law professor and a clinician–use members of our campus and local communities to help instruct transactional business law students. We each have independently realized that there is a value to sharing these outside business and legal experts with our students. Among other things, we have found that we can bring unique areas of legal and business expertise into our teaching and, at the same time, introduce our students to real-life practice experiences and related simulations. All of this is foundational to law practice. In addition, experiences of this kind are, in our view, increasingly useful and…

Which is why you get an extra blog post this week.

So I’m reading this entire fairness conflicted controller opinion and right there at the end, VC Laster preemptively wanders into a Caremark discussion – and the reason this is important is it hits on some of the issues I’ve blogged about previously with respect to the (over) extension of Caremark.

The case is Firefighters’ Pension System v. Foundation Building Materials, and I’ve got threads up at other social media spaces of the horror show of fiduciary breaches (help yourself), but here I’ll talk about the Caremark piece, which is tangential to the actual claims but important for theory. 

The traditional rule is that “Delaware law does not charter law breakers,” articulated in In re Massey Energy Co., 2011 WL 2176479 (Del. Ch. May 31, 2011), and part of a general family of cases that fall under the Caremark rubric that requires Delaware managers to take reasonable steps to ensure legal compliance.

Here’s what VC Laster writes in Foundation Building Materials:

timing principles govern Massey and Caremark claims. Before a plaintiff can invoke those theories, the plaintiff must point to some sufficiently concrete corporate injury.

…