Photo of Benjamin P. Edwards

Benjamin P. Edwards

Subscribe to Benjamin P. Edwards's Posts

Benjamin Edwards joined the faculty of the William S. Boyd School of Law in 2017. He researches and writes about business and securities law, corporate governance, arbitration, and consumer protection.

Prior to teaching, Professor Edwards practiced as a securities litigator in the New York office of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP. At Skadden, he represented clients in complex civil litigation, including securities class actions arising out of the Madoff Ponzi scheme and litigation arising out of the 2008 financial crisis. Read More

National Business Law Scholars Conference (NBLSC)
June 16-17, 2022
Call for Papers

The National Business Law Scholars Conference (NBLSC) will be held on Thursday and Friday, June 16-17, 2022, at the University of Oklahoma College of Law.

This is the thirteenth meeting of the NBLSC, an annual conference that draws legal scholars from across the United States and around the world. We welcome all scholarly submissions relating to business law. Junior scholars and those considering entering the academy are especially encouraged to participate. If you are thinking about entering the academy and would like to receive informal mentoring and learn more about job market dynamics, please let us know when you make your submission.

Please fill out this form to register and submit an abstract by Friday, April 1, 2022. If you have any questions, concerns, or special requests regarding the schedule, please email Professor Eric C. Chaffee at eric.chaffee@utoledo.edu. We will respond to submissions with notifications of acceptance a few weeks after the submission deadline. We anticipate the conference schedule will be circulated in May.

Conference Organizers:

Afra Afsharipour (University of California, Davis, School of Law)
Tony Casey (The University of Chicago Law School)
Eric C. Chaffee (The…

Yesterday, I was privileged to attend a wonderful Knoxville Symphony Orchestra performance as part of its Chamber Classics Series.  The featured piece was the Bach Concerto for Two Violins–an amazing piece of work.  It was preceded in the program by a wonderfully catchy Stravinski Octet.  The second half of the program focused solely on a Shostakovich piece (arranged by Rudolph Barshai): Chamber Symphony, Op. 73a.  I want to focus here for a moment on this last composition.

Dmitri Shostakovich was a Russian (Soviet) composer.  He died back in 1975.  As my husband and I looked at the program in anticipation of the Shostakovich work, we could not help but think of the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine.  We have watched with horror and sadness the violence, destruction, displacement, and more.  Of course, the program for the concert today was many months in the making; the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra could not have anticipated that a Russian composer’s music would be played in these circumstances . . . .

In his introduction to the Shostakovich Chamber Symphony, our conductor, Aram Demirjian, explained that Shostakovich was periodically critical of the Soviet government, despite its patronage of his work.  He explained that the…

Last week, I had the privilege of presenting at the first of three sessions in an academic research symposium cohosted by George Mason’s institute for Humane Studies and Florida Atlantic University’s Madden Center for Value Creation.  The symposium, Contemporary Challenges in Corporate Governance, has two spring semester online (Zoom) components and an in-person session in August in Seattle, Washington.  The program in which I was featured, “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Initiatives,” also included two management scholars (Siri Terjesen from Florida Atlantic University and Aaron Hill from the University of Florida).  We each had the opportunity to talk about our work in the DEI space, engage with audience questions, and (in breakout rooms) discuss ongoing research projects and questions with other participants.  The format was very engaging.  And friend-of-the-BLPB Paul Rose was in attendance saying nice things about our blog.  (Thanks, Paul!)

We should do more of this.  And when I say “this,” I mean getting together with scholars from other fields.  Paul and I ended up in a fun conversation with a philosopher who is working on issues involving the purpose of the corporation, which led us into a productive discussion of the nature of fiduciary duties–to…

❤️  It’s Valentine’s Day!

Time for candy and flowers,

Not for posting blogs.

 

Until next week, then,

When I will be back with more.

Be my Valentine?  ❤️

OKLAHOMA CITY UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF LAW invites applications for one or more tenured or tenure-track faculty positions to begin with the 2022-23 academic year. We welcome applications from candidates with interests in any area of law, but we are particularly interested in candidates with a teaching interest in business organizations, energy law, environmental law, healthcare law, homeland security and national security, or secured transactions. We welcome candidates whose approaches in research will add to the scope and depth of our faculty scholarship.

Candidates should have an excellent academic background, demonstrated potential to be a productive scholar, a strong commitment to the practice of inclusion, and a strong commitment to becoming an engaged classroom teacher. Candidates must have a J.D. degree from an ABA accredited law school and be licensed to practice law in one of the states or the District of Columbia.

Oklahoma City University School of Law is located in downtown Oklahoma City and is deeply engaged with the legal, business, and governmental communities. Oklahoma City has been named “American’s Most Livable Community” and is consistently ranked among the most affordable and prosperous cities, among the top cities for entrepreneurs and small businesses, and among the best-run large cities.…

I cannot resist sharing with you today a proud moment that I had last week.  One of the 3L students that I mentor wrote a blog post that our Leading as Lawyers blog published. I could not be more proud.

I had been encouraging this student–a young woman I deeply admire–to write a post for us for a number of months.  She wasn’t sure.  But I kept telling her that she had such compelling stories to tell.  Nevertheless, she remained unsure until recently that anything she would write could speak in a powerful enough way about leadership.

More recently, the pieces of her professional development puzzle have started to fall into place.  As a result she could see it–she found her voice; she knew what she had to say.  The result of her labors can be found here.  The title alone is enough to make a business law prof proud: The Unlikely Avenue from Hopeful Environmental Litigator to Inspired Transactional Lawyer.  You can click on the link and read the post in its entirety.  But here is the bottom line:

When I came to law school, I was so scared of “selling out.” I thought that transactional law…

I begin teaching again on Wednesday.  The past few weeks have been occupied with course preparation as well as catching up on editing, writing, and other tasks abandoned during a month+ focused on the grading period, attentiveness to  a downturn in my dad’s health, Christmas, a nasty cold, and intensive physical therapy.  As I have focused on the spring semester, I continue to be concerned about helping to teach my students critical and intensive thinking, in and outside legal reasoning.  On this day honoring the life and many legacies of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., I am inspired in my work by this passage from his writing–specifically, Chapter 1 of Strength to Love (1963; Pocket Book ed. 1964):

 . . . The tough mind is sharp and penetrating, breaking through the crust of legends and myths and sifting the true from the false. The tough-minded individual is astute and discerning. He has a strong austere quality that makes for firmness of purpose and solidness of commitment.

Who doubts that this toughness is one of man’s greatest needs? Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and…

Will Moon recently posted an article forthcoming in the Duke Law Journal to SSRN.  It’s a fascinating, accessible read and thoughtfully explores privacy as a functional feature of modern business entities.  Many states, Nevada included, allow the principal of a business entity to conduct business without ever disclosing the principal’s identity.  Most discussions about using business entities to cloak individual identity focus on how the wealthy and powerful use privacy to avoid accountability and evade responsibility.  Yet not enough attention has been paid to the other side of the coin, how privacy enables economic activity for persons with stigmatized identities or in areas where violent retaliation against a business’s disclosed principals may functionally force it to close.

A few years ago, Ann McGinley and I wrote about how some entrepreneurs will trot out persons with favored identities to access capital.  Because white men tend to raise more money, some entrepreneurs will strategically affiliate with white men to raise capital.  A proposal to create an agency for these purposes recently circulated online:

…

Yesterday evening, the 2022 Association of American Law Schools Annual Meeting concluded.  Hosted on a platform using Zoom, the conference spanned five days.  It was a meeting filled with super papers and discussion, many worthy honorees, and a little bot of networking and fellowship (not as satisfactory over Zoom, of course).

I was invited by BLPB co-blogger John Anderson and Martin Edwards to be part of an exciting discussion group: A Very Online Economy: Meme Trading, Bitcoin, and the Crisis of Trust and Value(s) – How Should the Law Respond?  [Editor’s note: a hypertext link to John’s earlier blog post was added post publication.]  Participants were asked to write short papers on the topic and share their theses during the session at the meeting. Initially, I planned to write on something involving substantive doctrinal law stemming from the meme stock phenomenon or my work in crowdfunding, blockchains, or insider trading.  But the more I thought about it (and the topic), and with the conference’s programs honoring the life and legacy of Deborah Rhode in the foreground of my mind, the more I became convinced that I wanted to write/speak about lawyer leadership in this area at this time.

The…

Perhaps you missed these interesting programs–with super speakers–among all the amazing business associations, securities regulation, business transactions, etc. sessions!  I know I did and was glad a friend highlighted them for my attention.

Wednesday, January 5, 2022, 12:35 PM to 1:50 PM
Climate Finance and Banking Regulation: Beyond Disclosure?
Financial Institutions and Consumer Financial Services

U.S. banking regulation has been slower than other forms of financial regulation (and slower than in Europe) to address climate-related financial risks. This panel explores the role of banking regulation in addressing the physical and transition risks from climate change. Possible measures include: mandatory climate risk disclosures by banks; supervisory assessments of climate-related financial risk; capital and liquidity regulation; scenario tests; determination of the appropriate role of banks in mitigating climate risk; financial stability oversight of climate risk; and action (through the Community Reinvestment Act and otherwise) to deter harms to disadvantaged communities and communities of color from climate change.

    • Patricia A. McCoy, Boston College Law School, Moderator
    • Christina Skinner, Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Speaker
    • Graham Steele, Stanford Graduate School of Business, Speaker
    • Hilary J. Allen, American University, Washington College of Law, Speaker
    • Nakita Cuttino, Georgetown University Law Center, Speaker from a

…