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Benjamin P. Edwards

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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

The College of Business Administration at Central Michigan University (“CMU”) invites applications for two separate entrepreneurship faculty positions to begin service on August 22, 2022.  CMU encourages applicants from diverse academic backgrounds to apply.

The first open position is for a tenure-track assistant professor.  Candidates must have a terminal degree: (i) a Ph.D. or D.B.A in entrepreneurship or a related business field (from an AACSB accredited institution); or, (ii) a J.D. (from an ABA accredited institution) with significant entrepreneurship-related experience; or, (iii) other relevant terminal degree with significant entrepreneurship-related experience. For those pursuing a Ph.D. or D.B.A., ABD applicants will be considered if it is clear that the applicant’s degree will be conferred at the time of appointment.  Tenure-track faculty are generally expected to teach three courses per semester, maintain an active research agenda, and actively participate in service activities.

The second open position is for a fixed-term faculty member at the rank of Lecturer I.  The candidate must have: (i) an earned a master’s degree in a business or other discipline related to entrepreneurship; or, (ii) a relevant terminal degree (such as a Ph.D. or D.B.A in entrepreneurship or related business field or a J.D.).  The candidate must also…

BLPB(NIULawLogo)Assistant Professor

College of Law

Northern Illinois University

NORTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF LAW invites applications for an anticipated opening for an entry-level tenure-track faculty position beginning August 2022. Duties include engaging in high quality research and teaching, as well as being an active participant in law school and university service. Applicants must hold a J.D. degree from an ABA accredited law school, or a foreign law school equivalent, and must provide evidence of the potential for engaging in high quality research and teaching. 

NIU Law is a public law school. It resides at the heart of a diverse and active university campus of over 17,000 students in DeKalb, Illinois, located on the western edge of the Chicago metropolitan area.

Preferred qualifications include record of scholarly publication, teaching experience (particularly in a law school), legal practice experience, strong law school record, law journal membership, and clerkship experience.

We will consider candidates with a broad range of teaching and research interests. Our needs include, but are not limited to, Business Law, Civil Procedure, Commercial Law, Tax, Trusts and Estates, and skills courses. Applications are encouraged from women, members of minority groups, and others whose background and experience would contribute to the diversity…

Expressions of interest due November 19, 2021
Drafts due December 22, 2021

Journal of Affordable Housing & Community Development Law

GUIDELINES FOR AUTHORS

The Journal of Affordable Housing & Community Development Law is the official quarterly publication of the Forum on Affordable Housing and Community Development Law of the American Bar Association. The Journal is the nation’s only law journal dedicated to affordable housing, fair housing and community development law. The Journal educates readers and provides a forum for discussion and resolution of problems in these fields by publishing articles from distinguished law professors, policy advocates and practitioners. This issue, which will hit mailboxes in late April of 2022, will have a theme: preservation of affordable housing, expiring use restrictions, and “Year 15” issues. Your submission does not have to address the theme but we will be looking out for pieces that do.

Article/Essay Length. The Journal welcomes essays (typically no longer than 6,000 words) or articles (typically 5,000 – 10,000 words). Generally, articles are more thoroughly researched and footnoted than essays.

Style. The writing should be appropriate for a readership that consists primarily of lawyers. Authors should avoid excess verbiage, long quotations and jargon. Authors should use gender-neutral language.…

Gonzaga University School of Law in Spokane, Washington seeks a Full-time Assistant, Associate, or Full Professor (Tenured or Tenure Track) who will typically teach two courses per semester, which may include first-year and/or required courses. Our curricular needs include Contracts, Bankruptcy, Secured Transactions, and other Commercial Law courses; experiential courses in the realm of business law; and academic support or bar preparation courses taught in conjunction with doctrinal courses. Gonzaga Law embraces a unified faculty model, in which all faculty members are supported as scholars in all subject matter areas and have the opportunity to teach experiential, clinical, academic support, or bar preparation courses if desired. Candidates must demonstrate the ability to be an outstanding teacher, a commitment to service, and excellent scholarly potential, particularly in alignment with one or both of Gonzaga Law’s two academic Centers – the Center for Civil & Human Rights and the Center for Law, Ethics & Commerce.

Gonzaga Law embraces its humanist mission of educating the whole person and preparing lawyers to serve marginalized populations in an increasingly international legal market. Law faculty instruct law students, provide service to the law school and University, and engage with other professionals and the public to contribute…

For prospective law teachers, “[t]he Illinois Academic Fellowship Program helps new legal academics place into tenure-stream positions at U.S. law schools.”  More specifically, the University of Illinois College of Law

 . . . is accepting applications for fellowship positions for the 2022-2023 academic year. Applicants should submit a cover letter, CV, and a research agenda at https://jobs.illinois.edu/academic-job-board/job-details?jobID=149338. Applicants may also submit up to three letters of reference.

Applicants are strongly encouraged to submit their materials by January 1, 2022. We expect interviews to take place starting in January 2022. No applications will be accepted after January 31, 2022. For assistance with the application process, please email lehigh@illinois.edu.

The full posting is available here.

Open Rank – Tenure-Track Professor of Law

The University of New Hampshire Franklin Pierce School of Law (UNH Franklin Pierce), a national leader in legal education with a commitment to inclusion, diversity, and quality engagement for all, is pleased to announce that it is currently seeking applicants for two tenure-track appointments to its full-time faculty starting in August 2022. The law school has a number of curricular needs but is particularly interested in candidates with subject-matter expertise and scholarship in Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, Evidence, Torts, Business and Commercial Law, Technology Law, and/or Intellectual Property. Both first-time faculty and junior lateral faculty are welcome to apply.

Additional Job Information

Cover letter should be addressed to Professor Courtney Brooks, co-chair of the Faculty Appointments Committee. In your cover letter, please describe your scholarly agenda, why you are interested in this position, and what makes you a strong candidate in light of the required and preferred qualifications described above. In the required Diversity Statement, please address how you have contributed to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in your scholarship and work. This position is open until filled. Review of applications will begin immediately. Priority review date: November 19, 2021.

Link to the full

Earlier this year, Transactions: The Tennessee Journal of Business Law, published papers presented at the 2020 Connecting the Threads IV symposium, held on Zoom just about a year ago.  Back in July, I wrote about my coauthored piece from the 2020 symposium.  That was my primary contribution to the event and the published output.

However, I also had the privilege of commenting on two papers at the symposium last year, and my comments were published in the Transactions symposium volume. I have been wanting to post about those published commentaries for a number of months, but other news just seemed more important.  Given the recent completion of this year’s Connecting the Threads V symposium, it seems like a good time to make those posts.  I start with the first of the two here.

This post covers my commentary on Stefan Padfield’s paper, An Introduction to Viewpoint Diversity Shareholder Proposals.  It was a fascinating read for me.  I was unaware of this genre of shareholder proposal before I picked up Stefan’s draft.  If you also are in the dark about these shareholder proposals, his article offers a great introduction.  Essentially, viewpoint diversity shareholder proposals are shareholder-initiated matters…

The Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) Chairman, Gary Gensler, recently directed the staff to present recommendations to “freshen up” and tighten some provisions in Exchange Act Rule 10b5-1. In response, the SEC’s Investor Advisory Committee proposed new restrictions on the use of 10b5-1(c) trading plans as an affirmative defense against insider trading liability. The proposed changes are designed to address concerns that “some plans are used to engage in opportunistic trading behavior that contravenes the intent behind the rule,” and they are consistent with recommendations outlined in the  Promoting Transparent Standards for Corporate Insiders Act that passed the House of Representatives in April 2021.

But any proposed restrictions to trading plans must be considered in light of the broader context of Rule 10b5-1, and the motivation behind the affirmative defense’s adoption.

The courts have interpreted Section 10b of the Exchange Act as prohibiting insiders from trading in their own company’s shares only if they do so “on the basis” of material nonpublic information. This element of intent for insider trading liability can be difficult for regulators and prosecutors to satisfy because insiders who possess material nonpublic information at the time of their trade can often claim that they did…

I suggested in my last two posts (here and here) that as Congress and the SEC contemplate reforms to our current insider trading regime, it is important for us all to explore our intuitions about what we think insider trading is, why it is wrong, who is harmed by it, and the nature and extent of the harm. If we are going to rethink how we impose criminal and civil penalties for insider trading, we should have some confidence that the proscribed conduct is wrongful and why. One way to do this is to place ourselves in the shoes of traders and ask, “What would I do?” or “What do I think about that?” With this in mind, I developed some scenarios designed to test our attitudes regarding trading scenarios that distinguish the four historical insider trading regimes (laissez faire, fiduciary-fraud, equal access, and parity of information).

In the previous post, I offered a scenario that would result in liability under equal-access and parity-of-information regimes, but not under the fiduciary-fraud and laissez-faire models. Those of you who were not convinced that the trading in that scenario was wrongful may favor one of the less restrictive models.

In today’s…

As Congress and the SEC continue to contemplate reforms to the U.S. insider-trading enforcement regime, I suggested in my last post that it is important for us all to explore our intuitions about what we think insider trading is, why it is wrong, who is harmed by it, and the nature and extent of the harm. If we are going to rethink how we impose criminal and civil penalties for insider trading, we should have some confidence that the proscribed conduct is wrongful and why. One way to do this is to place ourselves in the shoes of traders and ask, “What would I do?” or “What do I think about that?” To this end, I have developed some scenarios designed to test our attitudes regarding trading scenarios that distinguish the four historical insider trading regimes (laissez faire, fiduciary-fraud, equal access, and parity of information).

In the last post, I offered a scenario that would result in liability under a parity-of-information regime, but not under the other three. Those of you who were not convinced that the trading in that scenario was wrongful may favor one of the less restrictive models.

In this post, I offer the following scenario to…