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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

Thanks to faithful BLPB reader Scott Killingsworth for the tip about this new article appearing in the New Yorker detailing the scholarship and advocacy of renowned Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe.  The article raises questions about conflicts of interest between scholarship and advocacy.

[I]t would also be foolish to ignore the inherent tension in searching for truth while also working for paying clients. The scholar-warrior may lapse into a far more contemptible figure: the scholar for hire, who sells his name and his title for cash. A subtler danger comes from the well-known and nearly unavoidable tendency lawyers have of identifying with their clients. 

The article also highlights his role in the current debate on corporate constitutional rights.

Tribe has taken a strong view of individual rights; his view of corporate rights is similar, and in this capacity he has at times advanced constitutional arguments that might invalidate great parts of the administrative state, in a manner recalling the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence of the nineteen-twenties and thirties. In that sense, the current condemnation of Tribe can be seen as part of a larger progressive backlash against the use of the Bill of Rights to serve corporate interests.

This…

The AALS Sections on Business Associations and Law & Economics are pleased to announce a Call for Papers for a joint program to be held on Friday, January 8, 2016 at the AALS 2016 Annual Meeting in New York City.  The topic of the program is “The Corporate Law and Economics Revolution 40 Years Later: The Impact of Economics and Finance Scholarship on Modern Corporate Law.”

Corporate law scholarship continues to engage in a dialogue with the wave of law and economics scholarship that exploded in the 1980s.  The law and economics revolution dramatically shifted the way that scholars, courts, practitioners, and business leaders see the relationship between management and shareholders. 

Modern corporate law theories owe much to literature in economics and finance, such as Jensen and Meckling’s 1976 article on agency costs within the firm and Eugene Fama’s work on efficient capital markets.  By the 1980s, many ambitious legal scholars were applying insights from economics and finance literature to corporate law and the capital markets.   They explored such ideas as the market for corporate control, the market for corporate law, the need for systematic corporate disclosure, the role of the board, and the role of shareholders in corporate governance.

National Business Law Scholars Conference

Thursday & Friday, June 4-5, 2015 (Seton Hall University School of Law, Newark, NJ)

The organizers have put together a great line up of speakers and this conference is becoming (has already become) an intellectual highlight for the summer.  Keynote speakers include:  SEC Commissioner Troy Paredes, and Boston College Law  Professor Kent Greenfield.

In addition to the call for papers, which has been extended to May 8th (email Eric Chaffee), the conference will feature a Plenary Panel on the Extraterritorial Application of Federal Financial Markets Regulations with the following participants: 

Colleen Baker (view bio)
Lecturer, University of Illinois, College of Business

Sean Griffith (view bio)
T.J. Maloney Chair in Business Law; Director, Fordham Corporate Law Center

Eric Pan (view bio)
Associate Director, Office of International Affairs, U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission

Joshua White (view bio)
University of Georgia, Terry College of Business

For those of you unfamiliar with the NBLSC, here’s a conference description from the organizers: 

This is the sixth annual meeting of the NBLSC, a conference which annually draws together legal scholars from across the United States and around the world. We welcome all

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Perhaps this post would have been timelier before the spring submission cycle, but hopefully it will be helpful in framing title options for pieces being developed this summer.  One of the many benefits of co-authorship is learning substantive and procedural knowledge from your collaborators.  On a recent article, I worked with three economists who have different skill sets, perspectives, and discipline standards.  When we were trying to finalize our title, we came up with several different categories or types of article titles—a framework that I will utilize again in the future and which I am sharing with you today.  We selected the “themed” based title for our article, Institutional Investing When Shareholders Are Not Supreme, and a play on words, Institutional Investors’ Appetite for Alternatives, for a shorter piece appearing on Columbia Blue Sky Blog.

 Title Framework:

SOBER: Institutional Investing after Constituency Statutes

QUESTION:  Does Changing Shareholder Value Maximization Standards Change Institutional Investors’ Behavior?

CONTRAST:  Institutional Investors Behavior Before and After Constituency Statutes

PLAY ON WORDS:  Appetite for Alternatives:  Institutional Investors’ Behavior in the Fact of Shareholder Value Maximization Pressures

FORWARD THINKING:  What Does Institutional Investors Behavior after Constituency Statutes Tell Us Regarding…

In an earlier BLPB post, I wrote about President Obama’s call for greater regulation of retirement investment brokers.  The proposed reforms focused on elevating the current standard that brokers’ investment advice must be “suitable” to something closer to an enforceable fiduciary duty to counter financial incentives for some brokers to channel investors into higher-fee investment options.  

Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Labor released new proposed rules (Proposed Rule), which would classify brokers as “fiduciaries” under ERISA but allow them to continue to receive brokerage commissions and fees (a practice that would otherwise violate ERISA conflict-of-interest rules) so long as the brokers and customers enter into a  “Best Interest Contract”.

The exemption proposed in this notice (“the Best Interest Contract Exemption”) was developed to promote the provision of investment advice that is in the best interest of retail investors such as plan participants and beneficiaries, IRA owners, and small plans.  Proposed Rule at 4.

In 1975, the DOL issued rules defining investment advice for purposes of triggering fiduciary status under ERISA and the attended duties and conflict-of-interest prohibitions.  That 1975 definition is still in use, is narrow, and excludes much of paid-for investment advice, particularly that…

CALL FOR PAPERS

Fourth European Research Conference on Microfinance

1-3 June 2015

Geneva School of Economics and Management, University of Geneva

Geneva, Switzerland

Access to suitable and affordable finance is a precondition for meeting basic human needs in incomes and employment, health, education, work, housing, energy, water and transport. Microfinance – and more broadly, financial inclusion – will continue to be on the research and policy agenda. 2015 will be a special occasion to question received notions about the link between access to finance and welfare. In 2015 the Millennium Development Goals will make place for the Sustainable Development Goals. A broad debate and exchange on micro, macro and policy topics in financial inclusion will advance our knowledge and ultimately improve institutional performance and policy. This applies in particular to issues of financial market organization, but also patterns, diversity and trade-offs in institutional performance, scope for fiscal instruments, impact of technology on efficiency and outreach etc.

The European Research Conference on Microfinance is a unique platform of exchange for academics involved in microfinance research. The three former conferences organized by the Centre for European Research in Microfinance (CERMI) at the Université Libre de Bruxelles in 2009, by the University of…

My colleague Mark Phillips recently published a short article in the Nashville Bar Journal entitled Can Entrepreneurial Education Restore Faith in Legal Education? (pgs. 6-7). Mark primarily teaches entreprenuership classes in the undergraduate and graduate business schools at Belmont University, but has a JD from NYU Law, in addition to his MBA from NYU (Stern) and his PHD from George Washington University. 

For local readers, Mark will be speaking at a Nashville Bar Association breakfast on Nov 11th (at 8 am at Noshville restaurant at 1918 Broadway, Nashville, TN 37203). Mark has also started a website (www.eEsquire.net), which may be of interest to readers.

A portion of Mark’s recent Nashville Bar Journal article is below:

A great deal was lost in legal industry during the recent recession, but perhaps the most lasting damage was inflicted upon the reputation of law schools. When news broke in 2011 that a significant number of law schools had distorted their placement figures to increase enrollment and rankings, both current and prospective law students were shocked. After a stretch of bad publicity, coupled with some inevitable lawsuits, law schools worked to erase their new-found stigma through greater disclosure and transparency. Yet

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Earlier, I posted a list of legal studies positions in business schools.

Today, I decided to go through the helpful PrawfsBlawg spreadsheet on hiring committees to draw out the law schools that listed at least one business law area of interest. The PrawfsBlawg spreadsheet is a few months old, so it is possible that the schools’ needs have changed somewhat in the interim. Also, many schools did not list any specific areas of interest, but hopefully this list is still helpful to our readers.

If readers know of any other law schools that have an interest in hiring in one or more business law areas, please leave the school name in the comments (with a link to the posting, if possible) or send me an email. Updated positions (that are not on the PrawfsBlawg list) will include a link to the posting, if possible. 

Updated 1/5/14

Alabama (business law)

Belmont (business law)

California Western (business associations)

Campbell (financial regulation)

Detroit Mercy (business law)

Florida A&M (business law)

Florida State (business law)

Fordham (international economic law)

Georgetown (transactional clinic, tenure track)

Loyola (Los Angeles) (associate clinical professor/director of business law practicum)

Maryland (business law)

North Carolina (corporate finance, international business…

I am back teaching law students again this semester, in addition to teaching business school students. Last class, I did my “mid-course” teaching evaluations in the law school, which I do voluntarily each semester to gauge how the courses are going for the students. Almost always, I pick up on some important trends from the responses. One somewhat frustrating thing, however, is that students often want contradicting things. (e.g., “the previous class review is extremely helpful” and “the previous class review is a complete waste of time.”)

The Lon Fuller quote below, from his article On Teaching Law, 3 Stan. L. Rev. 35, 42-43 (1950), helped me realize that some of the contradition, even within the same individual, is natural and expected.

Herein lies a dilemma for student and teacher. The good student really wants contradictory things from his legal education. He wants the thrill of exploring a wilderness and he wants to know where he stands every foot of the way. He wants a subject matter sufficiently malleable so that he can feel that he himself may help to shape it, so that he can have a sense of creative participation in defining and formulating it. At the

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