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

Joseph Yockey (Iowa) has posted a new paper on social enterprise.  I have not read this one yet, but enjoyed his first article on the subject and have added this second one to my long “want to read” list.  The abstract is below.

Social enterprises generate revenue to solve social, humanitarian, and ecological problems. Their products are not a means to the end of profits, but rather profits are a means to the end of their production. This dynamic presents many of the same corporate governance issues facing other for-profit firms, including legal compliance. I contend, however, that traditional strategies for corporate compliance are incongruent to the social enterprise’s unique normative framework. Specifically, traditional compliance theory, with its prioritization of shareholder interests, stands at odds with the social enterprise’s mission-driven purpose. Attention to this distinction is essential for developing effective compliance and enforcement policies in the future. Indeed, arguably the greatest feature of the social enterprise is its potential to harness organizational characteristics that inspire the values and culture most closely linked with ethical behavior — without resort to more costly or intrusive measures.

The below is from an e-mail I received earlier this week about an impact investment legal symposium on October 2, 2014 from 8:30 a.m. to noon (eastern):

Bingham, in conjunction with the International Transactions Clinic of the University of Michigan Law School, Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE) Legal Working Group and Impact Investing Legal Working Group, is proud to present a legal symposium on Building a Legal Community of Practice to Add Still More Value to Impact Investments.

The symposium will be held at Bingham McCutchen LLP’s New York offices at 339 Park Avenue or you can attend virtually by registering here.

The panelists include Deborah Burand (Michigan), Jonathan Ng (Ashoka), Keren Raz (Paul Weiss), and many others.   

Randall Thomas (Vanderbilt Law School) and Lawrence Van Horn (Owen Graduate School of Management, Vanderbilt University) have posted a new article entitled Are Football Coaches Overpaid? Evidence from Their Employment Contracts.

This is a rare article that appeals to both my academic interests and my interest in football. Rarely do these two set of interests overlap in my life, and the article has prompted me to think of ways I might incorporate my football knowledge into future academic articles. 

The article’s abstract reads:

The commentators and the media pay particular attention to the compensation of high profile individuals. Whether these are corporate CEOs, or college football coaches, many critics question whether their levels of remuneration are appropriate. In contrast, corporate governance scholarship has asserted that as long as the compensation is tied to shareholder interests, it is the employment contract and incentives therein which should be the source of scrutiny, not the absolute level of pay itself. We employ this logic to study the compensation contracts of Division I FBS college football coaches during the period 2005-2013. Our analysis finds many commonalities between the structure and incentives of the employment contracts of CEOs and these football coaches. These contracts’ features

…

We are less than a month away from the AALS Faculty Recruitment Conference (a/k/a the “meat market” or the “FRC”). Reading the comments at PrawfsBlawg from the nervous candidates brings me back to my time on the meat market in 2010.

In this post, I hope to encourage hiring committees to engage in some perspective taking and improve the typical law school hiring process for candidates.

Instead of focusing on schools that I felt needed improvement in their hiring processes, I want to highlight one hiring committee that I think got it exactly right. The hiring committee was from The University of Oklahoma College of Law, made up of Emily Hammond (now at George Washington), Katheleen Guzman, and Joseph Thai.

Four years later, I remember their names vividly. I only made it to the FRC interview level with Oklahoma, and never got a call-back with the school, which makes their conduct that much more admirable. Oklahoma’s hiring committee excelled in three areas that I think all hiring committees should focus on and that I discuss more fully after the break: communication, transparency, and humanity.

NDSU

First Joshua Fershee visits North Dakota, now ESPN’s College GameDay. 

North Dakota State University, which is being featured on GameDay this morning, is also one of the schools looking for a business law professor (albeit a “lecturer”) on my updated list here.

While most of my co-bloggers teach at much bigger sports schools than I, as I mentioned previously, it is a lot of fun teaching at a school that gets at least occasional national attention for its sports teams.