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Douglas Moll

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Professor Moll graduated with highest honors from the University of Virginia in 1991 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Commerce. He attended Harvard Law School where he served as the Developments in the Law chairperson on the Harvard Law Review. Professor Moll graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1994.

Professor Moll teaches in the areas of business organizations, business torts, and commercial law. His courses include Business Organizations, Doing Deals, Business Torts, Secured Financing, and Sales and Leasing. He is the co-author of a treatise on closely held corporations, three casebooks on business law (closely held business organizations, business organizations generally, and business torts), and a concise hornbook on business organizations. He has also written numerous law review articles focusing on closely held businesses and related fiduciary duty and oppression doctrines. Read More

Benjamin Means (South Carolina) recently posted a new article to SSRN entitled Wealth Inequality and Family Businesses. The article is forthcoming in the Emory Law Journal.

This article builds on Ben’s previous, extensive and well-regarded research on family businesses. Ben’s analysis of the relationship between family businesses and wealth inequality is carefully done and thought-provoking. The abstract is posted below, and I recommend reading the entire article.

Wealth inequality endangers democratic values and calls for a public response. This Article contends that family businesses merit special scrutiny because they control vast amounts of private wealth and combine two of society’s most important economic institutions: family and business. Accordingly, family businesses implicate concerns regarding both inherited wealth and the concentration of economic power made possible by the corporate form.

Despite their economic significance, little has been done to investigate whether family businesses contribute to wealth inequality. This Article offers the first legal, and one of the only academic, treatments of the topic and shows that family businesses play a double role. On the one hand, family businesses reinforce existing disparities in wealth and opportunity. Heirs, after all, stand to benefit from the hard work of previous generations. On the

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PrawfsBlawg has compiled an entry-level hiring report for law professors a number of years. Brian Leiter tracks law professor lateral hires with tenure. These lists serve at least two purposes:

  • welcoming new hires into the academy (or to their new positions) and
  • providing a summary of the state of the legal academic hiring market

As a curious law firm associate, with hopes of an academic career, lists of this type were especially valuable in shining light on the qualifications of new academic hires.

While the lists of law professor hires seem well-covered elsewhere, I have not seen similar hiring lists for legal studies professor hires in business schools. For this first edition, I am simply pasting the material sent to me via e-mail or in the comments. I will cover full-time entry level or lateral hires in this list, but may split them into separate posts in future years. I will continue to update this list periodically, as some business schools may still be hiring.

Updated 7/7/2015

Details below the page break.

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Professor Todd Haugh (Indiana University – Kelley School of Business) will be joining us as a guest blogger for the month of May. Todd is an assistant professor of business law & ethics and has focused his research on white collar crime and sentencing. His most recent work deals with “the financial crisis and how white collar offenders rationalize their conduct.” We welcome Todd to the Business Law Prof Blog and look forward to his posts.   

Almost three years ago, I helped organize a conference on social enterprise law. (The law review members, especially Rachel Bauer and Sam Moultrie, were responsible for most of the organizing and did an excellent job). 

My co-bloggers Joan Heminway and Marcia Narine were among the speakers.

Also joining us was Michael Pirron of Impact Makers, one of the first certified B corporations in Virginia. While Impact Makers was a certified B corporation at the time of the conference, it was organized as a Virginia nonstock corporation; now Impact Makers is organized as a benefit corporation. Michael did an excellent job serving as a panelist and the keynote speaker.

Recently, I saw Michael back in the news. He transferred ownership of his company (valued at approximately $11.5 million) to two foundations. As Michael mentioned to me over e-mail, this was not a radical departure from his previous business model for Impact Makers. Previously, Impact Makers donated 100% of its profits to area charities, so this move just formalized their previous commitment.  Impact Makers has given away approximately $1 million to date.

At the University of Connecticut social enterprise and entrepreneurship conference I attended and presented at last…

Bain Deval

The New York Times DealB%k recently reported that Deval Patrick, former governor of Massachusetts, will join Bain Capital to head a new social impact fund.

These types of social impact funds seem to becoming more and more common. Social impact funds, however, vary greatly. Some social impact funds appear to be primarily focused on profits (while simply avoiding some “sin stocks“), others focus on serious social enterprises, and others fall somewhere in-between.  

I recently finished my law review submission season, placing two articles: The Social Enterprise Law Market at Maryland Law Review (on jurisdictional competition and social enterprise entity forms) and An Early Report on Benefit Reports at West Virginia Law Review (on data collected last summer on statutory reporting compliance by benefit corporations).

Below, I share a few words of advice for my new law review editors and any law review editor readers. I share this advice acknowledging that I disregarded much of it when I was an editor on my school’s law review. Also, as mentioned below, I fully recognize and appreciate the work law review editors put into our articles.   

Consider Blind Review. I still haven’t heard a good argument against law reviews moving to blind review of articles. A very few, maybe two, of the top-ranked journals appear to have made the move, but the vast majority have not. 

Consider Peer Review. I understand, a bit better, the pushback against a traditional peer-review system, but consider involving your faculty in the process more heavily and consider obtaining outside faculty reviewers (as some of the elite journals are already doing). 

Consider Exclusive Submission Windows. A few journals are…

UL_Lafayette_Logo

Some business schools are still hiring for this coming August. Here is a recent legal studies professor posting by University of Louisiana-Lafayette. University of Louisiana-Lafayette is a special school to me because they made my first tenure track offer, which was quickly followed by an offer from another school that was in a better geographic location for my family. While my decision was definitely the right one for our family, I have only good things to say about University of Louisiana-Lafayette. They ran a professional search process and have a collegial, bright faculty. Also, Lafayette seemed to have a wonderful, unique culture and excellent food.

I have updated my legal studies professor openings list here.

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At the end of next week, I will be at the University of Connecticut School of Business and the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center for their Social Enterprise and Entrepreneurship Conference.

Further information about the conference is available here, a portion of which is reproduced below:

In October 2014, Connecticut joined a growing number of states that empower for-profit corporations to expand their core missions to expressly include human rights, environmental sustainability, and other social objectives. As a new legal class of businesses, these benefit corporations join a growing range of social entrepreneurship and enterprise models that have the potential to have positive social impacts on communities in Connecticut and around the world. Designed to evaluate and enhance this potential, SE2 will feature a critical examination of the various aspects of social entrepreneurship, as well as practical guidance on the challenges and opportunities presented by the newly adopted Connecticut Benefit Corporation Act and other forms of social enterprise.

Presenters at the academic symposium on April 23 are:

  • Mystica Alexander, Bentley University
  • Norman Bishara, University of Michigan
  • Kate Cooney, Yale University
  • Lucien Dhooge, Georgia Institute of Technology
  • Gwendolyn Gordon, University of Pennsylvania
  • Gil Lan, Ryerson University
  • Diana Leyden, University of

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On April 3, Delaware Governor Jack Markell signed the Delaware Rapid Arbitration Act (DRAA) into law. The DRAA becomes effective on May 4, 2015. The DRAA is a different take on the attempted Chancery Arbitration that the Third Circuit ruled unconstitutional in 2013.

Under the DRAA, all parties in the dispute must agree to the arbitration. The DRAA does not use sitting judges to arbitrate, as the Chancery Arbitration attempted to do, but the Delaware Court of Chancery will be “facilitating” the process under the DRAA. Among other things, the Delaware Court of Chancery can assist in appointing an arbitrator for the process, enter final judgments, and determine an arbitrator’s fees. The Delaware Supreme Court can hear appeals of awards. 

The DRAA appears to be encouraging a relatively fast and cost effective dispute resolution process. The process is limited to 180 days – final award to be issued within 120 days of the arbitrator’s appointment and allowable extensions up to an additional 60 days. 

Given the privacy and the apparent time and cost-savings, this may be an attractive alternative dispute resolution process for various businesses. 

For more analysis see:

David J. Berger (Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati)

Brian Quinn

From the Faculty Lounge:

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This just in:

The Penn State Law Review is conducting an exclusive spring-cycle article review. Any article submitted to this exclusive review between now and April 19th will be evaluated by April 27th. If you have submitted an article to the Penn State Law Review previously, you must resubmit your article for consideration in the exclusive article review.

By submitting your article, you agree to accept an offer for publication, should one be extended. Any articles accepted will be published in Volume 120: Issue 1 or Issue 2 of this review—both of which are slated for publication in summer of 2015.

If you have an article that you would like to submit, please e-mail an attached copy of the article, along with your cv and cover letter, to esg5028@law.psu.edu . Please include “Exclusive Spring 2015 Article Review” in the subject line.