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Haskell Murray

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Professor Murray teaches business law, business ethics, and alternative dispute resolution courses to undergraduate and graduate students. Currently, his research focuses on corporate governance, mergers & acquisitions, sports law, and social entrepreneurship law issues.

Professor Murray is the 2018-19 President of the Southeastern Academy of Legal Studies in Business (“SEALSB”) and is a co-editor of the Business Law Professor Blog. His articles have been published in a variety of journals, including the American Business Law Journal, the Delaware Journal of Corporate Law, the Harvard Business Law Review, and the Maryland Law Review. Read More

Posted by request. Looks like a good event:

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Law and Ethics of Big Data
Hosted and Sponsored by:
Washington and Lee University School of Law
Lexington, Virginia

Co-Hosted by:
Kenan Institute for Ethics, Duke University; The Virginia Tech Center for Business Intelligence Analytics; The
Department of Business Law and Ethics, Kelley School of Business, Indiana University Bloomington

Wednesday-Thursday, April 24-25, 2019

Abstract Submission Deadline: Friday, March 1, 2019

We are pleased to announce the annual research colloquium, “Law and Ethics of Big Data,” which will be held this
year at Washington and Lee University School of Law in Lexington, Virginia. This year’s colloquium is co-hosted
by Associate Professor Margaret Hu at Washington and Lee University School of Law and Kenan Visiting Professor
at Duke University’s Kenan Institute for Ethics, Associate Professor Angie Raymond of Indiana University, and
Professor Janine Hiller of Virginia Tech.

Due to the success of this multi-year event that now is in its sixth year, the colloquium will be expanded and we seek broad participation from multiple disciplines. Please consider submitting research that is ready for the discussion stage. Each paper will receive detailed constructive critique. We are targeting cross-discipline opportunities for colloquium participants.

Examples of…

On February 15, the Washington & Lee Law Review will host a one-day symposium on the intersection of Civil Rights and Shareholder Activism.  In March of 1968, a civil rights organization, the Medical Committee for Human Rights, received five shares of Dow Chemical Company stock as a gift.  Well-known for its work deploying doctors and nurses on the front lines of civil rights protests across the American South, MCHR had no track record of shareholder activism.  Within a year, however, MCHR had initiated its first shareholder proposal to stop Dow from manufacturing and selling napalm for military use in the Vietnam War.  The activism campaign advanced MCHR’s commitment to civil and human rights, but it also represented an important innovation in shareholders’ use of corporate governance tools. The civil rights group had catalyzed a movement: shareholder activism campaigns on pollution, minority hiring, and apartheid were quickly brought by other shareholders at major U.S. companies like General Motors and Honeywell, Inc. and, over the decades, numerous other campaigns have followed.

Fifty years later, shareholder activism on ESG matters is surging. In the 2019 Proxy Season, companies will face shareholder campaigns on economic inequality, human rights, discrimination on the basis of race, gender…

By now, almost everyone has seen the new Gillette ad criticizing toxic masculinity and urging men to be better men:

Reactions range from offense at Gillette’s corporate moralizing to genuine appreciation and celebration.  Slate captured the corporate logic effectively:

The wide range of reactions was, of course, the point: to create a conversation starter. To rile people and get them talking about Gillette. To increase brand recognition amid Gillette’s declining market share and, ultimately, make Procter & Gamble more money. Much of the criticism of the ad has revolved around the company’s motives.

Yet P&G can have financial incentives and still make an ad worth lauding. These two things are not mutually exclusive. And this ad is a step in the right direction, because the more we collectively hear the message that sexual harassment is unacceptable, that bullying is wrong, and that helping victims is noble, the more this message will shape our—and our children’s—everyday choices. We need to get messages like this from our leaders, teachers, parents—andfrom television shows, movies, books, songs, and advertisements. Cultural shifts happen when every aspect of culture embraces and normalizes a change.

Some business law professors commenting on Twitter…

In case you’re not also subscribed, I wanted to flag this post from the Legal Scholarship Blog.  It’s an excellent resource for seeing what’s going on and calls for papers where you might want to apply.  This time, there is real money available from the Risk Institute:

The Risk Institute at The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business invites area-specific and inter-disciplinary proposals for research covering all areas in risk and risk management. Priority will be given to topics of the Risk Institute’s 2018-2019 risk series:

  • human resources risk
  • aging workforce
  • differing risks between born digital and traditional firms
  • third-party risk
  • predictive metrics and modeling
  • cybercrime/data fraud

The main focus of the research proposal should be understanding or managing risks with respect to any of these topics.

Funding will be up to $10,000 cash or research support per person with a maximum of $30,000 per project.

Proposals are due January 31, 2019, and should be limited to five pages plus necessary appendices.

Twitter tells me that there was a good bit of conversation at the AALS conference about the law review-based system of scholarship. If you want to try your hand at a different system, namely the double-blind peer-reviewed system, here is a call for papers from a legal journal in that system. 

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The Atlantic Law Journal is now open for submissions and is soliciting papers for its upcoming Volume 21 with an expected publication date in summer 2019. We are now also accepting book review submissions for books related to business law/society/legal studies.  The Atlantic Law Journal is listed in Cabell’s, fully searchable in Thomson-Reuters Westlaw, and listed by Washington & Lee. The journal is a double-blind peer-reviewed publication of the Mid-Atlantic Academy of Legal Studies in Business (MAALSB). Acceptance rates are at or less than 25%, and have been for all our recent history. We publish articles that explore the intersection of business and law, as well as pedagogical topics. Please see our website at http://www.atlanticlawjournal.org/submissions/ for the submission guidelines, the review timeline, and more information regarding how to submit. Submissions or questions can be sent to Managing Editor, Dr. Evan Peterson, at petersea@udmercy.edu.

The early registration deadline for Law & Society is nearly upon us.  For corporate and securities, this year is being organized by Wendy Gerwick Couture at Idaho Law.  The current set of panels looks fascinating. We’ll also have an Author-Meets-Reader Session featuring The Rise of the Working Class Shareholder: Labor’s Last Best
Weapon by David Webber.  It’s in Washington, D.C. this year. 

We now have some new developments on the non-attorney representative front.  After taking time to consider responses to its prior request for comments, FINRA’s board has approved a new rule proposal to prohibit “compensated non-attorney representatives from practicing in the FINRA arbitration and mediation forum.”  Once filed with the SEC, the proposed rule should be available here.

If you are looking for podcasts over the break, I recommend Professor Brian Frye’s Ipse Dixit. I have only listened to a handful of the 75 episodes, but I learned something new in each one.

A big thanks to Brian for putting all of these podcasts on legal scholarship together. The podcasts cover a wide range of legal topics, mostly in an interview format with other professors. 

The SEC Investor Advisory Committee met last week and considered how to respond to the unpaid arbitration awards problem.  This is an issue I’ve written about before.   As more outside attention has focused on the issue, FINRA has begun releasing statistics on how many arbitration awards go unpaid.  In 2017, about $25 million in awards went unpaid–amounting to roughly a third of the awards and a quarter of the total damages won.

The Investor Advisory Committee heard from an informed panel, taking statements from Christine Lazaro, President of the Public Investors Arbitration Bar Association (PIABA) and professor at St. John’s School of Law, Jill Gross, a professor at Pace Law School, Richard Berry, the head of FINRA’s dispute resolution group, and Robin Traxler, from the Financial Services Institute (also known as FSI).  There is also pending legislation on this issue from Senator Warren with Senator Kennedy on board as a bipartisan co-sponsor.

The issue matters for retirement savers swindled by bad brokers.  Professor Lazaro provided the committee with the stories of wronged investors, including the problem facing one retired couple:

Take for example the Sheas. The couple has been together for over 40 years. Mr.

…

Women and underrepresented founders face a tremendous funding gap when compared to their male, and particularly white male, peers.   Consider just the 2016 statistics.   All-male firms raised $58.2 billion in venture capital funding while all-female firms raised only 1.46 billion.  The funding gap grows starker when we look at black-female-founded firms.  Startups founded by black women raised an average of $36,000.  In contrasts, white men pulled in an average of $1.3 million for business ventures that failed.  

Many people see how identity affects capital allocation.  Academic research has shown that otherwise identical pitches are more favorably received when voiced by a man.  Founders can see it and try to present themselves in ways that cater to investor preferences. Ann McGinley and I have written about the gap and the extraordinary measures founders take to contort themselves and their businesses to increase their access to capital. We even categorized relatively common techniques that founders use to raise capital.  We identified substitution as when a woman sends a man in her stead as a founder or co-founder because she believes that it’s the right business decision to bypass investor bias.  We also identified something we called “manclusion” where a woman has…