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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

928 days.

That’s how long we’ve been waiting for the SEC’s exemption for crowdfunded securities offerings.

The JOBS Act, which authorized the crowdfunding exemption, was signed by President Obama on April 5, 2012. The act required the SEC to enact the necessary rules within 270 days. The SEC has now missed that deadline, December 31, 2012, by 658 days.

To put it in context, when the JOBS Act passed, I had three grandchildren. I now have six. I may have great grandchildren by the time the SEC acts.

The 270-day deadline was unrealistic, given the time required to draft rules from scratch and the delay imposed by the notice-and-comment requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act. But the SEC finally proposed the rules on October 23, 2013, almost a year ago. The deadline for commenting on the proposal expired last February and the SEC still hasn’t done anything. It’s getting a little ridiculous.

I’m on record that the crowdfunding exemption passed by Congress is unlikely to be very useful. (See my article analyzing the JOBS Act’s crowdfunding provisions.) But we won’t know until we actually have a crowdfunding exemption. At the SEC’s current rate of progress, some new technology…

Several years ago, I was at the front of the classroom preparing for my Business Associations class when a student approached and asked if her friend could sit in on the class. “My friend’s interested in law school,” she said, “and I’m trying to talk her out of it.”

No comment needed. Res ipsa loquitur.

Like many people I know, I am a huge fan of Frank Pasquale.  Thus, I was very excited to read his Balkanization interview (available here) discussing his forthcoming book, “The Black Box Society.”  The interview touches on a wide range of topics, so you should go read the whole thing, but here is an excerpt to tempt you in case you’re on the fence:

I think our academic culture is very good at analysis, but oft-adrift when it comes to synthesis. Specialization obscures the big picture. And law can succumb to this as easily [as] any other field. For example, in the case of internet companies, cyberlawyers too often confine themselves to saying: “Google and Facebook should win key copyright cases, and subsequent trademark cases, and antitrust cases, and get certain First Amendment immunities, and not be classified as a ‘consumer reporting agency’ under relevant privacy laws,” etc. They may well be correct in every particular case. But what happens when a critical mass of close cases combines with network effects to give a few firms incredible power over our information about (and even interpretation of) events?

Similarly, old banking laws may fit poorly with

…

This coming Tuesday, I am scheduled to provide a brief overview of the corporate law/theory aspects of Hobby Lobby as part of the University of Akron’s Supreme Court Roundup.  What follows are the seven key quotes from the opinion that I plan to focus on (time permitting) in order to highlight what I see as the key relevant issues raised by the opinion. Comments are appreciated.

Issue 1: Did corporate theory play a role in Hobby Lobby?

While I believe the majority made a pitch for applying a pragmatic, anti-theoretical approach (“When rights, whether constitutional or statutory, are extended to corporations, the purpose is to protect the rights of … people.” Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., 134 S. Ct. 2751, 2768 (2014)), the following quote strikes me as conveying an underlying aggregate view of corporations:

In holding that Conestoga, as a “secular, for-profit corporation,” lacks RFRA protection, the Third Circuit wrote as follows: “General business corporations do not, separate and apart from the actions or belief systems of their individual owners or employees, exercise religion. They do not pray, worship, observe sacraments or take other religiously-motivated actions separate and apart from the intention and direction of their individual actors.” 724 F.3d, at 385 (emphasis added). All of this is true—but quite beside the point. Corporations, “separate and apart from” the human beings who own, run, and are employed by them, cannot do anything at all.

134 S. Ct. at 2768.

The following paragraph is an excerpt from Micro-Symposium on Competing Theories of Corporate Governance, 62 UCLA L. Rev. Disc. 66, which can be found online (here) and is also available via Westlaw.

On Friday, April 11, and Saturday, April 12, 2014, the UCLA School of Law Lowell Milken Institute for Business Law and Policy sponsored a conference on competing theories of corporate governance…. This conference provided a venue for distinguished legal scholars to define the competing models, critique them, and explore their implications for various important legal doctrines. In addition to an oral presentation, each conference participant was invited to contribute a very brief essay of up to 750 words (inclusive of footnotes) on their topic to this micro-symposium being published by the UCLA Law Review’s online journal, Discourse. These essays provide a concise but powerful overview of the current state of corporate governance thinking….

The included essays:

  • Stephen M. Bainbridge, An Abridged Case For Director Primacy
  • George S. Georgiev, Shareholder vs. Investor Primacy in Federal Corporate Governance
  • David Millon, Team Production Theory: A Critical Appreciation
  • Usha Rodrigues, David and Director Primacy
  • Stefan J. Padfield , Citizens United, Concession Theory and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)

…

I have posted an updated draft of my latest piece, “Corporate Social Responsibility & Concession Theory” (forthcoming __ Wm. & Mary Bus. L. Rev. __) on SSRN (here). Here is the abstract:

This Essay examines three related propositions: (1) Voluntary corporate social responsibility (CSR) fails to effectively advance the agenda of a meaningful segment of CSR proponents; (2) None of the three dominant corporate governance theories – director primacy, shareholder primacy, or team production theory – support mandatory CSR as a normative matter; and, (3) Corporate personality theory, specifically concession theory, can be a meaningful source of leverage in advancing mandatory CSR in the face of opposition from the three primary corporate governance theories. In examining these propositions, this Essay makes the additional claims that Citizens United: (A) supports the proposition that corporate personality theory matters; (B) undermines one of the key supports of the shareholder wealth maximization norm; and (C) highlights the political nature of this debate. Finally, I note that the Supreme Court’s recent Hobby Lobby decision does not undermine my CSR claims, contrary to the suggestions of some commentators.

I expect to have at least one more meaningful round of edits, so all comments…

All of us here at the Business Law Prof Blog join all those inside and outside the legal blogging community who are today mourning the loss of Dan Markel.  Our thoughts and prayers go out to all the loved ones he left behind. 

From PrawfsBlawg (here):

We Have Lost Our Beloved Friend, Dan Markel

We write this together, all of us, as a community. Our friend Dan Markel has been taken from us, suddenly and terribly. His law school, the Florida State University College of Law, will issue an announcement in due time. We do not have all the details, but our understanding is that Dan was shot and killed. Painful as it is to say that, and as little as we know, the early news reports left enough room for speculation that it seemed necessary to say that much. The terrible, senseless nature of his loss makes it all the harder to bear.

All of us here on Prawfsblawg live in different places and come from different backgrounds. What we have in common, with many others, is Dan. His network of friends and loved ones–and he had a great deal of love for all his many friends…