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Joan Heminway

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Professor Heminway brought nearly 15 years of corporate practice experience to the University of Tennessee College of Law when she joined the faculty in 2000. She practiced transactional business law (working in the areas of public offerings, private placements, mergers, acquisitions, dispositions, and restructurings) in the Boston office of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP from 1985 through 2000.

She has served as an expert witness and consultant on business entity and finance and federal and state securities law matters and is a frequent academic and continuing legal education presenter on business law issues. Professor Heminway also has represented pro bono clients on political asylum applications, landlord/tenant appeals, social security/disability cases, and not-for-profit incorporations and related business law issues. Read More

Corporate & Securities Litigation Workshop: 

Call for Papers 

UCLA School of Law, in partnership with the University of Illinois College of Law, University of Richmond School of Law, and Vanderbilt Law School invites submissions for the Eleventh Annual Workshop for Corporate & Securities Litigation. This workshop will be held on September 20-21, 2024 in Los Angeles, California. 

Overview 

This annual workshop brings together scholars focused on corporate and securities litigation to present their scholarly works. Papers addressing any aspect of corporate and securities litigation or enforcement are eligible, including securities class actions, fiduciary duty litigation, and SEC enforcement actions. We welcome scholars working in a variety of methodologies, as well as both completed papers and works-in-progress at any stage. Authors whose papers are selected will be invited to present their work at a workshop hosted by UCLA School of Law. Participants will pay for their own travel, lodging, and other expenses. 

Submissions 

If you are interested in participating, please send the paper you would like to present, or an abstract of the paper, to corpandseclitigation@gmail.com by Friday, June 7, 2024 Please include your name, current position, and contact information in the e-mail accompanying the…

Check out the third issue of volume 73 of the DePaul Law Review!  It includes a series of papers emanating from the HBO series Succession.  As you may recall, I posted a call for papers for this issue about a year ago.  Most of the papers in the issue came from a venture originated and organized by Susan Bandes and Diane Kemker called the Waystar Royco School of Law.  I wrote about that enterprise here.  

I participated in the Waystar Royco School of Law Zoom meetings as the “Roy/Demoulas Distinguished Professor of Law and Business.”  I presented on fiduciary duty issues comparing the principals of two family businesses–The Demoulas family from Northern Massachusetts and Succession‘s Roy family from New York.  You can find my Zoom session here (Passcode: #hN+7J5N).  That presentation resulted in an essay that I wrote for the DePaul Law Review issue as well as an advanced business associations course based on the Succession series. I finish teaching that course this week.  I also presented on the topic of my Succession essay at the Popular Culture Association conference back in March.  I include a screenshot of my cover slide below.

I just posted the…

I appreciate Ann’s super helpful post on omissions liability after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Macquarie Infrastructure Corp. et al. v. Moab Partners, L. P., et al.  The hair splitting in that opinion is, in my view, dubious at best.  The Court’s creation of a legally significant concept of “pure omissions” in a public company disclosure context is doctrinally counterfactual.  The omission to state a fact required to be disclosed under a mandatory disclosure rule like Item 303 of Regulation S-K necessarily occurs in a veritable river of disclosures in SEC filings and more generally and has the potential of making those disclosures misleading.  If material, such an omission should be actionable as deceptive or manipulative conduct under Section 10(b) of and Rule 10b-5 under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended.  Period.

Of course. civil liability would require proof of all elements of the claim, including (even for public enforcement officials) the requisite state of mind or scienter.  Private class action plaintiffs also would have heightened pleading burdens.  And a criminal prosecution can only be sustained if the predicate conduct is willful, as provided in Section 32(a) of the Exchange Act.

The point is that…

Widener University Commonwealth Law School is seeking to hire two visiting professors for the 2024-25 academic year.  We have strong needs in Property, Legal Methods and Contracts.  Additional courses are flexible but we have additional needs in the areas of environmental law, intellectual property, wills & trusts, administrative law and other upper level courses.  Interested persons should submit a cover letter and resume to Professor Robyn Meadows, Chair, Faculty Appointments Committee, at rlmeadows@widener.edu.  

A federal jury found Matthew Panuwat liable for insider trading late last week.  As you may recall, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) brought an enforcement action against Mr. Panuwat in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California back in August 2021.  In that legal action, the SEC alleged that Mr Panuwat violated Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, and Rule 10b-5, seeking a permanent injunction, a civil penalty, and an officer and director bar. The theory of the case, as described by the SEC in a litigation release, was founded on Mr. Panuwat’s deception of his employer, Medivation, Inc., by using information obtained through his employment to trade in the securities of another firm in the same industry.

Matthew Panuwat, the then-head of business development at Medivation, a mid-sized, oncology-focused biopharmaceutical company, purchased short-term, out-of-the-money stock options in Incyte Corporation, another mid-cap oncology-focused biopharmaceutical company, just days before the August 22, 2016 announcement that Pfizer would acquire Medivation at a significant premium. Panuwat allegedly purchased the options within minutes of learning highly confidential information concerning the merger. According to the complaint, Panuwat knew that investment bankers had cited Incyte…

Calling attention today to Sue Guan’s paper, Finfluencers and the Reasonable Retail Investor, posted on SSRN and forthcoming to the University of Pennsylvania Law Review Online.  The abstract is copied in below.

Much recent commentary has focused on the dangers of finfluencers. Finfluencers are persons or entities that have outsize impact on investor decisions through social media influence. These finfluencers increasingly drive investing and trading trends in a wide range of asset markets, from stocks to cryptocurrency. They do so because they can provide powerful coordination mechanisms across otherwise diffuse investor and trader populations. Of course, the more influence wielded over their followers, the easier it is for finfluencers to perpetrate fraud and manipulation.

The increase in finfluencing has highlighted a gray area in the securities laws: a finfluencer’s statements may not be factually untrue or clearly deceptive, but they can be interpreted as misleading depending on the context and the particular beliefs held by the finfluencer’s social media followers. Moreover, such statements can harm investors who buy or sell based on their interpretation of the finfluencer’s activity. In other words, finfluencers can easily profit off of their followers’ trading activity while steering clear of the securities laws.…

I learned earlier this week of the death of Brooklyn Law Professor Roberta Karmel.  Roberta was extraordinary, and I miss her already.  Much has been written about her role in our profession–including her service as the first female commissioner at the Securities and Exchange Commission.  I will only add a few personal reflections here.

Roberta was both exacting and compassionate–traits that we sometimes think of as being mutually exclusive.  Small in stature, she somehow was still formidable.  When I first met her in a setting where she was commenting on academic work, I was impressed and intimidated.  Despite my extroversion, I was hesitant to introduce myself and reach out to her in friendship.  When I later admitted that to her, she laughed and (in that inimitable voice we all know and will remember) let me know how silly that was.

Roberta was the honored keynote speaker at our 2009 law graduation (hooding) ceremony at The University of Tennessee College of Law.  She was invited by a student committee that understood well her significance to the law and legal education communities.  She shared details of her life and career with us.  It was inspirational for me, even though I knew…

Please note that the deadline for submission of proposals for the National Business Law Scholars Conference has been extended to April 1!  The revised Call for Papers follows.  I hope to see many of you there.

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 National Business Law Scholars Conference (NBLSC) 
June 24-25, 2024 
Call for Papers 

The National Business Law Scholars Conference (NBLSC) will be held on Monday and Tuesday, June 24-25, 2024, at The University of California, Davis School of Law. 

This is the fifteenth meeting of the NBLSC, an annual conference that draws legal scholars from across the United States and around the world. We welcome all scholarly submissions relating to business law. Junior scholars and those considering entering the academy are especially encouraged to participate. If you are thinking about entering the academy and would like to receive informal mentoring and learn more about job market dynamics, please let us know when you make your submission. 

Submission Guidelines: 

Please fill out this form to register and submit an abstract by Monday, April 1, 2024. Please be prepared to include in your submission the following information about you and your work: 

• Name 
• …

Sometimes, the scholarly enterprise offers one the opportunity to deeply learn while sharing embedded knowledge.  I never thought that my 2022 Southeastern Association of Law Schools discussion group on Elon Musk and the Law would turn into such a rich learning experience.  But it did.  

In organizing the group, I knew folks would focus on all things Twitter (especially as the year proceeded).  But because of the kind offer of the Stetson Law Review to host a symposium featuring the work of the group and publish the proceedings, I was able to dig in a bit deeper in my work, which focused on visioning what it would be like to represent Elon Musk.  The resulting article, “Representing Eline Musk,” can be found here.  The SSRN abstract follows.

What would it be like to represent Elon Musk on business law matters or work with him in representing a business he manages or controls? This article approaches that issue as a function of professional responsibility and practice norms applied in the context of publicly available information about Elon Musk and his business-related escapades. Specifically, the article provides a sketch of Elon Musk and considers that depiction through a professional conduct lens…