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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

The Southeastern Association of Law Schools (SEALS) is soliciting proposals for its 2024 annual meeting (to be held at the Harbor Beach Resort & Spa in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from July 21-July 27, 2024).  After last year’s meeting, folks suggested to me it could be time again to have a teaching panel at SEALS in 2024.  Specifically, the suggestion was made that a group be put together to talk about teaching numeracy to business-inclined students.  I am happy to organize it.

Please let me know if you want to join in on this discussion group.  I am looking for at least nine folks to join me.  Email me or leave a comment here if you would like to join in.

BLPB(FinRestructRoundtable)

The Third Annual Financial Restructuring Roundtable will be held in person on April 4, 2024 in New York City. Spearheaded by Samir Parikh, Robert Rasmussen, and Michael Simkovic, this invitation-only event brings together practitioners, jurists, scholars, and finance industry professionals to discuss important financial restructuring and business law issues.

The Roundtable invites the submission of papers. Selected participants will receive a $2,000 stipend and have the opportunity to workshop their papers in an intimate, collegial setting.

We seek papers exploring diverse topics and will be interested in interdisciplinary perspectives. Papers will be selected through a blind review process. Junior scholars (with one to ten years in academia) are invited to submit a 3 – 5 page overview of a proposed paper. Submissions may be an introduction, excerpt from a longer paper, or extended abstract. The submission should be anonymized, and – aside from general citations to the author’s previous articles – all references to the author should be removed.

Please submit proposals by October 30, 2023. Invitations will be issued via email by December 1, 2023. Working drafts of papers should be available for circulation to participants by March 1, 2024.

Proposals – as well as questions and concerns…

I am pleased to report that Connecting the Threads is back for another year–our seventh!  As readers will recall, this annual symposium features the work of your Business Law Prof Blog editors (sometimes with coauthors), with commentary from Tennessee Law faculty members and students.  Every year, my colleagues and I offer up a variety of presentation topics covering developing theory, policy, doctrine, pedagogy, and practice trends in various areas of business law.

This year’s panels include:

“Algorithms to Advocacy: How Emerging Technologies Impact Legal Practice and Ethics”
Marcia Narine Weldon

“The Road and Corporate Purpose”
William P. Murray and J. Haskell Murray

“Is the SEC Proposing a ‘Loaded Questions’ Climate Disclosure Regime?”
John P. Anderson

“Business Lawyer Leadership: Valuing Relationships”
Joan Heminway

“Metals Derivatives Markets and the Energy Transition”
Colleen Baker and James Coleman

If you are in the Knoxville area, please come join us on Friday for the day.  The program runs from 8:30 am (registration) to 3:00 pm.  Registration for CLE credit can be accessed here.

 

BLPB(DiversityProgramGraphic)

RWU Law looks forward to the next installment of the Integrating Doctrine & Diversity Speaker Series:

HOW DOES DIVERSITY, EQUITY, INCLUSION AND BELONGING PEDAGOGY FIT IN BUSINESS ISSUES AND FINANCIAL AFFAIRS CLASSES? LEADING WITH DEIB IN WILLS, TRUSTS, ESTATES, INSURANCE, CONTRACTS, AND TAXATION LAW CLASSES

Wednesday, October 4 | 2:00 – 3:00 PM EST

Zoom Webinar Registration here.

Details about the Featured Speakers & Program here.

It was so much find to have our business law prof colleague Erik Gerding and two fabulous key members of his staff here in Knoxville yesterday.  I had posted on this visit last week.  Our visitors regaled us on the role of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) Division of Corporation Finance, the registration requirements and exemptions under the Securities Act of 1933, as amended (“1933 Act”), and the rule-making part of the Division’s (and SEC’s) mission.

Erik explained how, when he is teaching Securities Regulation, he spends two classes at the beginning of the semester putting the “fear of God” into his students about the registration requirement in Section 5 of the 1933 Act.  (His point is to make the dangers clear up front, since students tend to drop the class who should take it, given that they plan to practice business law in one way or another.)  Erik’s colleague, Jennifer Zepralka, Chief of the SEC’s Office of Small Business Policy, similarly noted in her remarks that there are only three kinds of securities offerings: registered, exempt from registration, and illegal.  Erik’s Counsel, Jeb Byrne, echoed this.  And in the session at lunch time, one of my…

We are excited to welcome our colleague Erik Gerding, the Director of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Division of Corporation Finance, together with members of his staff, to The University of Tennessee College of Law a week from today. Information about the visit is included below.  If you are in the neighborhood, stop by!

SECFlyer

Thanks to my dear and patient friend and colleague Nizan Packin, I set out on a research and writing adventure a bit more than eighteen months ago.  The result is a book chapter on NFTs for her forthcoming edited volume, The Cambridge Handbook for the Law and Policy of NFTs.  The chapter is entitled “Non-investment Finance in an NFT World.”  At her suggestion, I recently posted the draft chapter to SSRN.  You can find it here, and the abstract is set forth below.

Recent years have witnessed the rise of NFTs as vehicles for non-investment finance, including in nonprofit and political fundraising. As with other financial sectors in which NFTs have a role, the use of NFTs in financing nonprofits and political campaigns and committees has revealed gaps and ambiguities in existing legal regulatory systems. Appetite exists to evolve legal frameworks to complete and clarify applicable bodies of law and regulation.

This chapter undertakes to illuminate and reflect on the use of NFTs in financing nonprofits, political campaigns, and political committees. It begins by reviewing general aspects of the non-investment Internet finance environment and then describes and illustrates the use of NFTs in nonprofit and political fundraising.

I found the message below in my “in box” yesterday from Celia Bigoness and Beth Lyon at Cornell Law and thought it important to share the opportunities they reference with the broader BLPB community.  I hope it is useful to those of you considering long-term non-tenure-track roles in the entrepreneurial law space.

I’m happy to share that Cornell Law School is seeking two new clinicians to work in our Entrepreneurship Law Clinic (ELC) and help us create the law school’s first dual-campus clinic. Expanding the ELC, made possible by a generous gift creating the Blassberg-Rice Center for Entrepreneurship Law, represents Cornell Law School’s commitment to community-engaged learning and partnerships throughout New York state.

We are searching for one clinician to be based at our Ithaca campus, and one clinician to be based at the Co at Cornell Law:rnell Tech campus in New York City. Both new hires will have a full-time teaching responsibility in the ELC, working alongside the ELC’s founder and the director of the new center, Celia Bigoness. Both appointments will be to the long-term, presumptively renewable, contract track for permanent clinical faculty at Cornell Law School, with voting rights and academic leave rights consistent with the…

BLPB(labor-day-messages-email-headers-6)

I am the daughter of two Depression Era babies.  My parents always appreciated what they had and worked hard to earn it.  And they were aware of and respected those who contributed their time and efforts to bring them products and services.

On Labor Day, it seems appropriate to channel my parents’ gratitude and share it here.  Too often, I take for granted that so much in my life comes from or relies on the labors of others.  I welcome the opportunity today to remember and give thanks.

Parenthetically, I have learned over time (through leadership training and mindfulness activities) that gratitude is an amazingly powerful character strength for lawyers.   As explained on the Via Institute on Character’s website, 

The character strength of gratitude involves feeling and expressing a deep sense of thankfulness in life, and more specifically, taking the time to genuinely express thankfulness to others. This thankfulness can be for specific gifts or thoughtful acts. . . .Gratitude tends to foster the character strengths of kindness and love, and therefore is closely associated with empathy and with connection to others.

I am certain you can see from this excerpted description why gratitude can be a great asset…

Berkeley Center for the Study of Law and Society

Applications for Visiting Scholars Program

THE APPLICATION PERIOD FOR THE 2024-25 ACADEMIC YEAR IS NOW OPEN. 

Please submit your application by December 1, 2023 by e-mail to csls@law.berkeley.edu(link sends e-mail) 

 Inquiries may be made to CSLS at csls@law.berkeley.edu

 

For more information about the Visiting Scholars program and the Center for the Study of Law and Society, see here.