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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 University of Georgia, Terry College of Business has posted information about two legal studies professor positions – one tenure-track and one lecturer. I know each of the University of Georgia legal studies professors; they are an impressive and thoughtful and friendly group. 

Assistant or Associate Professor of Legal Studies:

https://facultyjobs.uga.edu/postings/1754

Lecturer of Legal Studies:

https://facultyjobs.uga.edu/postings/1750

Applications received by February 15, 2017, are assured of consideration; however applications will continue to be accepted until the positions are filled.

I recently finished my first consistent year of running since high school. To celebrate, I bought and read Once a Runner. Yes, that is how nerds like me celebrate – buy and read a book. I was asleep by 10pm on New Year’s Eve.

Once a Runner is a cult classic published in 1978 and authored by a former University of Florida runner (and fellow lawyer), John Parker Jr. The novel was originally self-published, sold at running stores and out of the back of the author’s car. It eventually became a New York Times Bestseller. The story follows the fictional Quenton Cassidy as he moves from a successful (but still somewhat distracted) college runner to a laser-focused, woods-dwelling hermit who increases his training to beat the best runners in the world. He does, eventually, beat one of the very best milers (in a small track meet), and then goes on to win silver in the Olympic Games.

Among the passages that struck me was the following from Quenton’s time at a cocktail party, after spending months (in relative solitude) training and logging 100+ mile weeks:

What was the secret, they wanted to know; in a thousand different ways they wanted to know

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As avid readers of this blog already know, I am a fan of New Year’s Resolutions. I usually set over twenty goals for each year, and they prove helpful in directing effort during the year. 

Over the past few years, my employer (Belmont University) has been engaged in Vision 2020, which should amount to something like New Year’s Resolutions for the University (to be accomplished by 2020). I recently served on the committee for the Athletics Department’s contribution to Vision 2020, which was an enjoyable and interesting experience. 

My time on the Vision 2020 committee and my years of doing my own resolutions have taught me a few things. Most importantly, I have learned that SMART goals tend to be the most useful and effective. (For those who don’t know, SMART usually stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-Based, though there are variations).

The most difficult part, in my view, is finding appropriate measurements. Some items are easy to measure – movements in endowment, enrollment, incoming student GPA and standardize test scores, rankings, etc. There are plenty of items that are important, but much more difficult to measure. And measurements can be overdone, especially if the focus on the measurement overshadows the

I recently updated my list of business law teaching positions. At this point, a number of the positions have probably been filled, but I put posted dates by the more recently posted positions. I still get asked, on a fairly regularly basis, about how one breaks into law teaching, and while I do have thoughts on that topic (basically, write, write, write), I think folks wanting to enter the legal academy should ask themselves a few questions first. 

  1. Are you truly drawn to both teaching and research (or are you just tired of practicing)?
  2. Are you geographically flexible? (You have to be both really good and really lucky to pick your geographic location in legal academia)
  3. Do you have a few years to devote to pursuing a career in legal academia? (these days, it often takes a VAP or two, and/or a few years on the market to secure an academic job).
  4. If you are in BigLaw, are you truly comfortable with a sizable pay cut?
  5. Can you be patient with students, administrators, staff, etc.? (things typically move much more slowly in academia than in practice)

Once you have received one of more offers, I would ask the following…

My favorite new (to me) podcast is NPR’s How I Built This. They describe the podcast as “about innovators, entrepreneurs, and idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. Each episode is a narrative journey marked by triumphs, failures, serendipity and insight — told by the founders of some of the world’s best known companies and brands.”

So far, I have listened to two of the episodes: one about the Sam Adams founder Jim Koch and one about the Clif Bar co-founder Gary Erickson.

On the Sam Adams episode, I liked Jim Koch’s distinction between scary and dangerous — repelling off a mountain with an expert guide is scary but not not necessarily dangerous; walking on a snow-covered, frozen lake on a sunny day is dangerous but not necessarily scary. Jim said that his comfortable job at Boston Consulting Group was not scary, but it was dangerous in luring him away from his true calling. However, founding his own company (Sam Adams) was scary, but not really as dangerous as working for BCG. Also, it was interesting to find out that Jim Koch is a Harvard JD/MBA.

On the Clif Bar episode, though I have eaten more than…

UC Irvine law professor, David Min, has a new article titled, Corporate Political Activity and Non-Shareholder Agency Costs, in theYale Journal on Regulation.  Professor Min examines corporate constitutional law  in recent examples such as Citizens United, through the lens of nonshareholder dissenters.  

The courts have never considered the problem of dissenting nonshareholders in assessing regulatory restrictions on corporate political activity. This Article argues that they should. It is the first to explore the potential agency costs that corporate political activity creates for nonshareholders, and in so doing, it lays out two main arguments. First, these agency costs may be significant, as I illustrate through several case studies. Second, neither corporate law nor private ordering provides solutions to this agency problem. Indeed, because the theoretical arguments for shareholder primacy in corporate law are largely inapplicable for corporate political activity, corporate law may actually serve to exacerbate the agency problems that such activity creates for non-shareholders. Private ordering, which could take the form of contractual covenants restricting corporate political activity, also seems unlikely to solve this problem, due to the large economic frictions facing such covenants. These findings have potentially significant ramifications for the Court’s corporate political speech

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It used to be that Friday night was Domino’s Pizza night in our house . . . .  My, how things change if one lets 15-20 years slip by unnoticed.  No more of that in our house!

I guess Domino’s is doing OK without us, however.  Third quarter 2016 financial results for Domino’s Pizza, Inc., a Delaware corporation with common stock listed on the New York Stock Exchange, were favorable as compared to the firm’s 2015 results, accordingly to the most recent quarterly earnings release.  Somebody’s eating a lot of Domino’s pizza, even if it isn’t the Heminway family.

Apparently, Domino’s wants to share the wealth–with its customers.  Co-blogger Haskell Murray pointed this recent press item out to me and co-blogger Ann Lipton in an email message last week, knowing full well that we both were or would be interested.  He was right.  Ann may have more to say on this in a later post.  (She also noted that other firms are adopting consumer benefit plans similar to the Domino’s plan I describe here today.)

Of course, as a corporate finance/securities lawyer, I immediately had visions of Ralston Purina dancing in my head.  (Not quite like visions of sugarplums, in this holiday…

Do you love charts? Do you need/want a break from grading/procrastinating/writing frantically on a deadline real or self-imposed?  All of these things at once?  Welcome to the month of December– the time of year that should be a break from our schedules, but which always (and I mean ALWAYS) is my busiest time when I try to fit 6 weeks of work into 2.  

My December gift to you?  The Investment Company Factbook.  The Investment Company Institute (ICI), is an association of regulated funds that collects and distributes data from its members.  The full text of the Factbook (an annual publication) is available here, and the charts (and underlying data) are available here.  I wept when I first discovered this source while writing years ago.  ICI information is widely used in legal research.  A quick search produced 3,265 law reviews and journal articles.  For critiques of ICI’s information and framing, see John C. Bogle, Mutual Funds at the Millennium: Fund Directors and Fund Myths, at http://www.vanguard.com/bogle_site/may152000/ (May 15, 2000); John P. Freeman & Stewart L. Brown, Mutual Fund Advisory Fees: The Cost of Conflicts of Interest, 26 J. Corp. L. 609, 625/26 (2001); and yours truly…

In a relatively brief opinion released this morning, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the Ninth Circuit’s judgment in Salman v. United States.  The decision of the Court was unanimous.  The big take-aways include:

  • doctrinally, the Court’s complete, unquestioning reliance on the language in Dirks v. Sec’s Exch. Comm’n, 463 U. S. 646 (1983), as to when the sharing of information through a tip is improper, and therefore a basis for insider trading liability (quoting from the text on page 662 of the Dirks opinion: “'[T]he test,’ we explained, ‘is whether the insider personally will benefit, directly or indirectly, from his disclosure.’”);
  • factually, the emphasis placed by the Court on the value proposition represented by the information-sharing between the close brothers, Maher and Michael–that information passed on with the knowledge that it will be traded on was effectively a substitute for a monetary gift (“In one of their tipper-tippee interactions, Michael asked Maher for a favor, declined Maher’s offer of money, and instead requested and received lucrative trading information.”), noting “[a]s Salman’s counsel acknowledged at oral argument, Maher would have breached his duty had he personally traded on the information here himself then given the proceeds as a gift to his

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Wharton’s Legal Studies & Business Ethics Department invites submissions for its inaugural Conference on Business Law and Ethics, to take place March 31-April 1, 2017.

This is the first meeting of what will be a recurring conference: we aim to gather together each year the most cutting-edge work on law, ethics and business. Papers are invited from scholars both senior and junior, and from diverse disciplines, on the theme of “The Ethical Lives of Corporations.” Submit an abstract of an unpublished paper to Phil Nichols (nicholsp@wharton.upenn.edu ) and Gwendolyn Gordon (gwgordon@wharton.upenn.edu). The deadline for abstract submissions is January 6th, 2017.