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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

National Business Law Scholars Conference (NBLSC)
Thursday & Friday, June 8-9, 2017

Call for Papers

The National Business Law Scholars Conference (NBLSC) will be held on Thursday and Friday, June 8-9, 2017, at the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law. 

This is the eighth 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 legal academy are especially encouraged to participate. 

To submit a presentation, email Professor Eric C. Chaffee at eric.chaffee@utoledo.edu with an abstract or paper by February 17, 2017.  Please title the email “NBLSC Submission – {Your Name}.”  If you would like to attend, but not present, email Professor Chaffee with an email entitled “NBLSC Attendance.”  Please specify in your email whether you are willing to serve as a moderator.  We will respond to submissions with notifications of acceptance shortly after the deadline. We anticipate the conference schedule will be circulated in May. 


Keynote Speaker:

Lynn A. Stout, Distinguished Professor of Corporate & Business Law, Cornell Law School


Plenary Author-Meets-Reader Panel:

Selling Hope, Selling Risk: Corporations, Wall Street, and the Dilemmas of Investor Protection by Donald C. Langevoort…

The Wells Fargo headlines–fresh from a congressional testimony, a spiraling stock price, and a CEO with $41M less dollars to his name— raise the question of whether this is a case study of corporate governance effectiveness or inefficiency. That the wrong doing (opening an estimated 2M unauthorized customer accounts to manipulate sales figures) was eventually unearthed, employees fired and bonus pay revoked may give some folks confidence in the oversight and accountability structures set up by corporate governance. Michael Hiltzit at the LA Times writes a scathing review of the CEO and the Board of Directors failed oversight on this issue.  

The implicit defense raised by Stumpf’s defenders is that the consumer ripoff at the center of the scandal was, in context, trivial — look at how much Wells Fargo has grown under this management. But that’s a reductionist argument. One reason that the scandal looks trivial is that no major executive has been disciplined; so how big could it be? This only underscores the downside of letting executives off scot-free — it makes major failings look minor. The answer is to start threatening the bosses with losing their jobs, or going to jail, and they’ll start to

…

The Stanford Law Review Online has just released a series of essays on Salman v. United States, scheduled for oral argument on Wednesday.  I plan to blog more about the Salman case as/if I can find time this week, but I wanted you to have this link right away–first thing this morning.  The essays are a veritable insider trading feast and are written by some of the most thoughtful scholars in the area: Jill Fisch, Don Langevoort, Jonathan Macey, Donna Nagy, and Adam Pritchard.  There’s something in at least one of the essays for almost everyone out there.

In recent weeks, co-bloggers Ann Lipton and Anne Tucker both have posted on issues relating to the upcoming Supreme Court oral argument in Salman v. U.S.  Indeed, this is an important case for the reason they each cite: resolution of the debate about whether the receipt of a personal benefit should be a condition to tippee liability for insider trading (under Section 10(b) of/Rule 10b-5 under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended), when the tipper and tippee are close family members.  Certainly, many of us who teach and litigate insider trading cases will be watching the oral argument and waiting for the Court’s opinion to see whether, and if so, how, the law evolves.

Having noted that common interest (as among many) in the Salman case, as I earlier indicated, I have a broader interest in the Salman case because of a current project I am working on relating to family relationships and friendships in insider trading–both as a matter of tipper-tippee liability (as in Salman) and as a matter of the duty of trust and confidence necessary to misappropriation liability.  The project was borne in part of a feeling that I had, based on reported investigations…

Fresh from the presidential debate,** I find myself writing about board room diversity.*** Over the 2016 summer, SEC Chairwoman Mary Jo White signaled intent to revisit diversity in U.S. boardrooms.  In 2009 the SEC adopted a diversity disclosure rule requiring companies to disclose how their nominating committees considered diversity and whether the company had a diversity policy. The full rule can be viewed here.  The SEC did not define (nor did it mandate a singular definition of ) diversity, and companies have been left to define diversity individually, often without regard to gender, ethnic, racial or religious identities.  The result, criticized by Chairwoman White,  has been vague disclosures without apparent impact. 

SEC diversity rule making (past and future) was the backdrop for a recent corporate governance seminar class where I asked students:  Why should they care about board room diversity? And if the 2009 disclosure rule changes, how should it change? How do other countries approach the issue of boardroom diversity?  Can it be a mandated or legislated endeavor?  To guide our discussion we read  Aaron A Dhir’s brilliant and thorough: Challenging Boardroom Homogeneity: Corporate Law, Governance and Diversity and consulted Catalyst.org to understand the panoply of diversity choices…

The enticing facts of insider trading have me writing about the topic again (see an earlier post here) as the US Supreme Court prepares to hear oral argument in Salman v. US on October 5th.  In Salman, the Supreme Court is asked to draw some careful lines in the questions: what benefit counts and how to prove such a benefit under Dirks v. SEC.  

Recall that in Dirks, the Supreme Court focused the test on whether an insider benefitted—either by trading or by tipping in exchange for a benefit from the person to whom she tipped material nonpublic information. After Dirks, the 10b inquiry is whether the insider breached a duty by conveying the information for the insider’s personal benefit, and whether the tippee knows or at least should know of the breach. The Court explained that even in a case against a tippee who trades “Absent some personal gain [by the insider], there has been no breach of duty to stockholders. And absent a breach by the insider, there is no derivative breach [by the tippee].”

The Salman case highlights a circuit split:  the Second Circuit case United States v. Newman and the Ninth…

This Friday, I will co-present on a continuing legal education panel on “The New Crowdfunding Laws for Private Investors & Other Ways to Legally Raise Money For Your Project” at the Americanafest–the Americana Music Festival and Conference.   The program description is set forth below.

There have been significant changes in federal and state laws related to soliciting investors through crowdfunding and other types of investment activities.  These new changes are designed to make certain types of investments easier and more accessible to people and businesses who seek investors for their projects. This panel will discuss those new laws and strategies of how to seek small to moderate size investments under today’s federal and state law. The panel will also discuss “dos” and “don’ts” for those seeking out investors and what to look for when offered an investment opportunity.

I love cultivating this ground, even if I have done much of it in the past with different audiences.  I will prepare some specialized information relating to financing music and other creative projects, for example, for this program.  I also plan to discuss important traps for the unwary.

What I really want to know is: what else might folks working with and in the music…

Last spring, in the wake of Justice Scalia’s passing, I blogged about Justice Scalia’s final business law case: Americold Realty Trust v. ConAgra Ltd. The oral argument signaled that the Court’s preference for a formalistic, bright line test that asked whether the entity involved was an unincorporated entity, in which case the citizenship of its members controlled the question of diversity, or whether it was formed as an corporation, in which a different test would apply.  The Supreme Court issued its unanimous (8-0) opinion in March, 2016 holding that the citizenship of an unincorporated entity depends on the citizenship of all of its members. Because Americold was organized as a real estate investment trust under Maryland law, its shareholders are its members and determine (in this case, preclude) diversity jurisdiction.   

S.I. Strong, the Manley O. Hudson Professor of Law at the University of Missouri, has a forthcoming article, Congress and Commercial Trusts: Dealing with Diversity Jurisdiction Post-Americold, forthcoming in Florida Law Review.  The article addresses the corporate constitutional jurisprudential questions of how can and should the Supreme Court treat business entities.  What is the appropriate role of substance and form in business law?  Her article offers a decisive reply:

Commercial

…

Interesting research has been done on overconfidence in business leadership (see, e.g., here, here, and here) and political behavior (see, e.g., here and here).  I periodically consult the literature in this area for use in my work.  It is fascinating and often helpful.

In my continuing career development advice to law students, and as a member of our faculty appointments committee at UT Law this year, however, I recently have come to notice and be concerned about overconfidence in job searches.  Specifically, I see law students who, in testing out a new confidence in their knowledge and skills, overdo it a bit and over-claim or come across as unduly self-important.  I also see faculty candidates who have registered for the Association of American Law Schools Faculty Appointments Register (FAR) puff and oversell–using the comment areas to make cringe-worthy self-aggrandizing statements about their teaching or scholarly background or abilities.

Most of us prefer to associate with confident people.  Confidence in a leader or colleague is an attractive trait–one that we associate with strong governance and high levels of performance.  Confidence wins appointments, elections, and jobs.  Yet overconfidence, if recognized, is unattractive and often means lost opportunities.

Overconfidence is common.  Don Moore…

As many of you already know, I regularly advise students (as so many of us do) on career planning and job searches.  This advice extends to communications in connection with career planning and job searches.  And I have blogged about all this.  I have posted in the past, for example, on networking letters (my post is here) and cover letters, for example (my most recent post is here). 

Yesterday, I got an email message from a student with a great question related to all this.  Here is the question: “What would you recommend as the subject line of an email to a contact you have been referred to by someone else?”  Nice.  Here’s what I ended up writing back, in pertinent part.

 . . . Email titles are tricky.

The first thing I would do is ask if the person making the connection can e-introduce you with an email message and copy you in.  I have done that many times.  My script usually goes something like this:

[X], e-meet [Y].  As I explained to you earlier today, [Y] is the [title & affiliation].

[Y], [X] is a [year] at UT Law who is considering [career goal].