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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

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

…

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.

Today, I share a quick teaching tip/suggestion.

I taught my last classes of the semester earlier today.  For my Business Associations class, which met at 8:00 am, I was looking for a way to end the class meeting, tying things from the past few classes up in some way.  I settled on using the facts from a case that I used to cover in a former casebook that is not in my current course text:  Coggins  et al. v. New England Patriots Football Club, Inc., et al.  Here are the facts I presented:

  • New England Patriots Football Club, Inc. (“NEPFC”), the corporation that owns the New England Patriots, has both voting and nonvoting shares of stock outstanding.
  • The former president and owner of all of the voting shares of NEPFC, Sullivan, takes out a personal loan that only can be repaid if he owns all of the NEPFC stock outstanding.
  • The board and Sullivan vote to merge NEPFC with and into a new corporation in which Sullivan would own all the shares.
  • In the merger, holders of the nonvoting shares receive $15 per share for their common stock cashed out in the merger.

From this, I noted that three legal actions are common…

I have been thinking about the long-short term investment horizon debate, definitions, empirics and governance design consequences for some time now (see prior BLPB post here and also see Joshua Fershee’s take on the topic).  This has been on mind so much  that I am now planning a June, 2017 conference on that very topic in conjunction with the Adolf A. Berle Jr. Center on Corporations, Law & Society (founded by Charles “Chuck” O’Kelley at Seattle University School of Law). In planning this interdisciplinary conference where the goal is to invite corporate governance folks, finance and economics scholars, and psychologists and neuroscientist, I have had the pleasure of reading a lot of out-of-discipline work and talking with the various authors.  It has been an unexpected benefit of conference planning.   I also want some industry voices represented so I have reached out to Aspen Institute, Conference Board and a new group, Focusing Capital on the Long Term (FCLT), which I learned about through this process.

I share this with BLPB readers for several reasons.  The first is that the FCLT, is a nonprofit organization, a nonprofit organization for BUSINESS issues created and funded by BUSINESSES.  In July 2016, the…

Thanks to all who responded to my query two weeks ago on teaching corporate fiduciary duties.  I continue to contemplate your suggestions as I recover from the cold that has consumed me now for a week.  Don’t catch this version of the common cold!  It’s a bear.

Anyway, the weekend after I published that post, I presented at a super symposium on shareholder rights at the University of Oklahoma College of Law–“Confronting New Market Realities: Implications for Stockholder Rights to Vote, Sell, and Sue,” hosted by the Oklahoma Law Review.  (I spoke on rights to sell securities purchased in an offering exempt from registration under the CROWDFUND Act, Title III of the JOBS Act.)  Although it was not part of the formal agenda for the symposium, I got a chance to chat informally with a group of folks at and after the conference, including our host, Megan Shaner, along with Jessica Erickson, Gordon Smith, and Vice Chancellor Travis Laster from the Delaware Chancery Court (among others) about fiduciary duty complexity.  All, even the Vice Chancellor, had sympathy, offering ideas for simplifying corporate fiduciary duty law (as opposed to merely the teaching of it) that made sense.  And it seems that among those of us in…

Last week on the eve of the election, I shared a series of predictions regarding the market’s response to a Trump or Clinton presidential election victory.  Almost all of the predictions were for a swift and negative reaction to a Trump victory.  Immediate market predictions, like polling predictions, were, in a word: WRONG.  

From the Wall Street Journal:

Dow Posts Best Week Since 2011

Stocks were mixed on Friday, taking a pause to end an eventful week that pushed the Dow industrials to their best week since 2011.

The Dow climbed 0.2% on Friday to 0.2%, pushing the index up 5.4% for the week to 18847.66.

The S&P 500 dipped 0.1% on Friday to 2164.45, while the Nasdaq Composite jumped 0.5% to 5237.11.

I find myself so disorientated in this post-election reality.

Anne Tucker

Each year, I rethink how I teach fiduciary duties in the corporate law context in my Business Associations course.  My learning objectives for the students are both limited and involved.  On the one hand, there’s little room in my three-credit-hour course for a nuanced understanding of all of the contexts in which corporate fiduciary duty claims typically occur.  In particular, I have determined to leave out the public company mergers and acquisitions context almost completely.  On the other hand, I find myself juggling uncertain classifications of duty components, explanations of seemingly mismatched standards of conduct and liability, and judicial review standards in and outside the Delaware corporate law context.  It’s a handful.  It’s teaching complexity.

Of course, fiduciary duty is not the only complex matter that one must teach in Business Associations.  But it is, for me, one of the topics I am least confident that I “get right” in my interactions with students in and outside the classroom.  Accordingly, as I again head toward the end of the semester, I find myself wondering whether I could have done–or could do–more with the students in my Business Associations course this semester.  This leads me to ask my fellow business law professors (that’s you!) whether…

As we gear up for the final show down and hopefully the end of the 2016 election (please, please, please let it end) I write today about the relationship between the markets and politics.  It is apparently THE business angle in the news cycle this week. This is an admitted punt on substantive work and am instead providing you with a host of hyperlinks to nervously check and re-check in between nervously checking and re-checking polling estimates and vote counts.  Please note, I am passing along a compilation of articles, a list that I have not editted to reflect a certain viewpoint.

Historical Accounts of the Relationship between politics and the markets

Call Levels, History of Past Presidential Elections and Their Effect On Stock Market

Merrill Lynch, How Presidential Elections Affect the Markets

ABC, History on how presidential elections affect stock markets

Predictions regarding market reactions to the outcome of the 2016 election

Forbes, Trump Vs. Clinton: How Will The Stock Market React To The Election?

CNBC, Wall Street reacts: Here’s what the markets will do after the election  

The Street, If Hillary Clinton Is Elected President, Here’s What Will Happen to the U.S. Economy

Market Watch, Here are all…

General Electric (GE)  and Baker Hughes (BHI) announced on Monday, October 31st, a proposed merger to combine their oil and gas operations.  GE and Baker Hughes will form a partnership, which will own a publicly-traded company.   GE shareholders will own 62.5% of the “new” partnership, while Baker Hughes shareholders will own 37.5% and receive a one-time cash dividend of $17.50 per share.  The new company will have 9 board of director seats:  5 from GE and 4 from Baker Hughes.  GE CEO Jeff Immelt will be the chairman of the new company and Lorenzo Simonelli,  CEO of GE Oil & Gas, will be CEO. Baker Hughes CEO Martin Craighead will be vice chairman.

Reuters is describing the business synergies between the two companies as leveraging GE’s oilfield equipment manufacturing (“supplying blowout preventers, pumps and compressors used in exploration and production”) and data process services with Baker Hughes’ expertise in ” horizontal drilling, chemicals used to frack and other services key to oil production.”

Baker Hughes had previously proposed a merger with Halliburton (HAL), which failed in May, 2016, after the Justice Department filed an antitrust suit to block the merger. Early analysis suggests that the proposed GE & Baker Hughes will pass regulatory scrutiny because of the limited business overlap of GE and Baker Hughes.

As I plan to tell my corporations students later today: this is real life!  A high-profile, late-semester merger of two public companies is a wonderful gift.  The proposed GE/Baker Hughes merger illustrates, in real life, concepts we have been discussing (or will be soon) like partnerships, the proxy process, special shareholder meetings, SEC filings, abstain or disclose rules, and, of course, mergers.

My October included some signifiant tricks and a bunch of parallel treats.  I will highlight but a few of each here.  They illustrate, in my view, the busy mid-semester lives that law professors may have.

The Tricks

It was a real trick for me to give three distinct presentations in three cities (two in person and one virtually) in a two-day period early in the month.  On the morning of October 6, I participated in a panel discussion at The Crowdfunding Conference in New York City (New York).  That afternoon, I jumped on a plane for Little Rock (Arkansas), where I gave a continuing legal education presentation on crowdfunding for the Arkansas Bar Association as part of a program on “Capital Raising Today and Securities Law Issues.”  Finally, later that day, I was Skyped into a the North Carolina Law Review 2016 annual symposium in Chapel Hill (North Carolina) on “The Role of Law in Entrepreneurship,” at which I presented a draft paper, forthcoming in the North Carolina Law Review, on the important role of business finance lawyers in entrepreneurial enterprise.  

It then was a trick to refocus my energy on faculty hiring a few days later.