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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

OK.  No more complaining about grading–at least for another few months.  Whew!  I think I am getting too old for this crazy few weeks in December that involve holiday preparations and reading for the purpose of assessment.

This week, as I promised last week, I do want to say a bit more about the exams themselves, however.  I noticed certain patterns of wrong answers this year (some of them common to ones noted in prior years that I have tried in various ways–unsuccessfully–to address in my teaching).  I sent a message to my students that captured those common mistakes.  An edited list of the observations I shared with them about those errors is included below.

  • Management/Control vs. Agency.  Management and control as an entity attribute is not the same as agency. The former involves internal governance–who among the internal constituents of the firm has the power to exercise the firm’s rights and keep it operating, from a legal (and practical) point of view. The latter relates to the firm’s liability to third parties. These two matters are set forth in different rules in each statute we covered in our course last semester. In the corporation, for example–the most complicated firm we studied,

…

Merry Christmas, Law Profs

Greeting cards have not been sent.

The Christmas stress is true.
But I still have one wish to make,
A special one for you:

Merry Christmas, law profs!
We’re on break(?), that’s true.
So I can dream,
And in my dreams,
There’s no more grading to do!
Grading’s ne’er joyful.
There’s always something “new.”
And every day’s a taxing one,
When grades and gifts are due.
The lights on my tree
( . . . Wait–is there a tree?)
Perhaps we’ll buy one today . . . ?!
No logs on the fire,
But I have real desire
To take a break and say
That I wish you Merry Christmas
–Happy New Year too.
I’ve just one wish
On this Christmas Eve:
I wish that grading was through!
I wish that grading was through!!
Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas, law profs.

 

Still grading, and (in the process) reflecting on the line in Marcia Narine’s post from last week on the references to “creepy tender offers” and “limited liability corporations” in her students’  final exam submissions . . . .  I thought I might share today a few of my own favorite outtakes from my students’ Business Associations exams.  I know that the time crunch and the nature of the exam software contribute mightily to the typing errors in student submissions, but on the reading end, some of the answers submitted are just . . . well . . . funny.  As you’ll no doubt note, today’s post focuses mostly on closely held corporations (with one typo relating to limited partnerships).

First , there are, of course, the transposed letters.  Most of these don’t warrant more than a brief mention.  The limited partnership act references to UPLA and RUPLA, instead of ULPA and RULPA fit into this category.  Similar are the inevitable variants of case names (Donahue becoming Danahue, Donahur, and Donaue, etc.). 

Then, there are the many misspelling of fiduciary(ies)–which I have come to believe may just be a hard word to type.  (Or maybe no one actually knows how to spell it.)  Un…

A number of months back, the Business Law Prof Blog hosted a series of five posts by Marcos Antonio Mendoza (here, here, here, here, and here) that were quite popular.  He wrote about (among other things) the need to educate students for the evolving roles in which they may serve as corporate counsel.  His recent article on corporate counsel.com offers much food for thought along those lines and serves as a good reminder, as we head into a new semester, of what our students may need long-term in the workplace.  In both this article and his earlier BLPB posts, Marcos is reacting to an academic research paper, “Finding the Right Corporate Legal Strategy” (available to subscribers or for purchase), published last year in the MIT Sloan Management Review by Professor Robert C. Bird of the University of Connecticut School of Business and Professor David Orozco from the Florida State University College of Business.

Although you all should read Marcos’s Corporate Counsel article (and his posts) for yourselves, I will offer a few quotes from the article and related law school instruction take-aways here.  These largely repeat and reframe Marcos’s own observations in his BLPB posts.

  • “[T]he

…

A few days ago, co-blogger Steve Bradford posted on law professor complaints about grading under the title Warning: Law Professor Whine Season.  OK.  I typically am one of those whiners.  But today, rather than noting that grading is the only part of the semester I actually need to be paid for (and all that yada yada), I want to briefly extoll one virtue of exam season:  the positive things one sees in students as they consciously and appropriately struggle to synthesize the material in a 14-week jam-packed semester.

My Business Associations final exam was administered on Tuesday.  Like many other law professors, I gave my students sample questions (with the answers), held a review session, and responded to questions posted to the discussion board on our class course management site.  Sometimes, I dread any and all of that post-class madness.  This year, I admit that there were few of the thinly veiled (and, by me, expressly discouraged and disdained) “is this on the exam?” or “please re-teach this part of the course . . .” types of questions or requests in any of the forums that I offered for post-class review and learning.  That was a relief.

The students’ final work product for my Corporate Finance planning and drafting seminar was due Monday.  I met with a number of students in the course about that drafting assignment and about the predecessor project in the final weeks before each was due.  I watched them work through issues and begin to make decisions, uncomfortable as they might be in doing so, that solve real client problems.  Satisfying times . . . .

In fact, there have been a number of moments over the past week in which I was exceedingly proud of the learning that had gone on and was continuing to go on during the post-class exam-and-project-preparation phase of the semester.  I  offer a few examples here to illustrate my point.  They come from both my Business Associations course, for which students take a comprehensive written final examination, and my Corporate Finance planning and drafting seminar, for which students solve a corporate finance problem through planning and drafting and write a review of a fellow student’s planning and drafting project.

CALL FOR PROPOSALS AND REGISTRATION INFORMATION

Emory’s Center for Transactional Law and Practice is delighted to announce its fifth biennial conference on the teaching of transactional law and skills. The conference, entitled “Method in the Madness: The Art and Science of Teaching Transactional Law and Skills,” will be held at Emory Law, beginning at 1:00 p.m. on Friday, June 10th and ending at 3:45 p.m. on Saturday, June 11th.

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

We are accepting proposals immediately, but in no event later than 5 p.m. on Monday, February 15, 2016. We welcome proposals on any subject of interest to current or potential teachers of transactional law and skills, focusing particularly on our overarching theme: “Method in the Madness: The Art and Science of Teaching Transactional Law and Skills.”

We hope to receive proposals about teaching: business/corporate law; contract drafting and other transactional drafting; deal skills (interviewing a client, conducting due diligence, negotiating, etc.); business and financial literacy; and ethics and professionalism.

We also welcome proposals about the interplay between teaching transactional law and skills and the ABA’s new experiential learning requirement (Standard 303(a)(3)). Moreover, with regard to the teaching of transactional law and skills, we would like…

I so often find Keith Bishop‘s blog, California Corporate & Securities Law, both informative and entertaining.  Monday’s post in that forum is no exception.  In that post, Keith describes three important principles of Delaware corporate law that are not codified in the General Corporation Law of the State of Delaware (commonly and fondly known as the Delaware General Corporation Law or DGCL).  No surprise, but the three principles he identifies and describes are:

  • the business judgment rule;
  • derivative suit pleading requirements; and
  • the intermediate standard of review applicable in certain limited fiduciary duty actions.

Great list.  And I agree with what he says.

Of course, anyone who teaches corporate law has had to consider (and, to sone degree, call out) the areas of that body of law that derive from decisional, rather than statutory, law.  I often have been heard to say, in the basic Business Associations course, that if students forget–or need to leave behind–one of the two required texts (a casebook and a statutory resource book) when they come to class, most days, they should forget/leave behind the casebook, since it is more important for them to have the statutory law in front of them to answer most Business Associations law questions.  I note, however, that there are two large areas of exception:  veil piercing and fiduciary duty.  For those two doctrinal areas, I inform them that they won’t need the statutory resource book as much as the casebook.

Please accept my apologies for not posting this notice sooner.  I received the call for papers a few weeks ago and meant to post it then.  But I now see that the deadline for abstract submissions is Monday!  Mea culpa.  Please feel free to post a comment here or contact me by email for more information if you want to submit.  I have a more full-blown version of the call for papers that I can send by email to those who are interested in more information.  (I omitted here prior conference locations as well as the names and affiliations of members of the conference academic and practice review boards and organizing committee.) 

I have participated in this conference for the past two years.  While there are few law academics in attendance, I have found the work of our international colleagues from the business side of the aisle to be both very informative to my work and interesting in many other respects.  This conference also has enabled me to forge new relationships that have positively impacted my scholarship.

Call for Papers
7th Conference on Innovative Trends Emerging in Microfinance (ITEM-7)
Pumping up Innovations In and Around Microfinance
(Microfinance, Crowdfunding and Community Development Finance)…

GIVING-THANKS

Last year, in my first Thanksgiving week post, I gave public thanks for my students. I could just as easily have done that again this year.  My students continue to impress and inspire me.  And that is certainly something to be grateful for–year in, and year out.

This year, however, I also want to acknowledge my thanks for all of the special colleagues I have in the academy (and yes, fellow BLPB editors, that includes you!) and the bar that make my job complete.  When I have needed assistance, support, or just a good laugh, it is my fellow law peeps–and especially my business law peeps–to whom I most often turn and on whom I almost always rely.

You, my law teacher and lawyer friends, have:

  • read and edited my early syllabi, exams, and assignments, preventing me from making mistakes that new law professors often make;
  • taught my Business Associations class when my mother was dying so I could be by her side;
  • helped my son learn about e-discovery and various types of law practice so that he could launch his career;
  • provided assistance to my Corporate Finance students when they needed specialized guidance or advice on their planning and

…

The title of this post undoubtedly promises too much.  But that won’t prevent me from trying to establish a few points that approach the many topics that could be discussed under a title that includes this much great stuff.  I make that attempt here.

I start with contract law.  As I noted in my prior post for this micro-symposium, one of my appearances at last week’s ABA LLC Institute included a debate on whether an operating agreement is a common law contract.  This question arose in connection with my teaching of operating agreements (and also has arisen in my teaching of partnership agreements) in Business Associations.  Of course, lawyers understand that not all agreements are contracts.  A significant amount of energy is spent on this matter in the beginning of the standard contracts course in law school.  

Is an LLC operating agreement a contract?  I like the question not just for its face value, but because I believe that the answer does or may matter for purposes of resolving other questions arising in and outside LLC law.  I captured some thoughts about this question in a draft essay soon to be published in revised form in the SMU Law Review.  (I blogged about it here over the summer.)  Among other things, with judicial and legislative attention on freedom of contract in the LLC, the status of the LLC as a matter of contract law may shed light on the extent to which contract law can or should be important or imported to legal issues involving LLC operating agreements.