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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

Call for Papers

ITEM 6 – Tunis, Tunisia

Microfinance: Coaching, Counting, and Crowding

The Banque Populaire Chair in Microfinance of the Burgundy School of Business (France) and l’École supérieure du commerce de Tunis jointly organize the 6th edition of the annual conference “Institutional and Technological Environment of Microfinance” (ITEM) in March 2015 (17, 18, 19) in Tunis, Tunisia.

The 6th edition brings together–but not limited to-three major issues, which are shaping the sector of microfinance: Coaching, Counting, and Crowding.

Coaching in microfinance provides training in business and soft skills (attributes enhancing an individual’s interactions and self-performance) that the poor micro-entrepreneurs rarely have. Increasingly, microfinance academics and practitioners consider building the human capital of micro-entrepreneurs a critical ingredient of moving out of poverty.

Counting and tracking the microfinance clients and prospects with the information technologies not only lessen information asymmetry, but also lower the transaction cost of financial intermediation. Corollary: information technologies can open ways for offering financial services to the poor as a normal way of doing and extending normal business, and accelerate their social integration. 

Crowding, based on the Web 2.0 technologies, enables direct interactions between millions of lending and borrowing people. Through crowdfunding, micro and…

Crowdfunding site GoFundMe recently removed the funding page for a person looking to crowdfund her abortion.  Past crowdfunding campaigns have funded fertility treatments, gender confirmation surgeries, organ transplants, and other medical procedures and treatments.  Watsi is an entire crowdfnding platform dedicated to financing medical care for patients through donations.  While I usually research and write about crowdfunding business entities and projects, the crowdfunding of medical procedures and treatments has gotten more and more traction with those needing or wanting financial assistance for expensive medical care.  It seemed like a good time to say something about it . . . .  But what to say?

Last week, I posted my observations (musings?) relating to a colloquy that I had with Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam at an event sponsored by the C. Warren Neel Corporate Governance Center on The University of Tennessee’s Knoxville campus.  At almost the same time, and not at all related to my attendance at that event, I picked up a reprint of a recent article, CEOs and Presidents, authored by Tom Lin at Temple.  Tom and I often work in overlapping fields.  In particular, both of us have shown interest, from different perspectives, in substantially similar issues relating to corporate executives. 

I commend Tom’s article to you.  It provides a lucid and engaging comparison of CEOs and Presidents (as the title suggests).  (His analysis is, of course,  significantly more rich and nuanced than the reflections I shared in my earlier post.)  But Tom’s piece doesn’t stop there.  It goes on to critique the desirability of the “President as CEO” model based on the harms posed to both corporations and democracies and also highlights some important lessons we can learn from his study.

I do want to challenge Tom on one provocative statement that he makes in the article, however.  After critically commenting on the dangers of (among other things) government reliance on private industry and values in the accomplishment of its objectives, he observes that “[g]overnment and corporations are not actual or conceptual substitutes for one another, but are complements of one another.”  He lists examples and avows that both government and private industry are optimized when they collaborate.  

Larry Cunningham has a further post on his forthcoming book, Berkshire Beyond Buffett: The Enduring Value of Values, over at Concurring Opinions.  The post includes an excerpt from Chapter 8 of the book, Autonomy, and links to the full text of the chapter, available on SSRN for free (!) download.  Larry’s and my earlier posts on the book here on the BLPB can be found here, here, here, and here.

Here’s a slice of the excerpt included in the Concurring Opinions post:

. . . Berkshire corporate policy strikes a balance between autonomy and authority. Buffett issues written instructions every two years that reflect the balance. The missive states the mandates Berkshire places on subsidiary CEOs: (1) guard Berkshire’s reputation; (2) report bad news early; (3) confer about post-retirement benefit changes and large capital expenditures (including acquisitions, which are encouraged); (4) adopt a fifty-year time horizon; (5) refer any opportunities for a Berkshire acquisition to Omaha; and (6) submit written successor recommendations. Otherwise, Berkshire stresses that managers were chosen because of their excellence and are urged to act on that excellence. 

Cool stuff . . . .

On Friday, Bill Haslam, the Governor of the State of Tennessee, spoke at a session sponsored by the C. Warren Neel Corporate Governance Center on The University of Tennessee’s Knoxville campus.  He is our former city mayor and a hometown favorite for many.  I always enjoy his talks.

His talk on Friday focused on how Tennessee is attracting businesses and jobs and how education–including higher education–plays a role.  But before he honed in on that topic, he asked an intriguing, albeit basic, question that operates on theoretical, political, and practical planes.  That question: How is government similar to and different from private enterprise?  He wanted audience participation.  I waited to see how everyone would react.  He got lots of good answers that cut across economics, management, finance, and governance.

Provocatively (at least for me), he characterized his gubernatorial role as akin to the role of a chief executive officer in a corporation.  He has served as a corporate manager (president of his family’s firm and the CEO of a division of another firm), and his vision of the state gubernatorial role is clearly framed by that experience.  He actually called the legislature his “board of directors” in his role as governor. 

Well, after that analogy, I just had to contribute to the discussion with a comment.  I endorsed the governor’s view of his position, but I also noted that the executive, as the head of a separate branch of a government of three branches, has power independent of the power afforded to the legislature.  That is when things got interesting, at least for me.

Thanks for your informative post, Anne.  I started drafting this post as a comment to yours, and then I realized it was its own post.   [sigh]

It seems to me that the U.S. Department of HHS and any commentators must grapple with what has been a difficult, fact-based question in determining how to define “closely held” to effectuate the Supreme Court’s intent in as expressed in the Hobby Lobby opinion.  That question?  What “control” means in this context.

The Court said in the Hobby Lobby opinion:  “The companies in the cases before us are closely held corporations, each owned and controlled by members of a single family, and no one has disputed the sincerity of their religious beliefs.”  More specifically, the Court notes that the Hahns (owners of shares in Conestoga) “control its board of directors and hold all of its voting shares” and notes that Hobby Lobby and Mardel “remain closely held, and David, Barbara, and their children retain exclusive control of both companies.”  [Emphasis has been added by me in each quote.]

The definition of “control” primarily has been a question of fact in business law, making the task of defining it here somewhat difficult.  Some questions and considerations to grapple with are set forth below the fold.  I am sure that others can come up with more.  I am posting these as a way of getting the collective juices flowing.

This follows on Ann’s post yesterday on Gender and Crowdfunding.  Ann, so glad you’ve joined me and Steve Bradford as securities crowdfunding watchers!  Delighted to have you in that informal, somewhat disgruntled “club.”

I have been interested in whether securities crowdfunding will democratize business finance.  (I note here that Steve Bradford’s comment to Ann’s post raises the broader question of crowdfunding’s ability to better engage underrepresented populations in general.)  My interest has, however, been more on the investor (backer) side of the crowdfunding equation than on the business (entrepreneur) side.  

As Ann notes, given the delay in the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rulemaking under Title III of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act, the information on gender and crowdfunding that we have so far comes from other types of crowdfunding.  This information may or may not map well to markets in securities crowdfunding.  But it’s still worth reviewing the information that we do have.

OK.  So, I am stretching a bit here.  But yoga may be considered a sport, athletic clothing is a kind of fashion, and securities fraud prohibitions and corporate director fiduciary duty involve law.  So, I stand by my blog title in the face of any criticism that may follow this post.

I do yoga four times a week when I am not traveling.  I also work out, sometimes on days when I am not doing yoga.  So, I have a fair number of pieces of yoga wear and other athletic clothing.  This means that I get regular mail and email solicitations from the firms that purvey these clothing items.

I recently received a catalog from one of my favorite athletic clothing brands, Sweaty Betty, which I discovered originally when I was teaching in Cambridge, England in one of our study abroad programs a few years ago.  I noticed, with some amusement, that the new catalog harps on the opacity of the firm’s yoga bottoms or trousers (as the British like to call them).  The website does the same–“100% opaque” labels abound.  As an astute consumer and securities lawyer, I immediately jumped to the conclusion, whether…

THE CENTER FOR LAW, ECONOMICS & FINANCE (C-LEAF)

AT

THE GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY LAW SCHOOL

 

Fifth Annual JUNIOR FACULTY BUSINESS AND FINANCIAL LAW WORKSHOP

AND JUNIOR FACULTY SCHOLARSHIP PRIZES

 

Sponsored by Schulte Roth & Zabel LLP

CALL FOR PAPERS

The Center for Law, Economics & Finance (C-LEAF) at The George Washington University Law School is pleased to announce its fifth annual Junior Faculty Business and Financial Law Workshop and Junior Faculty Scholarship Prizes.  The Workshop and Prizes are sponsored by Schulte Roth & Zabel LLP. The Workshop will be held on February 27-28, 2015 at GW Law School in Washington, DC.

The Workshop supports and recognizes the work of young legal scholars in accounting, banking, bankruptcy, corporations, economics, finance and securities, while promoting interaction among them and selected senior faculty and practitioners. By providing a forum for the exchange of creative ideas in these areas, C-LEAF also aims to encourage new and innovative scholarship.

Approximately ten papers will be chosen from those submitted for presentation at the Workshop pursuant to this Call for Papers. At the…

Ah, yes . . . .  The public/private divide . . . .  My co-blogger Ann Lipton fairly begged me to write about this topic today, given that she had to miss the discussion session on the subject (entitled “Does The Public/Private Divide In Federal Securities Regulation Make Sense?”) convened by me and Michael Guttentag at last week’s Southeastern Association of Law Schools (SEALS) annual conference.  Arm-twisting aside, however, this is a topic of current interest (and actively engaged scholarship) for me.

The discussion session allowed a bunch of our corporate and securities law colleagues to explore historical, present, and projected future distinctions between public and private offerings and public and private companies/firms.  The discussion ranged widely, as did the short papers submitted by the participants.  Some topics of conversation were oriented in part toward corporate governance concerns–comments from Lisa Fairfax on linkages to shareholder empowerment and from Jill Fisch on executive compensation in the post-Dodd-Frank public environment come to mind in this regard.  Other discussion topics engaged securities regulation more centrally, including by, e.g., questioning the coherence of the rationale underlying the Section 12(g) and 15(d) reporting thresholds (with interesting commentary from Amanda Rose and Usha Rodrigues); offering…