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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

Many of us are in the process of (perhaps frantically) wrapping up our summer scholarly activity and re-focusing our primary professional attention on teaching.  As always, I am using the annual conference sponsored by the Southeastern Association of Law Schools (SEALS) to help me make this transition.  Yesterday, I attended a discussion session led by law school associate deans and faculty who focus on faculty development–scholarship and teaching.  It was an incredibly interesting and wide-ranging discussion.

Part of the conversation centered around summer research stipends, a topic that has been in the national news a bit over the past few years.  Various participants in the discussion session addressed, each from his or her individual institution’s vantage point, the reasons for/purposes of summer research stipends (which not every school represented at the session currently has) and how summer stipends actually work or should/could optimally work.  I was surprised by the variations in approaches and ideas from school to school.  While the individual models are too numerous to capture here, I summarize below the fold some of the top-level points made and thoughts shared during the discussion.

As many readers (and all of my friends) know, I am a bit of a sports fan.  Having been a college athlete (field hockey, at Brown University, for trivia buffs), I focus most of my attention on college games.  I even served on The University of Tennessee’s Athletics Board for a few years.  But my Dad and I used to watch professional football and baseball a lot together when I was a kid (still do, when we are in the same place at the right time), so I also maintain a casual interest in professional sports.

I also have an interest in fashion, especially women’s fashion (maybe less well known, except by close friends).  I have friends in the industry and find aspects of it truly fascinating.  I even used to subscribe to Women’s Wear Daily, the fashion industry trade rag.  I am the faculty advisor to the College of Law’s Fashion and Business (FAB) Law student organization.

This personal background is prelude to my interest in two current events stories that I see as parallels.  I am trying to sort them through on a number of levels. Maybe you can help.  Here are the top lines of each story.

  • Last Thursday, the National Football League (NFL) suspended Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice for two games, fined him $58,000 dollars, and asked him to seek counseling after its investigation of an incident relating to a video in which Rice was depicted dragging his then-fiance, now wife, by her hair after punching her in the face (allegedly rendering her unconscious).
  • The very same day, American Apparel (AA) announced a new slate of directors who will assume positions on the AA board in early August as a result of investor intervention and a boardroom blood bath following on lagging profits and continuing investigations of allegations of sexual misconduct (most of it, as I understand it, not new news) against AA’s founder and former CEO and director, Dov Charney, whose management roles at the firm were suspended by the board back in June.

As I promised on Friday, I am posting a question and answer segment with Larry Cunningham, author of the forthcoming book: Berkshire Beyond Buffett: The Enduring Value of Values.  Larry will be guest blogging with us this week to talk more about the interesting findings he shares in the book and their implications for business and the research, teaching, and practice of business law.

Q:  Why did you write this book and what did you find?

A:  Widespread praise for Warren Buffett has become paradoxical: Buffett set out to build a permanent institution at Berkshire Hathaway and yet even great admirers, such as Steven Davidoff, doubt that the company can survive without him. I found that viewpoint intriguing since companies who are identified with iconic founders often have trouble after a succession, as Tom Lin has written.  I wanted to investigate how the situation will look for Berkshire after Buffett leaves the scene, collapse and breakup or prosperity coupled with continued expansion? What I found was a culture so distinctive and strong, that the company’s future is bright well beyond Buffett.

Q:  How did you reach that conclusion?  What was your research method?

A:  I focused on Berkshire’s fifty…

Cross-post alert!

At the risk of overdoing what may have been a good thing, I contributed a disclosure-oriented post to the Hobby Lobby symposium on The Conglomerate earlier today.  It includes new information about a U.S. Department of Labor Q&A posted yesterday, among other things.  Enjoy or not, as you so please . . . .

The Business Law Prof Blog is delighted to have as a guest blogger next week our friend and colleague Lawrence A. Cunningham (known to me as Larry!), of George Washington University Law School, who has just finished writing a new book being released in October called Berkshire Beyond Buffett: The Enduring Value of Values.  He will offer a few posts about aspects of the book during the week. We will kick it off Monday with some questions and answers.   

Larry is the Henry St. George Tucker III Research Professor at GW.  He teaches accounting, contracts, and corporate governance and has written extensively in all those areas.  He previously taught at Boston College Law School, where he served a term as Academic Dean, and Cardozo Law School, where he directed the Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Center on Corporate Governance.

Among his most cited articles are these scholarly jewels:

A Prescription to Retire the Rhetoric of “Principles-Based Systems” in Corporate Law, Securities Regulation and Accounting (Vanderbilt Law Review, 2007)

The Sarbanes-Oxley Yawn Heavy Rhetoric, Light Reform (And it Might Just Work) (Connecticut Law Review, 2003)

From Random Walks to Chaotic Crashes: The Linear Genealogy of the …

My post last week spawned more commentary than usual–on the BLPB site and off.  So, I am regrouping on the same issue for my post today and plan to push forward a bit on some of the areas of commentary.  Also, since The Conglomerate is running a Hobby Lobby symposium this week, I thought it might be nice to offer some thoughts on disclosure up here and (maybe) later chime in at The Conglomerate on this or other issues relating to the Hobby Lobby case later in the week . . . .

The Court’s Hobby Lobby decision, as noted in post-decision commentary (see, e.g., Sarah Hahn‘s guest post earlier this week), apparently relies in part on the fact that shareholders (and, potentially, employees and other relevant constituents of the firm) know that the firm has sincerely held religious beliefs and what those beliefs mean for business operations and legal compliance.  The Court does not directly address this in its opinion.  Rather, the opinion includes various references to owner engagement that imply buisness owner awareness.  The Court states:

  • For-profit corporations, with ownership approval, support a wide variety of charitable causes . . . . (Op. 23, emphasis added)

  • “So long as its owners agree, a for-profit corporation may take costly pollution-control and energy conservation measures that go beyond what the law requires.” (Op. 23, emphasis added)

In making these statements and reasoning through this part of the opinion, the Court relies on state corporate law principles and allusions.

Importantly, the Court also indicates its views on how the policy underlying the RFRA favors an interpretation that includes corporations as persons:

An established body of law specifies the rights and obligations of the people (including shareholders, officers, and employees) who are associated with a corporation in one way or another. When rights, whether constitutional or statutory, are extended to corporations, the purpose is to protect the rights of these people. For example, extending Fourth Amendment protection to corporations protects the  privacy interests of employees and others associated with the company. Protecting corporations from government seizure of their property without just compensation protects all those who have a stake in the corporations’ financial well-being. And protecting the free-exercise rights of corporations like Hobby Lobby, Conestoga, and Mardel protects the religious liberty of the humans who own and control those companies.

(Op. 18, emphasis in original)  Note how the last sentence reduces the protected category of persons under the RFRA to those who “own and control” the firm at issue.  This represents an interesting narrowing of constituency groups from the more inclusive treatment in the first sentence of the paragraph.  The reason for this narrowing may be (likely is) a practical one, evidencing judicial restraint.  The plaintiffs in the Hobby Lobby actions were those who owned or controlled the corporation, and the decision likely will be limited in its application accordingly.

Given these breadcrumbs from the Court’s opinion, should disclosure to shareholders or other constituencies be required, and if so, where would those disclosure rules reside as a matter of positive law?  A blog post may be the wrong place to begin to address this issue (which is admittedly complex and involves, potentially, areas of law somewhat unfamiliar to me).  But indulge me in a thought experiment here for a minute.

The blogosphere has been a-twitter with commentary on Jamie Dimon’s revelation earlier this week that he has throat cancer and will be undergoing treatments in the hope of eradicating it.  From the public news, his prognosis sounds good.  For that, I am sure all are grateful.

As some of you may know, my interest in issues relating to disclosures of facts from executives’ private lives stems from my fascination, starting about 12 years ago, with the Martha Stewart disclosure cases (about which I wrote in law journals and in several chapters of a book that I edited).  After co-writing the book about the basic concerns in Stewart’s insider trading, misstatements/omissions securities fraud, and derivative fiduciary duty actions, I focused in additional articles on some finer points relating to her case.  Two of these works covered the disclosure of private facts.  Among the types of private facts covered are those relating to executive health concerns.

Today, the body of former Senator Howard H. Baker Jr. lay in repose across the street from my office in the building that houses the academic center benefacted by and named after him.  (The building itself also bears his name.)  His coffin, draped elegantly in the American flag, is a reminder of a political era essentially gone–but not forgotten (at least by me). 

Senator Baker was a distinguished alumnus and benefactor of The University of Tennessee and the College of Law.  Our main rotunda on the first floor of the law building is named for him.  I dropped by today at the Baker Center for Public Policy to say goodbye to this revered statesman.  I did not make the trip across the street to pay my respects primarily because he was a UT alumnus or benefactor–or even because I knew him (although we shook hands and chatted pleasantly at least once that I can remember) or knew any member of his family.  I went because I deeply admire him and what he did with his public life.  He was the kind of guy–known as “The Great Conciliator”–who exhibited political patience, valued compromise, and didn’t let party politics or ideology stand in the way of what he knew in his gut was right.

In the obituary published by the American Bar Association in the ABA Journal, the following quote caught my eye:

“We are doing the business of the American people,” Baker said in a 1998 speech to members of Congress, explaining his philosophy of government. “And if we cannot be civil to one another, and if we stop dealing with those with whom we disagree, or that we don’t like, we would soon stop functioning altogether.”

Of course, the last bit stings a bit in light of the recent government shutdown.  But . . . doing the business of the American people.  Hmm.  This part of the quote reminded me of the public fiduciary arguments that Donna Nagy raises in her 2011 Boston University Law Review article entitled “Insider Trading, Congressional Officials, and Duties of Entrustment.”  A great read, for those who haven’t yet set aside the time.

However, the quote also made me think about Senator Baker’s engagements over the years with legal issues impacting businesses.  He was certainly pro-business, but he also fought for environmental protection and civil rights, among other things, even when those issues appeared, at least in the short term, to be a net negative for businesses.  What, then, would Senator Baker have said about today’s decision in Hobby Lobby?  Well, we’ll never know.  But I will take a few guesses, and those who knew him or know his politics better than I can feel free to question and correct my prognostications.

From Anne Tucker (who is off filming academic videos this afternon–whatever that means!):

Today’s Supreme Court decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores Inc. et al. exempted closely held corporations from complying with the contraceptive mandate in the Affordable Care Act.  There is plenty to debate about the opinion—corporations are persons under RFRA and can exercise religion as well as a host of choice quotes from the SCOTUS about “modern corporate law”—and I will leave that fun for another time.  I want to highlight three initial reactions:    

  1. There is no definition of closely held in today’s opinion.  Will we draw lines based on state corporate codes and elections to be S corp?  Will we rely upon the IRS definition of a closely held company?  It is unclear.  There is NOTHING in the opinion that prevents today’s ruling from applying to publically traded, closely held corporations like Wal-Mart.  The line drawing engaged by the SCOTUS in Hobby Lobby is not such a neatly drawn, tight circle, but is a wide net.  I discussed this briefly in a HuffPost Live segment earlier today—here.
  2. This is a statutory, not a constitutional ruling.  On its face.  Of course Congress could amend

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