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Marcia Narine Weldon

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Professor Narine Weldon is the director of the Transactional Skills Program, Faculty Coordinator of the Business Compliance & Sustainability Concentration, Transactional Law Concentration, and a Lecturer in Law.

She earned her law degree, cum laude, from Harvard Law School, and her undergraduate degree, cum laude, in political science and psychology from Columbia University. After graduating, she worked as a law clerk to former Justice Marie Garibaldi of the Supreme Court of New Jersey, a commercial litigator with Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen and Hamilton in New York, an employment lawyer with Morgan, Lewis and Bockius in Miami, and as a Deputy General Counsel, VP of Global Compliance and Business Standards, and Chief Privacy Officer of Ryder, a Fortune 500 Company. In addition to her academic position, she serves as the general counsel of a startup and a nonprofit.  Read More

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Call for Papers

Financial Inclusion: A Sustainable Mission from Microfinance to Alternative Finance

Social and Technological Paradigms

ITEM 8

Dijon, France

December 7-8, 2017

CEREN, EA 7477, Burgundy School of Business – Université Bourgogne Franche-Comté

Microfinance has sought to include individuals that financial institutions exclude. The mission has been progressively widening to alternative finance, which has thrived outside of conventional financial instruments and channels.

Alternative finance takes different forms, such as angel investment, asset funding, cash flow funding, crowdfunding, crypto-currencies (Bitcoin), fair investment, fintech, slow money, pension fund investments, social impact bonds, etc. All the types have resulted from social and/or technological innovations or a mix of both. They provide significant values to customers and investors. Some of the benefits include absence of lengthy applications, low documentation, almost no collateral, minimum or no credit score requirements, high approval rates, and fast funding.

Alternative finance has also widened the base of customers. While microfinance mainly aimed at making financial services available to people at the ‘Bottom of the Pyramid’, alternative finance has gone beyond to target not only the poor, but also small enterprises, young and innovative ventures, women, minorities, individuals with no credit history, and any other audience excluded by the conventional…

Every year my students have the opportunity to earn extra credit writing about business issues that they see in movies or television. This year the movies Wall Street, and The Social Network tied for the most popular subjects. One student wrote an interesting paper about the business and CSR issues in Monsters, Inc., a movie I plan to watch for the first time this weekend. Disney’s describes the movie this way:

Lovable Sulley and his wisecracking sidekick Mike Wazowski are the top scare team at Monsters, Inc., the scream-processing factory in Monstropolis. When a little girl named Boo wanders into their world, it’s the monsters who are scared silly, and it’s up to Sulley and Mike to keep her out of sight and get her back home.

The student who wrote the paper spent her time instead focusing on Mr. Waternoose, the villainous CEO, seen here.

Personally, I was hoping someone would write about Season 3 of HBO’s Silicon Valley, which has provided some great scenes about fiduciary duties, corporate governance, succession planning, funding, and other issues related to startups. No one did, but I was pleased to see so many students apply what they learned in…

A bit more than a year ago, I had the opportunity to participate in a conference on corporate criminal liability at the Stetson University College of Law.  The short papers from the conference were published in a subsequent issue of the Stetson Law Review.  This was the second time that Ellen Podgor, a friend and white collar crime scholar on the Stetson Law faculty, invited me to produce a short work on corporate criminal liability for publication in a dedicated edition of the Stetson Law Review.  (The first piece I published in the Stetson Law Review reflected on corporate personhood in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United opinion.  It has been downloaded and cited a surprising number of times.  So, I welcomed the opportunity to publish with the law review a second time.)

For the 2016 conference, I chose to focus on the reckless conduct of employees and its capacity to generate corporate criminal insider trading liability for the employer.  The abstract for the resulting paper, (Not) Holding Firms Criminally Responsible for the Reckless Insider Trading of their Employees (recently posted to SSRN), is as follows:

Criminal enforcement of the insider trading prohibitions under Section 10(b) and Rule 10b–5 is the root of corporate criminal liability for insider trading in the United States. In the wake of assertions that S.A.C. Capital Advisors, L.P. actively encouraged the unlawful use of material nonpublic information in the conduct of its business, the line between employer and employee criminal liability for insider trading becomes both tenuous and salient. An essential question emerges: when do we criminally prosecute the firm for the unlawful conduct of its employees?

The possibility that reckless employee conduct may result in the employer’s willful violation of Section 10(b) and Rule 10b–5 (and, therefore, criminal liability for that employer firm) motivates this article. The article first reviews the basis for criminal enforcement of the insider trading prohibitions established in Section 10(b) and Rule 10b–5 and describes the basis and rationale for corporate criminal liability (a liability that derives from the activities of agents undertaken in the course of the firm’s business). Then, it reflects on that basis and rationale by identifying the potential for corporate criminal liability for the reckless insider trading violations of employees under Section 10(b) and Rule 10b–5, arguing against that liability, and suggesting ways to eliminate it.

I was not the only conference participant concerned about the criminal liability of an employer for the insider trading conduct of an employee.  John Anderson, who co-led an insider trading discussion group with me at the 2017 Association of American Law Schools annual meeting back in January and also enjoys exploring criminal insider trading issues, contributed his research on the overcriminalization of insider trading at the conference.  His paper, When Does Corporate Criminal Liability for Insider Trading Make Sense?, identifies the same overall problem as my article does (employer criminal liability for insider trading based on employee conduct).  However, he views both the problem and the potential solutions more broadly.  

Last week, a reporter interviewed me regarding conflict minerals.The reporter specifically asked whether I believed there would be more litigation on conflict minerals and whether the SEC’s lack of enforcement would cause companies to stop doing due diligence. I am not sure which, if any, of my remarks will appear in print so I am posting some of my comments below:

I expect that if conflict minerals legislation survives, it will take a different form. The SEC asked for comments at the end of January, and I’ve read most of the comment letters. Many, including Trillium Asset Management, focus on the need to stay the course with the Rule, citing some success in making many mines conflict free. Others oppose the rule because of the expense. However, it appears that the costs haven’t been as high as most people expected, and indeed many of the tech companies such as Apple and Intel have voiced support for the rule. It’s likely that they have already operationalized the due diligence. The SEC has limits on what it can do, so I expect Congress to take action, unless there is an executive order from President Trump, which people have been expecting since February. 
 
The Senate

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As a business lawyer in private practice, I found it very frustrating when the principals of business entity clients acted in contravention of my advice.  This didn’t happen too often in my 15 years of practice.  But when it did, I always wondered whether I could have stopped the madness by doing something differently in my representation of the client.

Thanks to friend and Wayne State University Law School law professor Peter Henning, who often writes on insider trading and other white collar crime issues for the New York Times DealBook (see, e.g., this recent piece), I had the opportunity to revisit this issue through my research and present that research at a symposium at Wayne Law back in the fall of 2015.  The law review recently published the resulting short article, which I have posted to SSRN.  The abstract is set forth below.

Sometimes, business entity clients and their principals do not seek, accept, or heed the advice of their lawyers. In fact, sometimes, they expressly disregard a lawyer’s instructions on how to proceed. In certain cases, the client expressly rejects the lawyer’s advice. However, some business constituents who take action contrary to the advice of legal counsel…

Ratings behemoth Bill O’Reilly is out of a job at Fox News “after thorough and careful review of the [sexual harassment] allegations” against him by several women. Fox had settled with almost half a dozen women before these allegations came to light, causing advertisers to leave in droves once the media reported on it. According to one article, social media activists played a major role in the loss of dozens of sponsors. Despite the revelations, or perhaps in a show of support, O’Reilly’s ratings actually went up even as advertisers pulled out. Fox terminated O’Reilly– who had just signed a new contract worth $20 million per year– the day before its parent company’s board was scheduled to meet to discuss the matter. The employment lawyer in me also wonders if the company was trying to preempt any negligent retention liability, but I digress.

An angry public also took to social media to expose United Airlines’ after its ill-fated decision to have a passenger forcibly removed from his seat to make room for crew members. However, despite the estimated 3.5 million impressions on Twitter of #BoycottUnited, the airline will not likely suffer financially in the long term because…

I rarely post twice in one day, but I am making an exception today.  After posting this morning, I learned that today is International Haiku Poetry Day.  I loved Haiku poetry as a kid.  I still love it as an adult.  It has structure–a structure that, in my opinion, encourages both brevity and creativity.

In honor of this special day, I wrote a personal haiku for my Facebook page.

Yoga feeds the soul
And calms the body and mind.
Breathe and move. Repeat.

I am pretty proud of that one, inspired by my Monday night Iyengar practice.  So, I thought I would try my hand at a BLPB haiku.  Here goes.

A new President.
Time to revamp business regs!
Uncertainty reigns.

The inspiration for this haiku is obvious . . . .  :>)

Prefer more humorous verse? I also loved limericks.  So, I checked to see whether there might be an International or National Limerick Day.  Indeed, it appears that we will celebrate limericks on Friday, May 12, 2017.  Hmm . . . .

As Haskell earlier announced here at the BLPB, The first U.S. benefit corporation went public back in February–just before publication of my paper from last summer’s 8th Annual Berle Symposium (about which I and other BLPB participants contemporaneously wrote here, here, and here).  Although I was able to mark the closing of Laureate Education, Inc.’s public offering in last-minute footnotes, my paper for the symposium treats the publicly held benefit corporation as a future likelihood, rather than a reality.  Now, the actual experiment has begun.  It is time to test the “visioning” in this paper, which I recently posted to SSRN.  Here is the abstract.

Benefit corporations have enjoyed legislative and, to a lesser extent, popular success over the past few years. This article anticipates what recently (at the eve of its publication) became a reality: the advent of a publicly held U.S. benefit corporation — a corporation with public equity holders that is organized under a specialized U.S. state statute requiring corporations to serve both shareholder wealth aims and social or environmental objectives. Specifically, the article undertakes to identify and comment on the structure and function of U.S. benefit corporations and the unique litigation…

CALL FOR PAPERS
Presidential Powers and Administrative Law

The UMKC Law Review is pleased to announce a call for papers relating to the executive branch’s scope of power and its impact on administrative law and the lives of real people. Selected papers will be published in the Special Topics Symposium Winter 2018 edition of the UMKC Law Review.

This symposium invites proposals for papers exploring legal and administrative issues around the authority vested in the President of the United States. The constitutional limits on executive action, ethics and accountability in government, the separation of powers, the far-reaching economic and social effects of proposed or anticipated administrative reforms, and other considerations relating to the intersection of executive and administrative authority are all topics under the umbrella of this symposium. We also welcome analysis of the interaction between the executive branch and areas of administrative concern and impact, such as the environment, healthcare, consumer protection, banking regulation, and other areas dependent on agency oversight. The recent proliferation of executive orders and new structural rules, such as the one-in, two-out regulatory policy and possible changes for the organization of the Executive Branch, make the use of executive orders another topic of interest.…

After I published last week’s post, I heard from a few of you in person and by email.  You expressed support and sympathy.  And you had stories of your own.  Those communications motivate this post.

There are, in my view, rules of etiquette that apply to editing academic and professional work for publication.  It seems that I am not the only one who holds this view.  With articles and posts titled, e.g., Editing Etiquette and Editor Etiquette, a number of others in the writing and editing biz have ideas on how editors should behave in their interactions with writers.  And my key observations about best practices in law review, law journal, and law textbook editing echo theirs.  Here are my “Top Three” rules of editing etiquette for law publications.

  1. Always show the author where changes to the text have been made.  This typically means sending the author a blacklined version of the work.  Once the give-and-take of the editorial process is under way, the backline should indicate whether changes suggested by the author have been accepted and where new changes suggested by the editor have been implemented/added.  Recently, a law review sent me a backline that was made from

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