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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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I had planned to post about the intersection of business and CSR in light of the Pepsi/Kendall Jenner debacle and the Bill O’Reilly sponsorship flap, but I will save that for next week. For the last two days, I’ve been at my 25th anniversary reunion. I protested every year at HLS due to the lack of faculty diversity, and I also didn’t believe that I had learned a lot that prepared me for the real world, and thus had mixed emotions about coming back.

 HLS turns 200 this year, and Dean Martha Minow is stepping down because she actually misses full time teaching and scholarship. She raised some fascinating statistics about the incoming class that all of us in the profession should think about as we teach and work with the next generation of lawyers. Of course, Harvard is at the cutting edge, but schools at every tier should try to follow HLS’ lead where possible. 

Eighty percent  of  the incoming class didn’t come straight from college. Twenty-five percent have  four or more years of work experience, which means that these are students who didn’t just default into law school. They made a considered choice and their work experience adds…

From time to time, we at the BLPB offer our views on publishing with law reviews.  The excellent, the good, the bad, the ugly–apparently, we have seen it all (or at least close to it).  See, e.g., Marcia’s post from last year that includes links to many of these prior posts.  This post carries forward that tradition.  

Two-and-a-half years ago, I published a post entitled Nightmare in Law Review Land . . . . That post included the two standard instructions that I routinely give to law reviews when I submit stack-check drafts.

The first is to leave in the automatic footnote cross-referencing that I have used in the draft until we finalize the article.  The second is to notify me if the staff believes that new footnote citations or citation parentheticals need to be added (specifically noting that I will handle those additions myself).

For the most part, this has worked well for me.  Recently, however, I received the following response to the second instruction:

Thank you for your notes. As part of our editing process, we add any needed citations and parentheticals. We build in time to do this and tend to be fairly thorough.

Call for Participants

 

Proposed Discussion Group

A New Era for Business Regulation?

Joan MacLeod Heminway, The University of Tennessee College of Law

Anne Tucker, Georgia State University College of Law

2018 AALS Annual Meeting

San Diego, CA

January 3-6, 2018

This is a call for participants in a proposed discussion group on “A New Era for Business Regulation?” at the 2018 Association of American Law Schools (“AALS”) Annual Meeting.

In January 2017, the president signed an Executive Order on Reducing Regulation and Controlling Regulatory Costs. The order uses budgeting powers to constrict agencies and the regulatory process by requiring that two regulations must be eliminated for each new regulation adopted. The order also mandates that “the total incremental cost of all new regulations, including repealed regulations, to be finalized this year shall be no greater than zero.” While the executive order does not cover independent agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, agencies that crafted many of the rules required by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, these agencies and their regulatory agendas will likely be the subject of future reform. The co-organizers of this proposal are looking…

Earlier this month, the EU announced plans to implement its version of conflict minerals legislation, which covers all “conflict-affected and high-risk areas” around the world. Once approved by the Council of the EU, the law will apply to all importers into the EU of minerals or metals containing or consisting of tin, tantalum, tungsten, or gold (with some exceptions). Compliance and reporting will begin in January 2021. Importers must use OECD due diligence standards, report on their progress to suppliers and the public, and use independent third-party auditors. President Trump has not yet issued an executive order on Dodd-Frank §1502, aka conflict minerals, but based on a leaked memo, observers believe that it’s just a matter of time before that law is repealed here in the U.S. So why is there a difference in approach?

In response to a request for comments from the SEC, the U.S Chamber of Commerce, which led the legal battle against §1502, claimed, “substantial evidence shows that the conflict minerals rule has exacerbated the humanitarian crisis on the ground in the Democratic Republic of the Congo…The reports public companies are mandated to file also contribute to ―information overload and create further disincentives…

Ringling1

No.  This is not a travelogue.  Rather, it’s a brief additional bit of background on a case that business associations law professors tend to enjoy teaching (or at least this one does).

In Ringling Bros. Inc. v. Ringling, 29 Del. Ch. 610 (Del. Ch. 1947), the Delaware Chancery Court addresses the validity of a voting agreement between two Ringling family members, Edith Conway Ringling (the plaintiff) and Aubrey B. Ringling Haley (the defendant).  The fact statement in the court’s opinion notes that John Ringling North is the third shareholder of the Ringling Brothers corporation.

I spent two days in Sarasota Florida at the end of Spring Break last week.  While there, I spent a few hours at The Ringling Circus Museum.  It was fascinating for many reasons.  But today I will focus on just one.  I noted this summary in one of the exhibits, that seems to directly relate to the Ringling case:

Ringling2

Interestingly, 1938 is the year in which the plaintiff and defendant in the Ringling case created their original voting trust (having earlier entered into a joint action agreement in 1934).  The agreement at issue was entered into in 1941.  Could it be that, perhaps, the two women entered into…

I’m too busy to blog today because I am preparing a training presentation on governance duties for nonprofits. The audience will consist of high level staff, not board members. I have served on many nonprofits and have advised others but I would be interested in your thoughts. Do you teach nonprofit law? Do you sit on nonprofits? What issues do you think nonprofit board members and staffer should know? Among other things, I plan to focus on fiduciary duties, maintaining 501(c)(3) exemption status, agency issues, the implications of Sarbanes-Oxley, conflicts of interest, document retention, code of ethics/whistleblower (to comport with 990),why nonprofits get sued, compensation issues, lobbying, insurance and indemnification, the role of different committees (particularly the audit committee), how to take good minutes, etc. I plan to use hypotheticals to help make the points stick. If you can think of other matters for my 3 hour module or some good case studies, please comment below or inbox me at mnarine@stu.edu. 

A new case, out just yesterday from the Southern District of Ohio, makes a mess of LLC veil piercing law. It appears that the legal basis put forth by the court in granting a motion to dismiss a veil piercing claim was probably right, but the statement of veil piercing law was not quite there.  

The case is ACKISON SURVEYING, LLC, Plaintiff, v. FOCUS FIBER SOLUTIONS, LLC, et al., Defendants., No. 2:15-CV-2044, 2017 WL 958620, at *1 (S.D. Ohio Mar. 13, 2017).  Here are the parties: the defendant is FTE Networks, Inc. (FTE), which filed a motion to dismiss claiming a failure to state a claim. FTE is the parent company of another defendant, Focus Fiber Solutions, LLC (Focus). The plaintiff, Ackison Surveying, LLC (Ackison) filed  a number of claims against Focus, added an alter ego/veil piercing claim against FTE. Thus, Ackison is, among other things, seeking to pierce the veil of an LLC (Focus). Focus appears to be a Pennsylvania LLC, based on a search here.

Pennsylvania law provides the liability cannot be imposed on a member of an LLC for failing to observe formalities. The law states: 

The failure of a limited liability partnership, limited partnership, limited liability limited partnership, electing partnership or limited liability

…

Every year, I offer my students the option of writing an extra credit paper on what Hollywood gets wrong about business. They can also apply what they’ve learned to a popular movie, television show, or book (the Godfather, Game of Thrones, and Sex and the City have provided some of the more interesting analogies). Often I provide a list of TV shows or movies that they can consider. Today, I’m asking my co-bloggers and our readers for their binge-worthy movie or TV choices. Some movie lists for business students are here, here, here, and here but I welcome your suggestions. For those of you who aren’t in my class and just want a break from the news, these lists may come in handy.

George Mocsary has an interesting paper that is officially in print. He makes some great points, but I think it undervalues the role of the business judgment rule. More on that later. I disagee, at least on the margins, but it’s worth a look.

 

Freedom of Corporate Purpose

George A. Mocsary, Freedom of Corporate Purpose, 2016 BYU L. Rev. 1319 (2017)

77 PagesPosted: 13 Apr 2016Last revised: 2 Feb 2017

George A. Mocsary 

Southern Illinois University at Carbondale – School of Law

Date Written: 2017

Abstract

Every few decades, there erupt political and academic debates over the proper nature and purpose of the corporation. It is black letter law, according to most scholars, that corporations exist to maximize shareholder wealth. Others maintain that the corporation should exist for the benefit of multiple constituencies, regardless of what current black letter law may say. The current discourse of corporate purpose, however, is incomplete and misleading. The disarray has resulted from insufficient reliance on historical context in (1) analyzing the firm under modern theories of corporate governance, and (2) interpreting the “purpose” language in corporate charters and corporation-law statutes.

Modern conceptions of corporate governance, and by extension, corporate purpose, have failed

…