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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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The University of Akron Law Review recently published its Symposium on Law and SocioEconomics.  You can find a full list of the contributions here (Volume 49, Issue 2).  As one of the organizers of the symposium, I had the honor of writing a conclusion to the issue, titled Socio-Economics: Challenging Mainstream Economic Models and Policies.  I provide the abstract below, and you can read the entire piece here.

At a time when many people are questioning the ability of our current system to provide economic justice, the Socio-Economic perspective is particularly relevant to finding new solutions and ways forward. In this relatively short conclusion to the Akron Law Review’s publication, Law and Socio-Economics: A Symposium, I have separated the Symposium articles into three groups for review: (1) those that can be read as challenging mainstream economic models, (2) those that can be read as challenging mainstream policy conclusions, and (3) those that provide a good example of both. My reviews essentially take the form of providing a short excerpt from the relevant article that will give the reader a sense of what the piece is about and hopefully encourage those who have not yet done so

Former Delaware Chancellor William (Bill) Chandler and Elizabeth Hecker, a fellow lawyer at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati presented on benefit corporations and Delaware law at the Berle VIII conference. I cannot fully communicate how exciting it was to hear a distillation of Delaware law generally and several opinions specifically from a judge involved in the cases.  In short: it was thrilling.

Former Chancellor Chandler discussed the Delaware case law interpretation of shareholder value and its place in analyzing corporate transactions.  While these aren’t words that he used, I have been thinking a lot about this tension as a question of complimenting or competing.  The simple message was that the “inc.” behind corporate names means something.  But the question, is what does that mean?  It signals, among other things, that a Delaware court will invalidate a board of directors’ other serving actions only if they are in conflict with shareholder value, but never when it is complimentary.   And there is a expanding appreciation of when “other interests” are seen as complimentary to, and not in competition with, shareholder value maximization.

Former Chancellor Chandler reminded us that shareholder value can include long term interests as the Delaware Chancery Court concluded in February…

My latest article on Cuba and the US is out. Here I explore corporate governance and compliance issues for US companies. In May, I made my third trip to Cuba in a year to do further research on rule of law and investor concerns for my current work in progress.

In the meantime, please feel free to email me your comments or thoughts at mnarine@stu.edu on my latest piece
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The abstract is below:

The list of companies exploring business opportunities in Cuba reads like a who’s who of household names- Starwood Hotels, Netflix, Jet Blue, Carnival, Google, and AirBnB are either conducting business or have publicly announced plans to do so now that the Obama administration has normalized relations with Cuba. The 1962 embargo and the 1996 Helm-Burton Act remain in place, but companies are preparing for or have already been taking advantage of the new legal exemptions that ban business with Cuba. Many firms, however, may not be focusing on the corporate governance and compliance challenges of doing business in Cuba. This Essay will briefly discuss the pitfalls related to doing business with state-owned enterprises like those in Cuba; the particular complexity of doing business in Cuba…

Today is the rare day where I feel like a professor.  Dressed in jeans and drinking coffee in my office, I have been reading Colin Mayer‘s book Firm Commitment in advance of the Berle VIII Symposium in Seattle next week (you can also see Haskell’s post & Joan’s post about Berle).  That’s not a typo, my agenda for the day is reading.  And not for a paper or to prep for class, I am just reading a book–cover to cover. I can hardly contain my joy at this.

I have been struck by the elegantly simple idea that corporations’ true benefit is to advance (and therefore) balance commitment and control.  I have long viewed the corporate binary as between accountability and control.  Under my framework the two are necessary to balance and contribute to the checks and balances within the corporate power puzzle of making the managers, who control the corporation, accountable to the shareholders.  Colin Mayer posits that the one directional accountability of the corporation to shareholders without reciprocity of commitment from the shareholders to the corporation is a corrosive element in corporate design.  

“The most significant source of failure is the therefore that we have created a system of

…