Agency

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Business law has a broad overlap with tax, accounting, and finance.  Just how much belongs in a law school course is often a challenge to determine.  We all have different comfort levels and views on the issue, but incorporating some level of financial literacy is essential.  Fortunately, a more detailed discussion of what to include and how to include it is forthcoming.  Here’s the call: 

Call For Papers

AALS Section on Agency, Partnerships LLCs, and Unincorporated Associations

Bringing Numbers into Basic and Advanced Business Associations Courses: How and Why to Teach Accounting, Finance, and Tax

2015 AALS Annual Meeting Washington, DC

Business planners and transactional lawyers know just how much the “number-crunching” disciplines overlap with business law. Even when the law does not require unincorporated business associations and closely held corporations to adopt generally accepted accounting principles, lawyers frequently deal with tax implications in choice of entity, the allocation of ownership interests, and the myriad other planning and dispute resolution circumstances in which accounting comes into play. In practice, unincorporated business association law (as contrasted with corporate law) has tended to be the domain of lawyers with tax and accounting orientation. Yet many law professors still struggle with the reality…

Donna M. Nagy recently posted “Owning Stock While Making Law: An Agency Problem and A Fiduciary Solution” on SSRN.  Here is the abstract:

This Article focuses on Members of Congress and their widespread practice of holding personal investments in companies that are directly and substantially affected by legislative action. Whether entirely accurate or not, congressional officials with investment portfolios chock full of corporate stocks and bonds contribute to a corrosive belief that lawmakers can – and sometimes do – place their personal financial interests ahead of the public they serve.

Fiduciary principles provide a practical solution to this classic agency problem. The Article first explores the loyalty-based rules that guard against self-interested decision-making by directors of corporations and by government officials in the executive and judicial branches of the federal government. It then contrasts the strict anti-conflict restraints in state corporate law and federal conflicts-of-interest statutes with the very different set of ethical rules and norms that Congress traditionally has applied to the financial investments held by its own members and employees. It also confronts the parochial view that lawmakers’ conflicts are best deterred through public disclosure of personal investments and the discipline of the electoral process.

My Akron colleague Will Huhn just posted “2013-2014 Supreme Court Term: Court’s Decision in Daimler AG v. Bauman, No. 11-965: Implications for the Birth Control Mandate Cases?” over at his blog wilsonhuhn.com.  Here is a brief excerpt, but you should go read the entire post:

On January 14, 2014, the Supreme Court issued its decision in favor of Daimler AG (the maker of Mercedes-Benz), ruling that the federal courts in California lacked personal jurisdiction over Daimler to adjudicate claims for human rights violations arising in Argentina. The ruling of the Court may have implications for the birth control mandate cases pending before the Court in Hobby Lobby Stores and Conestoga Wood Specialties…. In those cases the owners of two private, for-profit business corporations contend that their individual rights to freedom of religion “pass through” to the corporation — that the corporations are in effect the “agents” of the principal shareholders, and that this is why the corporations have the right to deny their employees health insurance coverage for birth control. In Daimler the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had held that MBUSA was the “agent” of Daimler AG, and that the substantial business presence of…

Robert H. Sitkoff recently posted “An Economic Theory of Fiduciary Law” on SSRN.  Here is the abstract:

This chapter restates the economic theory of fiduciary law, making several fresh contributions. First, it elaborates on earlier work by clarifying the agency problem that is at the core of all fiduciary relationships. In consequence of this common economic structure, there is a common doctrinal structure that cuts across the application of fiduciary principles in different contexts. However, within this common structure, the particulars of fiduciary obligation vary in accordance with the particulars of the agency problem in the fiduciary relationship at issue. This point explains the purported elusiveness of fiduciary doctrine. It also explains why courts apply fiduciary law both categorically, such as to trustees and (legal) agents, as well as ad hoc to relationships involving a position of trust and confidence that gives rise to an agency problem.

Second, this chapter identifies a functional distinction between primary and subsidiary fiduciary rules. In all fiduciary relationships we find general duties of loyalty and care, typically phrased as standards, which proscribe conflicts of interest and prescribe an objective standard of care. But we also find specific subsidiary fiduciary duties, often…

Martin Gelter & Geneviève Helleringer posted “Constituency
Directors and Corporate Fiduciary Duties” on SSRN a few weeks ago, and I’m
finally getting around to passing on the abstract:

In this chapter, we identify a fundamental contradiction in
the law of fiduciary duty of corporate directors across jurisdictions, namely
the tension between the uniformity of directors’ duties and the heterogeneity
of directors themselves. Directors are often formally or informally selected by
specific shareholders (such as a venture capitalist or an important
shareholder) or other stakeholders of the corporation (such as creditors or
employees), or they are elected to represent specific types of shareholders
(e.g. minority investors). In many jurisdictions, the law thus requires or
facilitates the nomination of what has been called “constituency” directors.
Legal rules tend nevertheless to treat directors as a homogeneous group that is
expected to pursue a uniform goal. We explore this tension and suggest that it
almost seems to rise to the level of hypocrisy: Why do some jurisdictions
require employee representatives that are then seemingly not allowed to
strongly advocate employee interests? Looking at US, UK, German and French law,
our chapter explores this tension from the perspective of economic and
behavioral theory.

Really great piece by Justin Fox on “What We’ve Learned from
the Financial Crisis” over at the Harvard Business Review.  What follows is a brief excerpt, but you’ll want to go read the whole thing.

Five years ago the global financial system seemed on the
verge of collapse. So did prevailing notions about how the economic and
financial worlds are supposed to function. The basic idea that had governed
economic thinking for decades was that markets work…. In the summer of 2007,
though, the markets for some mortgage securities stopped functioning…. [T]he
economic downturn was definitely worse than any other since the Great
Depression, and the world economy is still struggling to recover…. Five years
after the crash of 2008 is still early to be trying to determine its
intellectual consequences. Still, one can see signs of change…. To me, three
shifts in thinking stand out: (1) Macroeconomists are realizing that it was a
mistake to pay so little attention to finance. (2) Financial economists are
beginning to wrestle with some of the broader consequences of what they’ve
learned over the years about market misbehavior. (3) Economists’ extremely
influential grip on a key component of the economic

…