This looks like an excellent position, and you would get to be colleagues with one of my favorite corporate law professors, Benjamin Means.
American Business Law Journal (“ABLJ”) – Call for Submissions
Earlier today, I received this call for submissions from the American Business Law Journal (“ABLJ”). I published with the ABLJ in 2017 and had a fabulous experience. The manuscripts are blind/peer-reviewed, something we need more of in the legal academy, in my opinion. I found the substantive comments to be of a much higher quality than one gets from a typical law review, and, unlike the practice of some peer-reviewed journals, the ABLJ published my manuscript in a timely manner.
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The American Business Law Journal is seeking submissions of manuscripts that advance the scholarly literature by comprehensively exploring and analyzing legal and ethical issues affecting businesses within the United States or the world. Manuscripts analyzing international business law topics are welcome but must include a comprehensive comparative analysis, especially with U.S. law.
As most of you know, the ABLJ is a triple-blind, peer-reviewed law journal published by the Academy. The ABLJ is available on Westlaw and Lexis, and ranks in the top 6% of all publications in the Washington & Lee Submissions and Ranking list by Impact Factor (2016) and in the top 1% of all peer-edited or refereed by Impact Factor (2016). The Washington & Lee list ranks
Yes, Ann. I believe that CEOs have private lives . . . .
I was fascinated by Ann Lipton’s post on April 14. I started to type a comment, but it got too long. That’s when I realized it was actually a responsive blog post.
Ann’s post, which posits (among other things) that corporate chief executives might be required to comply with their fiduciary duties when they are acting in their capacity as private citizens, really made me think. I understand her concern. I do think it is different from the disclosure duty issues that I and others scope out in prior work. (Thanks for the shout-out on that, Ann.) Yet, I struggled to find a concise and effective response to Ann’s post. Here is what I have come up with so far. It may be inadequate, but it’s a start, at least.
Fiduciary duties are contextual. One can have fiduciary duties to more than one independent legal person at the same time, of course, proving this point. (Think of those overlapping directors, Arledge and Chitiea in Weinberger. They’re a classic example!) What enables folks to know how to act in these situations is a proper identification of the circumstances in which the person is acting.
So, for example, an agent’s
Social Enterprise and the Traditional For-Profit Corporation
My essay on the use of traditional for-profit corporations as a choice of entity for sustainable social enterprise firms was recently published in volume 86 of the UMKC Law Review. I spoke on this topic at The Bryan Cave/Edward A. Smith Symposium: The Green Economy held at the UMKC School of Law back in October. The essay is entitled “Let’s Not Give Up on Traditional For-Profit Corporations for Sustainable Social Enterprise,” and the SSRN abstract is included below:
The past ten years have witnessed the birth of (among other legal business forms) the low-profit limited liability company (commonly known as the L3C), the social purpose corporation, and the benefit corporation. The benefit corporation has become a legal form of entity in over 30 states. The significant number of state legislative adoptions of new social enterprise forms of entity indicates that policy makers believe these alternative forms of entity serve a purpose (whether legal or extra legal).
The rise of specialty forms of entity for social enterprise, however, calls into question, for many, the continuing role of the traditional for-profit corporation (for the sake of brevity and convenience, denominated “TFPC” in this essay) in social enterprises, including green economy ventures.
AALS 2019 – Section on Business Associations Call for Papers
Call for Papers for the
Section on Business Associations Program on
Contractual Governance: the Role of Private Ordering
at the 2019 Association of American Law Schools Annual Meeting
The AALS Section on Business Associations is pleased to announce a Call for Papers from which up to two additional presenters will be selected for the section’s program to be held during the AALS 2019 Annual Meeting in New Orleans on Contractual Governance: the Role of Private Ordering. The program will explore the use of contracts to define and modify the governance structure of business entities, whether through corporate charters and bylaws, LLC operating agreements, or other private equity agreements. From venture capital preferred stock provisions, to shareholder involvement in approval procedures, to forum selection and arbitration, is the contract king in establishing the corporate governance contours of firms? In addition to paper presenters, the program will feature prominent panelists, including SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce and Professor Jill E. Fisch of the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
Our Section is proud to partner with the following co-sponsoring sections: Agency, Partnership, LLC’s and Unincorporated Associations; Contracts; Securities Regulation; and Transactional Law & Skills.
Submission Information:
Please submit an abstract or draft of
Changes to The University of Tennessee Board of Trustees
In recent weeks, the Tennessee General Assembly has been wrestling with a bill (house and senate versions here and here) that changes the governing board of The University of Tennessee (UT), where I teach. Non-controversially, the UT FOCUS Act, as it is commonly called (Focusing on Campus and University Success at UT), decreases the size of UT’s board of trustees. Currently, the board of trustees comprises 27 members–five ex officio members and 22 appointed members. Tenn. Code Ann. § 49-9-202. Most would agree that 27–or even 22–is a relatively unmanageable number of board members, without good cause, for most governing boards. But the composition requirements for the board (with this newly reduced number of trustees) are where the rubber hits the road.
The Bill Summary for the measure, as reported on the Tennessee General Assembly website, succinctly describes the current board composition, which is established by statute. I include the relevant text from the Bill Summary here.
The ex officio members are: the governor, the commissioner of education, the commissioner of agriculture, and the president of the university, who are voting members; and the executive director of the Tennessee higher education commission (THEC), who is a nonvoting member. Of the 22 additional members: one must be appointed from each congressional district (presently there are nine congressional districts); two additional members each must reside in Knox and Shelby counties; one additional member each must reside in Weakley, Hamilton, and Davidson counties; one additional member must reside in Anderson, Bedford, Coffee, Franklin, Lincoln, Moore or Warren County; one additional member is a non-Tennessee resident; two additional members, one voting and one non-voting, must be members of the faculty of the University of Tennessee who served as faculty senate president, or the equivalent, at a University of Tennessee institution during the academic year immediately preceding appointment as a trustee, appointed according to a sequence detailed in present law; and two additional members who are students at a UT institution, one voting and one nonvoting, appointed from the various institutions on a rotating basis pursuant to present law.
Present law requires that at least one third of the appointive members be members of the principal minority political party in the state and that at least one third of the appointive members must be alumni of the University of Tennessee. All appointive members are appointed by the governor subject to confirmation by the senate, but appointments are effective until adversely acted upon by the senate. In making appointments to the board of trustees, the governor must strive to ensure that at least one person appointed to serve on the board is 60 years of age or older, and that at least one person appointed to serve on the board is a member of a racial minority. Present law requires that the membership of the board reflect the percentage of females in the population generally. Appointive members serve terms of six years beginning June 1 of the year of appointment, and members are eligible to succeed themselves.
(emphasis added) Of particular importance for purposes of this post are the italicized portions of the description. The UT FOCUS Act calls for no faculty or students–no state employees altogether–on the board as voting or non-voting members. I am concerned about this aspect of the bill because of its effect on the expertise of UT’s board. No amount of board orientation can imbue board members with the knowledge that faculty and students have.
The apparent tension here is between the value of that expertise–boots-on-the-ground knowledge of shared governance, curriculum design and execution, the role of co-curricular and extra-curricular programming, faculty/staff/student relations, and other matters unique to current participation in the university’s campus communities–and a perceived conflict of interest (since faculty and students would be effectively governing themselves).
The Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges (AGB) and the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) agree that university governing boards generally lack knowledge of faculty affairs. A 2017 publication of the AGB notes in this regard:
Participants in all three categories in our listening sessions (board members, presidents, and faculty) acknowledged—and indeed emphasized—that there is a huge information gap between boards and faculty. They noted that board members often have very little— if any—understanding of the nature of faculty work, of the nature of academic culture, of the real meaning of academic freedom, and of the history and importance of faculty self-governance and the faculty role in shared governance. . . .
The AAUP website features a report on a 2012 Cornell University study of faculty trustees that includes a related observation.
Discussions of “best practices” for governing boards consistently cite improved relationships with the faculty as one of the characteristics of highly effective boards. We are in an era of increasingly “activist” boards, leading to significant mutual distrust between boards and faculty members and creating an impetus for improving faculty-board relations.
As a former faculty senate president at UT Knoxville, I understand and appreciate all of this.
Teaching Corporate Law Globally – Recommended Text
I am committed to introducing my business law students to business law doctrine and policy both domestically and internationally. The Business Associations text that I coauthored has comparative legal observations in most chapters. I have taught Cross-Border Mergers & Acquisitions with a group of colleagues and will soon be publishing a book we have coauthored. And I taught comparative business law courses for four years in study abroad programs in Brazil and the UK.
In the study abroad programs, I struggled in finding suitable texts, cobbling together several relatively small paperbacks and adding some web-available materials. The result was suboptimal. I yearned for a single suitable text. In my view, texts for study abroad courses should be paperback and cover all of the basics in the field in a succinct fashion, allowing for easy portability and both healthy discussion to fill gaps and customization, as needed, to suit the instructor’s teaching and learning objectives.
And so it was with some excitement–but also some healthy natural skepticism–that I requested a review copy of Corporations: A Comparative Perspective (International Edition), coauthored by my long-time friend Marco Ventoruzzo (Bocconi and Penn State) and five others (all scholars from outside
University of North Carolina Wilmington – Assistant/Associate Professor Business Law Position
The University of North Carolina-Wilmington recently posted an open position for an assistant/associate professor of business law.
Details about the position are posted below the break.
Professional Responsibility in an Age of Alternative Entities, Alternative Finance, and Alternative Facts
Like my fellow editors here at the BLPB, I enjoyed the first Business Law Prof Blog conference hosted by The University of Tennessee College of Law back in the fall. They have begun to post their recently published work presented at that event over the past few weeks. See, e.g., here and here (one of several newly posted Padfield pieces) and here. I am adding mine to the pile: Professional Responsibility in an Age of Alternative Entities, Alternative Finance, and Alternative Facts. The SSRN abstract reads as follows:
Business lawyers in the United States find little in the way of robust, tailored guidance in most applicable bodies of rules governing their professional conduct. The relative lack of professional responsibility and ethics guidance for these lawyers is particularly troubling in light of two formidable challenges in business law: legal change and complexity. Change and complexity arise from exciting developments in the industry that invite—even entice—the participation of business lawyers.
This essay offers current examples from three different areas of business law practice that involve change and complexity. They are labeled: “Alternative Entities,” “Alternative Finance,” and “Alternative Facts.” Each area is described, together with significant attendant professional responsibility and ethics
These Reasons Social Benefit Entities Hurt Business and Philanthropy Will Blow Your Mind
I suspect click-bait headline tactics don’t work for business law topics, but I guess now we will see. This post is really just to announce that I have a new paper out in Transactions: The Tennessee Journal of Business Law related to our First Annual (I hope) Business Law Prof Blog Conference co-blogger Joan Heminway discussed here. The paper, The End of Responsible Growth and Governance?: The Risks Posed by Social Enterprise Enabling Statutes and the Demise of Director Primacy, is now available here.
To be clear, my argument is not that I don’t like social enterprise. My argument is that as well-intentioned as social enterprise entity types are, they are not likely to facilitate social enterprise, and they may actually get in the way of social-enterprise goals. I have been blogging about this specifically since at least 2014 (and more generally before that), and last year I made this very argument on a much smaller scale. Anyway, I hope you’ll forgive the self-promotion and give the paper a look. Here’s the abstract:
Social benefit entities, such as benefit corporations and low-profit limited liability companies (or L3Cs) were designed to support and encourage socially responsible business. Unfortunately, instead