Blog Posts from Business Law Professors
Below are some resources related to the integration of faith and work stemming from businesses or business people.
Companies
Organizations
Presentations
Books and Articles
A friend of mine is considering teaching his constitutional law seminar based almost entirely on current and future decisions by the President-elect. I would love to take that class. I thought of that when I saw this article about Mr. Trump’s creative use of Delaware LLCs for real estate and aircraft. Here in South Florida, we have a number of very wealthy residents, and my Business Associations students could value from learning about this real-life entity selection/jurisdictional exercise. Alas, I probably can’t squeeze a whole course out of his business interests. However, I am sure that using some examples from the headlines related to Trump and many of his appointees for key regulatory agencies will help bring some of the material to life.
Happy Grading!
Today, I share a quick teaching tip/suggestion.
I taught my last classes of the semester earlier today. For my Business Associations class, which met at 8:00 am, I was looking for a way to end the class meeting, tying things from the past few classes up in some way. I settled on using the facts from a case that I used to cover in a former casebook that is not in my current course text: Coggins et al. v. New England Patriots Football Club, Inc., et al. Here are the facts I presented:
From this, I noted that three legal actions are common…
It is not secret that Patagonia is one of the companies that I admire most; it may be my favorite company and is certainly in my top-five.
Patagonia’s decision regarding its Black Friday sales adds to the reason I like the company. Patagonia will donate 100% of its Black Friday sales to grassroots environmental groups.
As I read it, the donations will be 100% of revenue, not profits, and the donations are estimated to be millions of dollars.
Patagonia is both a California benefit corporation and B corporation certified, but unlike many social enterprises, Patagonia often does things like the above that don’t appear to be done just for the PR, and may actually hurt the company in the very short-term.
That said, Patagonia definitely has a good PR team and is probably getting millions of dollars of exposure out of this decision. And their apparel is quite expensive, so they may be able to afford to do things like this, based, in part, on the margins and goodwill built over time.
I have been thinking about the long-short term investment horizon debate, definitions, empirics and governance design consequences for some time now (see prior BLPB post here and also see Joshua Fershee’s take on the topic). This has been on mind so much that I am now planning a June, 2017 conference on that very topic in conjunction with the Adolf A. Berle Jr. Center on Corporations, Law & Society (founded by Charles “Chuck” O’Kelley at Seattle University School of Law). In planning this interdisciplinary conference where the goal is to invite corporate governance folks, finance and economics scholars, and psychologists and neuroscientist, I have had the pleasure of reading a lot of out-of-discipline work and talking with the various authors. It has been an unexpected benefit of conference planning. I also want some industry voices represented so I have reached out to Aspen Institute, Conference Board and a new group, Focusing Capital on the Long Term (FCLT), which I learned about through this process.
I share this with BLPB readers for several reasons. The first is that the FCLT, is a nonprofit organization, a nonprofit organization for BUSINESS issues created and funded by BUSINESSES. In July 2016, the…
Thanks to all who responded to my query two weeks ago on teaching corporate fiduciary duties. I continue to contemplate your suggestions as I recover from the cold that has consumed me now for a week. Don’t catch this version of the common cold! It’s a bear.
Anyway, the weekend after I published that post, I presented at a super symposium on shareholder rights at the University of Oklahoma College of Law–“Confronting New Market Realities: Implications for Stockholder Rights to Vote, Sell, and Sue,” hosted by the Oklahoma Law Review. (I spoke on rights to sell securities purchased in an offering exempt from registration under the CROWDFUND Act, Title III of the JOBS Act.) Although it was not part of the formal agenda for the symposium, I got a chance to chat informally with a group of folks at and after the conference, including our host, Megan Shaner, along with Jessica Erickson, Gordon Smith, and Vice Chancellor Travis Laster from the Delaware Chancery Court (among others) about fiduciary duty complexity. All, even the Vice Chancellor, had sympathy, offering ideas for simplifying corporate fiduciary duty law (as opposed to merely the teaching of it) that made sense. And it seems that among those of us in…
Interest from churches in the integration of faith and work seems to have grown exponentially over the past few decades. That said, as far back as Martin Luther, there has been a call to view even jobs outside of ministry as a vocation or religious calling.
I plan to update this post from time to time, and I may add more discussion, but for now, I will just list some of the church-founded or church-connected faith & work initiatives or resources below. I welcome suggestions for additions to this list.
Organizations
Presentations and Panels
Books
Each year, I rethink how I teach fiduciary duties in the corporate law context in my Business Associations course. My learning objectives for the students are both limited and involved. On the one hand, there’s little room in my three-credit-hour course for a nuanced understanding of all of the contexts in which corporate fiduciary duty claims typically occur. In particular, I have determined to leave out the public company mergers and acquisitions context almost completely. On the other hand, I find myself juggling uncertain classifications of duty components, explanations of seemingly mismatched standards of conduct and liability, and judicial review standards in and outside the Delaware corporate law context. It’s a handful. It’s teaching complexity.
Of course, fiduciary duty is not the only complex matter that one must teach in Business Associations. But it is, for me, one of the topics I am least confident that I “get right” in my interactions with students in and outside the classroom. Accordingly, as I again head toward the end of the semester, I find myself wondering whether I could have done–or could do–more with the students in my Business Associations course this semester. This leads me to ask my fellow business law professors (that’s you!) whether…
From Hobby Lobby to Chick-fil-A to Indiana’s RFRA to wedding photographers and wedding cake bakers, “faith and business” has been in the headlines quite a bit over the past few years.
Over the next few weeks, I plan to write a series of posts exploring developments in this area of faith and business. I plan three additional posts, looking at faith and business (sometimes called, “faith and work”) initiatives in (1) universities, (2) churches, and (3) businesses. My comments in this series will have a Christian focus, as that is my faith and is the area with which I am most familiar, but I welcome comments from any faith tradition.
Based on what I have seen around the country, many universities, churches, and businesses seem to be increasing their focus on the integration of faith and business. For some, this is a terrifying development. For others it is long overdue. I submit that both sides should attempt to engage in perspective-taking and nuanced discussion in an attempt to reach common ground.
As someone who prioritizes his faith, I also want to share my personal thoughts on the area of “faith and business” in this introductory post. First, some Christians…
The Association of American Law Schools (AALS) Annual Meeting will be held Tuesday, January 3 – Saturday, January 7, 2017, in San Francisco. Readers of this blog who may be interested in programs associated with the AALS Section on Socio-Economics & the Society of Socio-Economics should click on the following link for the complete relevant schedule:
Download Socio-Economic AALS Participants + Descriptions 161018
Specifically, I’d like to highlight the following programs:
On Wednesday, Jan. 4:
9:50 – 10:50 AM Concurrent Sessions:
1:45 – 2:45 PM Concurrent Sessions:
1. What is a Corporation?
Robert Ashford (Syracuse) Moderator Stefan Padfield (Akron)
Tamara Belinfanti (New York) Sabeel Rahman (Brooklyn)
Daniel Greenwood (Hofstra)
On Thursday, Jan. …
