Business Associations

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The School of Law at Texas Tech University invites applications for a full-time, 9-month tenure-track Professor of Law position to begin in August of 2025.  The position is open to both entry-level candidates and candidates who are on the tenure-track or tenured at another school.  Candidates who satisfy Texas Tech University’s requirements to be hired with tenure will also be eligible to hold the Frank McDonald Endowed Professorship in business law.

Required Qualifications

In line with TTU’s strategic priorities to engage and empower a diverse student body, enable innovative research and creative activities, and transform lives and communities through outreach and engaged scholarship, applicants should have experience or demonstrated potential for working with diverse student populations at the undergraduate and/or graduate levels within individual or across the areas of teaching, research/creative activity, and service.

Specific required qualifications are:

  1. Candidates should have a J.D.;
  2. Candidates should have a demonstrated potential for excellence in research, teaching, and service; and
  3. Candidates should have demonstrated potential for excellence in the areas of Contracts and in corporate/business law, such as Business Entities, Securities Regulation, Mergers & Acquisitions, and related courses.

Preferred Qualifications

In addition to the required qualifications, individuals with the following preferred qualifications are…

Transactions: The Tennessee Journal of Business Law recently published the proceedings of the 2023 Business Law Prof Blog symposium, held at UT Law in Knoxville back in October.  The proceedings can be found here.  As is customary, the issue includes articles written by the principal presenters—bloggers from here at the BLPB—and related commentary from UT Law faculty and students.

My contribution to the symposium was a piece called Business Lawyer Leadership: Valuing Relationships.  The abstract is set forth below.

Business lawyers are surrounded by relationships because of the nature of their work. Businesses are relational; business associations law is relational; business lawyering is relational. Business lawyering, in all its manifestations, is a practice steeped in the lawyer’s awareness and management of, as well as their participation in, the layered sets of relationships found in businesses and business associations law.

This article recognizes these important connections between business law practice and relationships. It approaches each of them in turn. The substantial take-away is that a business lawyer can best lead by understanding the inherent value of relationships to business lawyering and leveraging that understanding through focused effort that includes the employment of, among other things, relationship management skills. Relationship…

At Emory Law’s Eighth Biennial Conference on the Teaching of Transactional Skills back in the fall of 2023, I had the privilege of presenting with my UT Law clinical teaching colleague, Brian Krumm.  (Congratulations are due to Brian, who was recently appointed the Interim Director of our Clayton Center for Entrepreneurial Law!)  The title of this post is also the title of our presentation.  An edited transcript of the presentation was recently published by Transactions: The Tennessee Journal of Business Law and can be found here. The abstract is as follows:

In this edited transcript, we explain how each of us–a doctrinal law professor and a clinician–use members of our campus and local communities to help instruct transactional business law students. We each have independently realized that there is a value to sharing these outside business and legal experts with our students. Among other things, we have found that we can bring unique areas of legal and business expertise into our teaching and, at the same time, introduce our students to real-life practice experiences and related simulations. All of this is foundational to law practice. In addition, experiences of this kind are, in our view, increasingly useful and…

Check out the third issue of volume 73 of the DePaul Law Review!  It includes a series of papers emanating from the HBO series Succession.  As you may recall, I posted a call for papers for this issue about a year ago.  Most of the papers in the issue came from a venture originated and organized by Susan Bandes and Diane Kemker called the Waystar Royco School of Law.  I wrote about that enterprise here.  

I participated in the Waystar Royco School of Law Zoom meetings as the “Roy/Demoulas Distinguished Professor of Law and Business.”  I presented on fiduciary duty issues comparing the principals of two family businesses–The Demoulas family from Northern Massachusetts and Succession‘s Roy family from New York.  You can find my Zoom session here (Passcode: #hN+7J5N).  That presentation resulted in an essay that I wrote for the DePaul Law Review issue as well as an advanced business associations course based on the Succession series. I finish teaching that course this week.  I also presented on the topic of my Succession essay at the Popular Culture Association conference back in March.  I include a screenshot of my cover slide below.

I just posted the…

We just finished our second week of the semester and I’m already exhausted, partly because I just submitted the first draft of a law review article that’s 123 pages with over 600 footnotes on a future-proof framework for AI regulation to the University of Tennessee Journal of Business Law. I should have stuck with my original topic of legal ethics and AI.

But alas, who knew so much would happen in 2023? I certainly didn’t even though I spent the entire year speaking on AI to lawyers, businesspeople, and government officials. So, I decided to change my topic in late November as it became clearer that the EU would finally take action on the EU AI Act and that the Brussels effect would likely take hold requiring other governments and all the big players in the tech space to take notice and sharpen their own agendas.

But I’m one of the lucky ones because although I’m not a techie, I’m a former chief privacy officer, and spend a lot of time thinking about things like data protection and cybersecurity, especially as it relates to AI. And I recently assumed the role of GC of an AI startup. So…

It always is a great pleasure to pass along and promote the work of a colleague.  And today, I get to post about the work of a UT Law colleague!  Many of you know Tomer Stein, who came to join us at UT Law back in the summer.  He is such an ideal colleague and, like many of us, has broad interests across business finance and governance.

This post supports a recent draft governance piece, the title of which is the same as this post–Of Directorships: Reconfiguring the Theory of the Firm.  You can find the draft here.  The abstract is included below.

This Article develops a novel account of directorships and then uses it to reconfigure the theory of the firm. This widely accepted theory holds that firms emerge to satisfy the economic need for carrying out vertically integrated business activities under a fiduciary contract that substitutes for the owners’ multiple agreements with contractors and suppliers. As per this theory, the fiduciary contract is inherently incomplete, yet often preferable: while it cannot address all future contingencies in the firm, it will effectively direct all unaccounted-for firm events by placing them under the owners’ purview as a…

The title of this post is the name of the advanced business associations law course I will teach in the spring.  I got the idea for this course after talking to students about decreasing enrollments in advanced business law courses.  Although they attributed much of the decrease to grade shopping, they also noted that they and their peers often base course registration decisions on course names (from which they make assumptions) without reading the course descriptions.  So, a course named “Advanced Business Associations,” no matter how creatively it is taught (and I teach it as a discussion seminar), is not likely to attract positive attention.  When I floated using the HBO Max series Succession as a jumping off point for a discussion seminar on business law, they responded favorably.  The rest is, as they say, history. The proof of the pudding will be in the registration numbers.

The idea for the Succession-oriented course came to me quite naturally. I already was writing an essay on fiduciary duties relating to the series–forthcoming in the DePaul Law Review in a special volume focusing on Succession.  So, it was only a small jump to think about teaching more broadly from the…

I am pleased to report that Connecting the Threads is back for another year–our seventh!  As readers will recall, this annual symposium features the work of your Business Law Prof Blog editors (sometimes with coauthors), with commentary from Tennessee Law faculty members and students.  Every year, my colleagues and I offer up a variety of presentation topics covering developing theory, policy, doctrine, pedagogy, and practice trends in various areas of business law.

This year’s panels include:

“Algorithms to Advocacy: How Emerging Technologies Impact Legal Practice and Ethics”
Marcia Narine Weldon

“The Road and Corporate Purpose”
William P. Murray and J. Haskell Murray

“Is the SEC Proposing a ‘Loaded Questions’ Climate Disclosure Regime?”
John P. Anderson

“Business Lawyer Leadership: Valuing Relationships”
Joan Heminway

“Metals Derivatives Markets and the Energy Transition”
Colleen Baker and James Coleman

If you are in the Knoxville area, please come join us on Friday for the day.  The program runs from 8:30 am (registration) to 3:00 pm.  Registration for CLE credit can be accessed here.

Full-Time Tenure Track Faculty Positions

New York Law School (NYLS), located in the heart of Tribeca, invites applications for full-time faculty tenure-track or lateral positions. Although we welcome applications from candidates in all fields, we are particularly interested in hearing from those who focus on business law (all areas), intellectual property law, technology and privacy law, and teaching basic first-year courses in torts and contracts. 

NYLS is deeply committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive community. We warmly welcome applications from any and all candidates whose background, lived experiences, and viewpoints will contribute to an exceptional learning environment. To view NYLS’s Strategic Plan, visit www.nyls.edu/strategy, and for information on the School’s commitment to diversity and inclusion, see www.nyls.edu/diversity.

Compensation

The salary range is from $150,000 to $210,000, expressed in annual terms.

How to Apply

Please submit a detailed curriculum vitae listing relevant legal practice and law school experience, a cover letter expressing your interest and describing your qualifications, and a list of references, to William P. LaPiana, Dean of Faculty, at associate.dean@nyls.edu.

New York Law School is an Equal Opportunity Employer

All qualified candidates will receive consideration for employment without regard to of race, color, religion, sex, sexual…

It’s been little while since I posted here, but long-time readers of theis blog will not be surprised by the topic.  I am happy to say that, after a lot of work with an exceptional co-author who shares my concerns, Professor Samantha Prince from Penn State Dickinson Law, we have an article documenting the problems with mislabeling LLCs and providing a variety of solutions.  I have been writing on this for nearly 15 years, and unfortunately, not a lot has changed. 

The article, An LLC By Any Other Name Is Still Not A Corporation, is now available on SSRN, here, and has been submitted for publication. In the meantime, we welcome thoughts and comments.  

Here is the abstract: 

Business entities have their own unique characteristics. Entrepreneurs and lawyers who represent them select an entity structure based on the business’s current and projected needs. The differing needs of each business span across myriad topics such as capital requirements, taxation, employee benefits, and personal liability protection. These choices present advantages and disadvantages many of which are built into the type of entity chosen.

It is critically important that people, especially lawyers, recognize the difference between entities such as corporations…