Conferences

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As I am traveling and conferencing, my thoughts already have turned to next summer’s conference schedule.  It seems like a good time to get two important business law conferences on the agenda for next year.  Those two conferences are: the sixth biennial conference on teaching transactional law and skills, “To Teach is to Learn Twice: Fostering Excellence in Transactional Law and Skills Education,” which will be held on June 1 – 2, 2018, at Emory Law in Atlanta, GA and the National Business Law scholars conference, which will be held at the University of Georgia School of Law in Athens, GA on June 21-22, 2018.  Emory Law’s “Save the Date” notice hit my in box this morning and appears below, FYI.

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SAVE THE DATE

Emory’s Center for Transactional Law and Practice cordially invites you to attend its sixth biennial conference on the teaching of transactional law and skills. The conference, entitled “To Teach is to Learn Twice: Fostering Excellence in Transactional Law and Skills Education,” will be held at Emory Law, beginning at 1:00 p.m. on Friday, June 1, 2018, and ending at 3:45 p.m. on Saturday, June 2, 2018.…

Hola de la Ciudad de Mexico.  I arrived in Mexico City for the Law and Society Association conference yesterday to get acclimated and take some personal time to see the city.  Today, I carry forward the theme I posted on last week: packing for conference travel.  Last week, I shared my prepacking strategy.  This week, I will offer some parameters for packing for the actual trip, using the trip I am on now as an example.  This is what I was working toward (and achieved).

BLPBPacking4

I noted in my post last week that I almost always travel with one carry on duffle-like bag (soft-sider) and one tote bag that holds, among other things, my handbag for the trip.  That is what I chose for this trip!  The main advantage is that I do not have to check bags.  I had a tight connection yesterday in Atlanta, and my grab-and-go luggage helped me to make that connection with time to spare.

To quote the Talking Heads, ” . . . you may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?”

Let’s begin with the things I packed in the blue soft-sider.  I started by considering what I plan do on the trip.  For this trip, I have four days of conference proceedings (for which I will dress up) and three days of walking/sight-seeing.  I also plan to attend at least two yoga classes and have to teach Barbri in Nashville on my way home.  I next consider the climate.  I am in one place almost the whole time, and the weather is forecasted to be pretty consistent–mid-eighties (Fahrenheit) during the day and mid-fifties in the evenings.  Chances of rain are slim most days, but higher at the end of the week.  Here’s what I chose to pack:

A three-piece coordinated suit set: skirt, cropped trousers, and jacket
9 shirts/blouses (6 tank tops–3 with shelf bras–and 3 wrinkle-resistant long-sleeved button-downs)
1 pair of reversible yoga shorts
1 pair of reversible dance/yoga leggings
PJs (undershirt tank top and boxers)
1 light rain jacket
1 French terrycloth embellished sweatshirt
Appropriate underwear items (gals, you can PM me for details, if you’d like)
2 extra pairs of earrings
1 necklace
1 pair of pumps
1 pair of fold-up flats
1 pair of sneakers
1 pair of flip-flops
1 traveling yoga mat

[Addendum:  I forgot to add that I also packed a printed silk scarf and a printed cotton bandana scarf!  I almost always travel with a scarf or two to accessorize outfits and make them look different when I am reusing the same basic suit pieces.]

It’s conference season, yet again.  It seems like just yesterday that I was embarking on my June Scholarship and Teaching Tour 2016.  In fact, it was over a year ago.  My, how time flies . . . .

This year, I am doing the “City” tour for the first part of the summer season.  I have already been to Kansas City, MO (Midwest Symposium on Social Entrepreneurship), New York City, NY (Legal Issues in Social Entrepreneurship and Impact Investing: In the US and Beyond), and Salt Lake City, UT (National Business Law Scholars Conference).  Next week, I will be in Mexico City, Mexico for the Law and Society Association’s International Meeting on Law and Society.  Not fitting into the “City” theme is my teaching day for Barbri in Nashville, TN and the Southeastern Association of Law Schools conference in Boca Raton, FL at the end of the summer.

Because of my travel schedule throughout the year, I often am asked about packing for my conference trips, which typically include some personal elements (e.g., touring, yoga, walking, or other exercise, etc.).  So, I decided to do a few posts on some packing tips and hacks that I use.  

Today, I focus on having a prepacked bag.  Given that I am a woman and choose to dress up for conferences, men and those who dress more casually will have to make significant modifications to my system.  Nevertheless, I hope that by sharing my conventions, I am offering something new to think about (at the very least). 

First things first: the generalities of my luggage (such as it is).  Unless I am teaching in a study abroad program (which I have not done since 2010), I pack in a soft-sided carryall and a tote large enough to fit my handbag (usually a small cross-body bag).  This combination works well for me.  (I am sure, however, that my doctor doesn’t approve and would like me to use a wheelie bag, given the cervical and thoracic issues that I have in my neck and back.)  I do not like to have to lift wheelie bags into the overhead bins. The carryall lifts easily and typically fits nicely, even in the overhead bins on the small puddle-jumper planes that I sometimes must take from my beloved TYS (Knoxville’s McGee-Tyson Airport). 

MemorialDayWreath

Wikipedia tells us what most (if not all) of us already knew: “Memorial Day is a federal holiday in the United States for remembering the people who died while serving in the country’s armed forces.”  As I have often noted in conversations and communications with friends, regardless of one’s views on the appropriateness of war in general or in specific circumstances, most of us understand the importance of honoring those who have lost their lives in serving their country.  My dad, father-in-law, secretarial/administrative assistant, and many friends and students have served in the U.S. armed forces and survived the experience.  Others have not been so lucky.  I dedicate this post to all of them.

Last week, I had the pleasure of presenting at and attending a conference on Legal Issues in Social Entrepreneurship and Impact Investing—In the US and Beyond (also featuring co-blogger Anne Tucker).  My presentation was part of a panel on securities crowdfunding as impact investing.  But I attended many other presentations and participated in a lunch table talk on choosing the right entity for social enterprise and a brainstorming session on how legal education can better support social entrepreneurship and impact investing.  The conference was fabulous, and I learned a lot by listening to the great folks invited by the organizers–including others on my panel.

As I reflected on the holiday today in light of last week’s conference, my thoughts turned to organizations serving the families of fallen warriors and what types of formal entity structures they had chosen.  These organizations are mission-driven and socially conscious.  They exist, at least in part, to serve society.  All of the ones I could think of or easily find in a Web search (among them Children of Fallen Patriots Foundation, That Others May Live Foundation, and Travis Manion Foundation–although I do not intend to endorse any specific organization) are organized as non-profit corporations under various state laws and qualified as exempt from federal income taxes under Section 501(c)(3) of the U.S. Internal Revenue Code.  One might ask why.  

Today, I am spending my birthday attending and presenting at the Fifth Annual Midwest Symposium on Social Entrepreneurship in Kansas City, Missouri.  I owe my presence here to my entrepreneurship colleagues and friends Tony Luppino (UMKC Law) and John Tyler (Kauffman Foundation).  Thanks for the awesome birthday present, guys.

There’s so much I have to say about just the first day of this event.  (I also will be here and presenting tomorrow.)  The proceedings so far have been incredibly thought-provoking and instructive.  Most intriguing has been the focus around creating an ecosystem for social entrepreneurship.  Of course, law and lawyers have roles in that.  Hence, this blog post . . . .

Specifically, I want to devote today’s post to the four essential action-elements necessary to generate a successful, sustained future for social entrepreneurship as posited and described by Mark Beam, Maverick in Residence at the Kauffman Foundation, in his kick-off keynote presentation this morning.  (As an aside, I will note that Mark started his talk with a brief recounting of the origin of the word “maverick,” which was independently fascinating.)  Here are Mark’s four elements, as I captured them in my notes (likely imperfectly), together with a bit of summary definitional commentary.  He contended that, to build a sustainable ecosystem for social entrepreneurship, we must:

  1. Redefine work (recognizing entrepreneurship as work; taking into account the power and effects of technology, but knowing it needs to serve us and the human potential)
  2. Nurture entrepreneurial ecosystems that mimic and integrate natural systems (e.g., helping people to help themselves; moving resources from the “haves” to the “have-nots”)
  3. Evolve our capacity to serve more of the entrepreneurial community through ecosystem design (referring to three megatrends outlined by Kauffman Foundation CEO Wendy Guillies–demography, geography, and technology; opening up entrepreneurship to all to increase business, start-ups employment, productivity)
  4. Tell new stories (relating anecdotes that connect us; “we create the future through the stories we tell ourselves”—visioning the future through stories)

That may not sound like much, but trust me.  The talk (beautifully delivered with amazing graphics, photography, and media content) was much better than my quick summary of the outtakes.

What Mark said made a lot of sense to me based on my related experience and work.  But I found myself thinking about the role of the lawyer in these action items.  How can lawyers–especially business lawyers–who support social enterprise help social entrepreneurship to productively move forward?

I received this call for papers and wanted to pass it on.

This Call for Papers invites contributions to the Cambridge Handbook of Corporate Law, Corporate Governance and Sustainability. Those tentatively selected to contribute will be invited to a Cambridge Handbook Symposium in Oslo on 12-14 March 2018, with draft chapters to be submitted to the editors beforehand. Participation at the Symposium is not a condition to contribute to the Handbook, but it is strongly encouraged. The Symposium is expected to enhance the quality of the contributions, reinforce the cohesive nature of the volume, and contribute to the timeliness of the manuscript.

The Handbook will be edited by Professor Beate Sjåfjell, University of Oslo, and Professor Christopher Bruner, Washington and Lee University. Final confirmation of contributions for the Handbook will be contingent on review of the chapters and will be decided by the editors. . . .

More information is available here.  In case you need a bit of encouragement to make a proposal, I will add that (in case you do not know them) the editors are well-regarded scholars in the field and also great people.

Call for Papers

Financial Inclusion: A Sustainable Mission from Microfinance to Alternative Finance

Social and Technological Paradigms

ITEM 8

Dijon, France

December 7-8, 2017

CEREN, EA 7477, Burgundy School of Business – Université Bourgogne Franche-Comté

Microfinance has sought to include individuals that financial institutions exclude. The mission has been progressively widening to alternative finance, which has thrived outside of conventional financial instruments and channels.

Alternative finance takes different forms, such as angel investment, asset funding, cash flow funding, crowdfunding, crypto-currencies (Bitcoin), fair investment, fintech, slow money, pension fund investments, social impact bonds, etc. All the types have resulted from social and/or technological innovations or a mix of both. They provide significant values to customers and investors. Some of the benefits include absence of lengthy applications, low documentation, almost no collateral, minimum or no credit score requirements, high approval rates, and fast funding.

Alternative finance has also widened the base of customers. While microfinance mainly aimed at making financial services available to people at the ‘Bottom of the Pyramid’, alternative finance has gone beyond to target not only the poor, but also small enterprises, young and innovative ventures, women, minorities, individuals with no credit history, and any other audience excluded by the conventional…

A bit more than a year ago, I had the opportunity to participate in a conference on corporate criminal liability at the Stetson University College of Law.  The short papers from the conference were published in a subsequent issue of the Stetson Law Review.  This was the second time that Ellen Podgor, a friend and white collar crime scholar on the Stetson Law faculty, invited me to produce a short work on corporate criminal liability for publication in a dedicated edition of the Stetson Law Review.  (The first piece I published in the Stetson Law Review reflected on corporate personhood in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United opinion.  It has been downloaded and cited a surprising number of times.  So, I welcomed the opportunity to publish with the law review a second time.)

For the 2016 conference, I chose to focus on the reckless conduct of employees and its capacity to generate corporate criminal insider trading liability for the employer.  The abstract for the resulting paper, (Not) Holding Firms Criminally Responsible for the Reckless Insider Trading of their Employees (recently posted to SSRN), is as follows:

Criminal enforcement of the insider trading prohibitions under Section 10(b) and Rule 10b–5 is the root of corporate criminal liability for insider trading in the United States. In the wake of assertions that S.A.C. Capital Advisors, L.P. actively encouraged the unlawful use of material nonpublic information in the conduct of its business, the line between employer and employee criminal liability for insider trading becomes both tenuous and salient. An essential question emerges: when do we criminally prosecute the firm for the unlawful conduct of its employees?

The possibility that reckless employee conduct may result in the employer’s willful violation of Section 10(b) and Rule 10b–5 (and, therefore, criminal liability for that employer firm) motivates this article. The article first reviews the basis for criminal enforcement of the insider trading prohibitions established in Section 10(b) and Rule 10b–5 and describes the basis and rationale for corporate criminal liability (a liability that derives from the activities of agents undertaken in the course of the firm’s business). Then, it reflects on that basis and rationale by identifying the potential for corporate criminal liability for the reckless insider trading violations of employees under Section 10(b) and Rule 10b–5, arguing against that liability, and suggesting ways to eliminate it.

I was not the only conference participant concerned about the criminal liability of an employer for the insider trading conduct of an employee.  John Anderson, who co-led an insider trading discussion group with me at the 2017 Association of American Law Schools annual meeting back in January and also enjoys exploring criminal insider trading issues, contributed his research on the overcriminalization of insider trading at the conference.  His paper, When Does Corporate Criminal Liability for Insider Trading Make Sense?, identifies the same overall problem as my article does (employer criminal liability for insider trading based on employee conduct).  However, he views both the problem and the potential solutions more broadly.  

As a business lawyer in private practice, I found it very frustrating when the principals of business entity clients acted in contravention of my advice.  This didn’t happen too often in my 15 years of practice.  But when it did, I always wondered whether I could have stopped the madness by doing something differently in my representation of the client.

Thanks to friend and Wayne State University Law School law professor Peter Henning, who often writes on insider trading and other white collar crime issues for the New York Times DealBook (see, e.g., this recent piece), I had the opportunity to revisit this issue through my research and present that research at a symposium at Wayne Law back in the fall of 2015.  The law review recently published the resulting short article, which I have posted to SSRN.  The abstract is set forth below.

Sometimes, business entity clients and their principals do not seek, accept, or heed the advice of their lawyers. In fact, sometimes, they expressly disregard a lawyer’s instructions on how to proceed. In certain cases, the client expressly rejects the lawyer’s advice. However, some business constituents who take action contrary to the advice of legal counsel…

CALL FOR PAPERS
Presidential Powers and Administrative Law

The UMKC Law Review is pleased to announce a call for papers relating to the executive branch’s scope of power and its impact on administrative law and the lives of real people. Selected papers will be published in the Special Topics Symposium Winter 2018 edition of the UMKC Law Review.

This symposium invites proposals for papers exploring legal and administrative issues around the authority vested in the President of the United States. The constitutional limits on executive action, ethics and accountability in government, the separation of powers, the far-reaching economic and social effects of proposed or anticipated administrative reforms, and other considerations relating to the intersection of executive and administrative authority are all topics under the umbrella of this symposium. We also welcome analysis of the interaction between the executive branch and areas of administrative concern and impact, such as the environment, healthcare, consumer protection, banking regulation, and other areas dependent on agency oversight. The recent proliferation of executive orders and new structural rules, such as the one-in, two-out regulatory policy and possible changes for the organization of the Executive Branch, make the use of executive orders another topic of interest.…