Conferences

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Having helped a few Tennessee bar applicants get straight on their knowledge of agency, unincorporated business associations, and personal property law last Friday at my BARBRI lecture (such a nice group present at the taping to keep me company!), it’s now time for me to wrap up my June Scholarship and Teaching Tour with a twofer–a week of travel to two of my favorite U.S. cities: Chicago, for the National Business Law Scholars Conference and Seattle for Berle VIII.  At both events, I will present my draft paper (still in process today, unfortunately) on publicly held benefit corporations, Corporate Purpose and Litigation Risk in Publicly Held U.S. Benefit Corporations.  Here’s the bird’s-eye view from the introduction:

Benefit corporations—corporations organized for the express purpose of realizing both financial wealth for shareholders and articulated social or environmental benefits—have taken the United States by storm. With Maryland passing the first benefit corporation statute in 2010, legislative growth of the form has been rapid. Currently, 31 states have passed benefit corporation statutes.

The proliferation of benefit corporation statutes and B Corp certifications can largely be attributed to the active promotional work of B Lab Company, a nonprofit corporation organized in 2006 under Pennsylvania law that…

Three Business Law Prof Blog editors (myself included) are presenting at the upcoming Berle Symposium on June 27-28 in Seattle.

Colin Mayer (Oxford) is the keynote speaker, and I look forward to hearing him present again. I blogged on his book Firm Commitment after I heard him speak at Vanderbilt a few of years ago. The presenters also include former Chancellor Bill Chandler of the Delaware Court of Chancery. Given that Chancellor Chandler’s eBay v. Newmark decision is heavily cited in the benefit corporation debates, it will be quite valuable to have him among the contributors. The author of the Model Benefit Corporation Legislation, Bill Clark, will also be presenting; I have been at a number of conferences with Bill Clark and always appreciate his thoughts from the front lines. Finally, the list is packed with professors I know and admire, or have read their work and am looking forward to meeting. 

More information about the conference is available here.

This past week, I completed the second leg of my June Scholarship and Teaching Tour.  My time at “Method in the Madness: The Art and Science of Teaching Transactional Law and Skills” at Emory University School of Law last week was two days well spent.  I had a great time talking to attendees about my bylaw drafting module for our transaction simulation course, Representing Enterprises, and listening to others talk about their transactional law and skills teaching.  Great stuff.

This week’s portion of my academic tour begins with a teaching whistle-stop at the Nashville School of Law on Friday, continues with attendance (with my husband) at a former student’s wedding in Nashville on Saturday evening, and ends (my husband and I hope) with Sunday brunch out with our son (and his girlfriend if she is available).  Specifically, on Friday, I teach BARBRI for four hours in a live lecture.  The topics?  Well, I drew a short straw on that.  I teach agency, unincorporated business associations (including a bit about both extant limited liability statutes in Tennessee), and personal property–all in four hours.  Ugh.  Although I am paid for the lecture and my expenses are covered, I would not have taken (and would not continue to take) this gig if I…

The first part of my June scholarship and teaching tour is now done.  Having just returned from the Law and Society Association conference in New Orleans (about which I will say more in later posts), I now am preparing for my presentation on Friday at “Method in the Madness: The Art and Science of Teaching Transactional Law and Skills,” this year’s conference hosted by Emory University School of Law’s Center for Transactional Law and Practice.  Emory Law convenes these conferences every other year.  The conferences always focus on teaching transactional business law and skills.

Here’s the abstract for my presentation:

Drafting Corporate Bylaws: From Alpha to Omega

The archetypal introductory law school course in business associations law characteristically introduces students to corporate bylaws. Typically, course references to corporate bylaws occur in the context of corporate formation and in cases construing corporate bylaws in the context of private ordering, fundamental corporate changes, and the like. Treatment of the subject is necessarily somewhat superficial and episodic. Although students may be exposed to bylaw provisions and even, in some cases, a sample set of corporate bylaws, little time exists in the standard basic Business Associations course to address the optimal drafting process for drafting organic documents…

See below for information on the The Midwest Academy of Legal Studies in Business (MALSB) Annual Conference in Chicago, IL and their call for papers. I attended MALSB this year, found it beneficial, and reflected on the conference in this post.

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Midwest Academy of Legal Studies in Business

2017 Annual Conference

March 22 – 24, 2017

The Palmer House Hilton Hotel – Chicago, Illinois

Conference Registration and Call for Papers

The Midwest Academy of Legal Studies in Business (MALSB) Annual Conference is held in conjunction with the MBAA International Conference, long billed as “The Best Conference Value in America.”

The MBAA International Conference draws hundreds of academics from business-related fields such as accounting, business/society/government, economics, entrepreneurship, finance, health administration, information systems, international business, management, and marketing. Although the MALSB will have its own program track on legal studies, attendees will be able to take advantage of the multidisciplinary nature of this international conference and attend sessions held by the other program tracks. 

For more information on the MALSB and its Annual Conference, please see the attached Call for Papers or go to http://www.malsb.org/. 

Readers attending Law & Society in New Orleans at the end of the week should make a note of the following corporate and securities law panels taking place on Friday, June 3rd and Saturday, June 4th.   

FRIDAY, JUNE 3

 
   

2:45 PM – 4:30 PM

1146—Panel Session—Financial Market Regulation

Room: Salon C, NOLA Marriott

4:45 PM – 6:30 PM

1147—Panel Session—Rulemaking, National and International

Room: Salon C, NOLA Marriott
   
   

SATURDAY, JUNE 4

 
   

8:15 AM – 10:00 AM

1150—Panel Session—Investors, Consumers, and the Public  Interest

Room: Salon C, NOLA Marriott        

2:45 PM – 4:30 PM

1152—Panel Session—Corporate Governance and Value

Room: Salon C, NOLA Marriott

2:45 PM – 4:30 PM

2895—Roundtable—Corporate Diversity: Comparative and Critical Perspectives

Room: Galerie 5, NOLA Marriott

4:45 PM – 6:30 PM

1154—Panel Session—Addressing Agency Costs and Corporate Wrongdoing

Room: Salon C, NOLA Marriott

*updated  June 1st at 4:20 to include 2 additional panels submitted by a reader (Shlomit  Azgad-Tromer)

Thursday June 2nd : Power Business and Legal Practice, 12:45- 2:30 PM
Friday June 3rd : Stakeholders and the Corporation, 4:45-6:30 PM

-Anne Tucker

This year, my research and writing season has started off with a bang.  While grading papers and exams earlier this month, I finished writing one symposium piece and first-round-edited another.  Today, I will put the final touches on PowerPoint slides for a presentation I give the second week in June (submission is required today for those) and start working on slides for the presentation I will give Friday.

All of this sets into motion a summer concert conference, Barbri, and symposium tour that (somewhere along the line) got a bit complicated.  Here are the cities and dates:

New Orleans, LA – June 2-5
Atlanta, GA – June 10-11
Nashville, TN – June 17
Chicago, IL – June 23-24
Seattle, WA – June 27

I know some of my co-bloggers are joining me along the way.  I look forward to seeing them.  Each week, I will keep you posted on current events as best I can while managing the research and writing and presentation preparations.  The topics of my summer research and teaching run the gamut from insider trading (through by-law drafting, agency, unincorporated business associations, personal property, and benefit corporations) to crowdfunding.  A nice round lot.

This coming week, I will be at the Law and Society Association annual conference.  My presentation at this conference relates to an early-stage project on U.S. insider trading cases.  The title and abstract for the project and the currently envisioned initial paper (which I would, of course, already change in a number of ways) are as follows:

As previously mentioned, last week I presented at the Center for Nonprofit Management’s Bridge to Excellence Conference. 

Below I share a few thoughts. Some of these thoughts I have shared before about other conferences, but I think they bear repeating.

  1. Value of Practitioner Conferences. As an academic, it is easy for me to stay mostly in the academic world. I do think, however, going to practitioner conferences can be quite useful. Maybe most important, these conferences can help you meet people who are in practice, especially in your local area. People I have met at practitioner conferences have served as guest speakers in my classes, provided individual advice to students, helped students find jobs, and provided ideas for blog posts and scholarship. Practitioner conferences can also be useful as they tend to address very practical problems and remind me that I want my scholarship to speak to not only academics, but also the bar, bench, and business people. Attending one practitioner conference can lead to more opportunities—other speaking engagements, board member openings, and consulting opportunities, and the like. 
  2. Check Technology Before Speaking. I learned this early in my academic career, and I found the IT person well before my talk and made

…

Today, I received notice of a web seminar on corporate political activity to be hosted by one of my former firms, King & Spalding.

Interested readers can register for the free web seminar here.

More information, from the notice I received, is reproduced below.

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Election 2016: What Every Corporate Counsel Must Know About Corporate Political Activity     

Thursday, May 26, 2016, 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM ET

                In this election year, corporations and their employees will be faced with historic opportunities to engage in the political arena. Deciding whether and how to do so, however, must be made carefully and based on a thorough understanding of the relevant law. In this presentation, King & Spalding experts will address this timely and important area of the law and provide the guidance that corporate counsel need when engaging in the political process.            

Yesterday, I presented on negotiation theory and stakeholder engagement at the Center for Nonprofit Management’s Bridge to Excellence Conference.

At a session after mine, I was directed to a PowerPoint entitled What Every Board Member Should Know: A Guide for Tennessee Nonprofits. The PowerPoint was authored by the Tennessee Attorney General, the Tennessee Secretary of State, and the President of the Center for Nonprofit Management. The document is rather simple, but might be useful as a primer for nonprofit board members in Tennessee.  

The conference attendees appeared to be a few hundred nonprofit practitioners and only about three or four professors, two of whom were among the presenters. After my morning presentation, I stuck around and listened to some of the other speakers and enjoyed an excellent lunch. I am a sucker for free food. 

At the conference, I was struck by how nonprofit board members were discussed by some of the speakers and attendees. One question that was posed was – “how do you deal with a board member who is not pulling his or her weight as a fundraiser?” I guess I knew that nonprofit board members were chosen, at least in part, for their ability…