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My post last week spawned more commentary than usual–on the BLPB site and off.  So, I am regrouping on the same issue for my post today and plan to push forward a bit on some of the areas of commentary.  Also, since The Conglomerate is running a Hobby Lobby symposium this week, I thought it might be nice to offer some thoughts on disclosure up here and (maybe) later chime in at The Conglomerate on this or other issues relating to the Hobby Lobby case later in the week . . . .

I have been working on a draft article for the University of Cincinnati Law Review based on a presentation that I gave this spring at the annual Corporate Law Symposium.  This year’s topic was “Crowdfunding Regulations and Their Implications.”  My draft article addresses the public-private divide in the context of the Capital Raising Online While Deterring Fraud and Unethical Non-Disclosure Act–more commonly known as the CROWDFUND Act.  I am using two pieces coauthored by Don Langevoort and Bob Thompson (here and here), as well as three works written by Hillary Sale (here, here, and here) to engage my analysis.

I also will be participating in a discussion group at the Southeastern Association of Law Schools annual conference in August on the publicness theme.  That session is entitled “Does The Public/Private Divide In Federal Securities Regulation Make Sense?” and is scheduled for 3:00 pm on Augut 6th, for those attending the conference.  Michael Guttentag was good enough to recruit the group for this discussion.

All this work on publicness has my head spinning!  There are a number of unique conceptions of pubicness, some overlapping or otherwise interconnected, with different conceptions being useful in different…

My former colleague, Scott Pryor (Regent), recently posted an interesting article entitled Municipal Bankruptcy: When Doing Less is Best. In 2013 Professor Pryor was the Resident Scholar of the American Bankruptcy Institute.  His paper’s abstract is below.  

The bankruptcy process takes as a given the pre-bankruptcy allocation of economic risk. Yet, the Bankruptcy Code permits this risk to be reallocated through the adjustment process so long as that reallocation is “fair and equitable,” does not “discriminate unfairly,” and is in the “best interests” of creditors. The first two look to bankruptcy law for their definitions; the third derives from state law.

Chapter 9 of the Bankruptcy Code does not resolve any conflicts among these requirements. This uncertain state of affairs generates a powerful incentive among most parties to settle. So long as the court retains the power to dismiss the case and remit the conflicts to the vagaries of state adjudication, Chapter 9 functions to create an institutional game of Chicken driving stakeholders to consensus.

Today, we finished two days of amazingly rich discourse on business law issues at the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) Workshop on Blurring Boundaries in Financial and Corporate Law in Washington, DC.  (Full disclosure:  I chaired the planning committee for this AALS midyear meeting.)  All of the proceedings have been phenomenally interesting.  I have learned so many things and been forced to think about so much . . . .  For those of you who couldn’t be there, I tried to faithfully pick up a bunch of salient points from the talks and discussions on Twitter using #AALSBB2014.  Moreover, some of the meeting was recorded.  I will try to remember to let you know when, to whom, and how those recordings are being made available. (Feel free to remind me if I forget . . . .)

One idea shared at the workshop that I am particularly intrigued by is the use of a new standard in federal securities regulation, suggested by Tom Lin in his talk as part of this morning’s plenary panel on “Complexity”.  He argues for an “algorithmic investor” standard (working off/refining the concept of the reasonable investor) in light of the growth of algorithmic trading.  It’s  predictable that I would be interested in this idea, given that I write about materiality in securities regulation (especially insider trading law, in articles posted here and here), in which the reasonable investor standard is central.  (In fact, Tom was kind enough to mention my work on  the resonable investor standard in his talk.)

Tom is not the first to argue for a securities regulation standard that better serves specific investor populations.  Memorable in this regard, at least for me, is Maggie Sachs’s paper arguing for a standard focused on the “least sophisticated investor”.  But many other fine works contending with materiality or the concept of the reasonable investor in securities regulation also question (among other things) the clarity and efficacy of the reasonable investor standard in specific contexts.

The following comes to us from Maximilian Martin, Ph.D., the founder and global managing director of Impact Economy, an impact investment and strategy firm based in Lausanne, Switzerland, and the author of the report “Driving Innovation through Corporate Impact Venturing.”

In 2010, despite the then-recent economic downturn, an overwhelming majority of corporate CEOs in the UN Global Compact-Accenture CEO Study on Sustainability—93 percent—responded that sustainability will be critical to the future success of their companies. What’s more, they believed that a tipping point could be reached that fully meshes sustainability with core business within a decade, fundamentally transforming core business capabilities, processes, and systems throughout global supply chains and subsidiaries. Three years later, a new 2013 edition of the study argued that many corporate CEOs have found themselves stuck on the ascent towards sustainability.

Radical change in market structures and systems is needed, and a bolder path for industry transformation needs to be charted, at a time when the logic of value creation is changing. The days of traditional corporate social responsibility (CSR)—the bolt-on approach that is compliance driven, costs money, and produces limited reputational benefits—are fast coming to an end, because sustainability is now increasingly driving value creation itself. Assessing joint opportunities for financial and social returns is the way forward.

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I am generating my summer reading list–both business and pleasure. At the top of my list is Other People’s Houses, by Jennifer Taub (Vermont Law School), which will be available from Yale Press on May 27th.   The official website for the book describes the project as:

Drawing on wide-ranging experience as a corporate lawyer, investment firm counsel, and scholar of business law and financial market regulation, Taub chronicles how government officials helped bankers inflate the toxic-mortgage-backed housing bubble, then after the bubble burst ignored the plight of millions of homeowners suddenly facing foreclosure.

Focusing new light on the similarities between the savings and loan debacle of the 1980s and the financial crisis in 2008, Taub reveals that in both cases the same reckless banks, operating under different names, received government bailouts, while the same lax regulators overlooked fraud and abuse. Furthermore, in 2013 the situation is essentially unchanged. The author asserts that the 2008 crisis was not just similar to the S&L scandal, it was a severe relapse of the same underlying disease. And despite modest regulatory reforms, the disease remains uncured: top banks remain too big to manage, too big to regulate, and too big to fail.

…

I am interested in the behavior of institutional investors, including defined benefit plans and large mutual funds, primarily because they trade in people’s retirement savings.   Institutional investors and hedge funds are some of the only remaining investors under the big umbrella heading of “shareholders” that have the resources and incentive to act the way that corporate law theorizes shareholders should act.  They become the lab rats and the test case of governance experiments and debates.

Notably, the passivity of institutional investors has been described, empirically documented by number of initiated shareholder proposals and with voting records on such proposals, and debated at considerable length.  Alan Palmiter, Jill Fisch, Roberta Romano, as well as a recent article by Gilson & Gordon and many others have all grappled with the evidence for and against and provided theories that augment or diminish the view of passivity by institutional investors.

The New York Times DealB%k published an article yesterday, New Alliances in Battle for Corporate Control, describing the coordination between institutional investors (both pension funds and mutual funds) and hedge fund activists.  Drawing from industry sources, the article describes informal coordination of activists courting institutional investors’ votes before…