Corporate Governance

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I’m a huge football fan. I mean real football– what people in the US call soccer. I went to Brazil for the World Cup in 2014 twice and have watched as many matches on TV as I could during the last tournament and this one. In some countries, over half of the residents watch the matches when their team plays even though most matches happen during work hours or the middle of the night in some countries. NBC estimates that 5 billion people across the world will watch this World Cup with an average of 227 million people a day. For perspective, roughly 208 million people, 2/3 of the population, watched Superbowl LVI in the US, which occurs on a Sunday.

Football is big business for FIFA and for many of its sponsors. Working with companies such as Adidas, Coca-Cola, Hyundai / KIA, Visa, McDonald’s, and Budweiser has earned nonprofit FIFA a record 7.5 billion in revenue for this Cup. Fortunately for Budweiser, which paid 75 million to sponsor the World Cup, Qatar does not ban alcohol. But in a plot twist, the company had to deal with a last-minute stadium ban. FIFA was more effective in Brazil, which has…

Zhaoyi Li, Visiting Assistant Profoessor of Law at the Univeristy of Pittsburgh School of Law, has published a new article, Judicial Review of DIrectors’ Duty of Care: A Comparison Between U.S. & China. Here’s the abstract:

Articles 147 and 148 of the Company Law of the People’s Republic of China (“Chinese Company Law”) establish that directors owe a duty of care to their companies. However, both of these provisions fail to explain the role of judicial review in enforcing directors’ duty of care. The duty of care is a well-trodden territory in the United States, where directors’ liability is predicated on specific standards. The current American standard, adopted by many states, requires directors to “discharge their duties with the care that a person in a like position would reasonably believe appropriate under similar circumstances.” However, both the business judgment rule and Delaware General Corporate Law (“DGCL”) Section 102(b)(7) shield directors from responsibility for their actions, which may weaken the impact of the duty of care requirement on directors’ behavior.

To better allocate the responsibility for directors’ violations of the duty of care and promote the corporations’ development, it is essential that Chinese company law establish a unified standard of…

Professor Caleb Griffin (University of Arkansas School of Law) offered testimony before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs in June of 2022 on problems associated with the fact that the “Big Three” index fund managers (Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street) cast almost a quarter of the votes at S&P 500 companies. As a result, enormous power is concentrated in the hands of just a few index fund managers, whose interests and values may not align with those whose shares they are voting. Professor Griffin proposed two solutions to this problem: (1) “categorical” pass-through voting, and (2) vote outsourcing. Professor Griffin’s remarks were recently posted here, and here’s the abstract:

In recent years, index funds have assumed a new and unprecedented role as the most influential players in corporate governance. In particular, the “Big Three” index fund managers—Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street—occupy a pivotal role. The Big Three currently cast nearly a quarter of the votes at S&P 500 companies, and that figure is expected to grow to 34% by 2028 and over 40% in the following decade.

The best solution to the current problem—where we have virtually powerless index investors and enormous, concentrated power in the…

It was so wonderful to be able to host an in-person version of our “Connecting the Threads” Business Law Prof Blog symposium on Friday.  Connecting the Threads VI was, for me, a major victory in the continuing battle against COVID-19–five healthy bloggers and a live audience!  Being in the same room with fellow bloggers John Anderson, Colleen Baker, Doug Moll (presenting with South Carolina Law friend-of-the-BLPB Ben Means), and Stefan Padfield was truly joyful.  And the topics on which they presented–shadow insider trading, exchange trading in the cloud, family business succession, and anti-ESG legislation–were all so salient.  (I offered the abstract for my own talk on fiduciary duties in unincorporated business associations in last week’s post.)  For a number of us, the topic of our presentations arose from work we have done here on the BLPB.

This year, as I noted in my post last week, we had a special guest as our luncheon speaker.  That guest would be known to many of you who are regular readers as “Tom N.”  Tom has commented on our blog posts here on the BLPB for at least eight years.  (I rooted around and found a comment from him as…

Another semester teaching business associations law is just around the corner. In fact, our fall semester begins next week.  This post is dedicated to those who, like me, are prepping for and teaching that course this semester.

I was invited to participate in a discussion group entitled “Pressure on and Backlash against Corporations as Political Actors” at the 2022 Southeastern Association of Law Schools (SEALS) annual conference last week.  The description for the session is as follows:

When businesses wade into political issues like abortion, the environment, gun control, LGBTQ rights, Black Lives Matter, and international affairs, they potentially face consumer backlash and even governmental retribution. Remaining silent can also be risky, potentially upsetting other consumers and employees. And silence/inaction is not always an option: either a business remains in Russia after its invasion into Ukraine or closes its operations there, sometimes at considerable expense. This discussion group will analyze these issues from corporate, tax, policy, electoral, and constitutional law perspectives. Should businesses like Nike, McDonalds, Disney, and Ben & Jerry’s take political stances, stay out of politics altogether, focus on profits or something broader, and what are the practical and legal ramifications of these views? More broadly, what is…

Millions of law school graduates around the US just took the bar exam. Others are preparing to enter colleges and graduates schools in a few weeks. How will these respective groups do? While a lot depends on how much and how well they study, a large part of their success or failure may depend on how they’ve been taught. I recently posted about how adults learn and what the research says we should do differently. In this post, I’ll show how I used some of the best practices in the last ten days when I taught forty foreign lawyers from around the world  and thirty college students in separate summer courses offered by the University of Miami as well as nine Latin American lawyers who were taking courses in business law from a Panamanian school. I taught these disparate groups about ESG, disclosures, and human rights. With each of the cohorts, I conducted a simulation where I divided them into groups to prioritize issues based on whether they were a CEO, an investor, a consumer, the head of an NGO, and for the US college students, I added the roles of a member of Congress or influencer. In a…

Greetings from Cervera, Spain.  As you know from my post last week, I am traveling in the Catalonia region of Spain for a few days this week after the 2022 Law and Society Association Global Meeting on Law and Society, which was held in Lisbon, Portugal this year.  I have the blessing of staying with a friend (whom I met through Zoom mindful yoga practices during the pandemic) in her private home.

I want to offer a quick post this week to reflect on what turned out to be a mini-theme in the presentations I attended at the Global Meeting on Law and Society.  That mini-theme was, perhaps unsurprisingly, corporate stakeholderism.  (And I note with some interest that Stefan has recently written and blogged on an aspect of corporate stakeholderism as well.)  The following programs from the collaborative research network (CRN) to which I belong picked up on this theme, in one way or another:

  • an entire paper panel entitled: “Corporations, Shareholders, and Other Stakeholders,” which featured academic work focusing on corporate governance and finance from a number of different stakeholder perspectives;
  • a roundtable discussion entitled “Corporations & Engendering Public Trust,” billed as a session that “brings together corporate

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Courtesy of friend-of-the-BLPB Bernie Sharfman, I am linking to his coauthored (with James Copland) comment letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on the climate change rule-making proposal.  The letter includes copious footnotes.  As with other comment letters that have been written on the substance of the SEC proposal, there are some interesting definitional questions on which intelligent folks disagree.  E.g., what is included under the umbrella of investor protection?  What regulation promotes “efficiency, competition, and capital formation”?  These all are among the big picture issues on which the SEC has the opportunity to speak.  I expect thoughtful responses.

NBLS2022(OULawPhoto)

Having just come back from the first in-person National Business Law Scholars Conference since 2019 (at The University of Oklahoma College of Law, pictured here), I have many thoughts swirling through my head.  I always love that conference.  The people, whom I dearly missed, are a big part of that. And Megan Wischmeier Shaner was an awesome planning committee host. But the ideas that were shared . . . .  Wow. So many great research projects were shared by these wonderful law teachers and scholars!  Over time, I hope to share many of them with you.  

But for today, I want to focus on one thing that I heard in a few presentations at the conference: that the shareholder wealth maximization norm is and always has been the be-all and end-all of corporate purpose and board decision making. I am posting on that topic today not only because of my engagement with the conference, but also because the issue is implicated in Ann’s post on Saturday (Bathrooms are About Stakeholders) and by Stefan’s post yesterday (ESG & Communism?). I want to focus on a part of Stefan’s post (and Stefan, you may that issue with…

Prior to joining academia, I served as a compliance officer for a Fortune 500 company and I continue to consult on compliance matters today. It’s an ever changing field, which is why I’m glad so many students take my Compliance, Corporate Governance, and Sustainability course in the Fall. I tell them that if they do transactional or commercial litigation work, compliance issues will inevitably arise. Here are some examples: 

  • In M&A deals, someone must look at the target’s  bribery, money laundering, privacy, employment law, environmental, and other risks
  • Companies have to complete several disclosures. How do you navigate the rules that conflict or overlap?
  • What do institutional investors really care about? What’s material when it relates to ESG issues?
  • What training does the board need to ensure that they meet their fiduciary duties?
  • How do you deal with cyberattacks and what are the legal and ethical issues related to paying ransomware?
  • How do geopolitical factors affect the compliance program?
  • Who can be liable for a compliance failure?
  • What happens when people cut corners in a supply chain and how can that affect the company’s legal risk?
  • What does a Biden DOJ/SEC mean compared to the same offices under Trump?
  • Who

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