Corporations

Subscribe to Corporations via RSS

I knew it would be impossible. There was no way to relay my excitement about the potential of blockchain technology in a concise way to lawyers and law students last Friday at the Connecting the Threads symposium at the University of Tennessee School of Law. I didn’t discuss cryptocurrency or Bitcoin other than to say that I wasn’t planning to discuss it. Still, there wasn’t nearly enough time for me to discuss all of the potential use cases. I did try to make it clear that it’s not a fad if IBM has 1500 people working on it, BITA has hundreds of logistics and freight companies signed up to explore possibilities, and the World Bank, OECD, and United Nations have studies and pilot programs devoted to it. As a former supply chain person, compliance officer, and chief privacy officer, I’m giddy with excitement about everything related to distributed ledger technology other than cryptocurrency. You can see why when you read my law review article in a few months in Transactions.

I’ve watched over 100 YouTube videos (many of them crappy) and read dozens of articles. I go to Meetups and actually understand what the coders and developers…

On Sept. 4, it was reported 

Nike just lost about $3.75 billion in market cap after announcing free agent NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick as the new face of its “Just Do It” ad campaign. It’s the 30th anniversary of the iconic TV and print spots.

At the time of this writing, the sneaker company’s intra-day market capitalization was $127.82 billion. On Friday, that number had been $131.57 billion.

Market capitalization is the market value of a publicly traded company’s outstanding shares.

Shares of NKE stock dropped about 4 percent on Tuesday morning, as #NikeBoycott has been trending on Twitter. The company’s valuation has since recovered a bit.

In light of the market cap loss, friend and co-blogger Stefan Padfield asked, via Twitter, “How much & what kind of information regarding projected backlash losses did Nike need to review in order to satisfy its duty of care to shareholders here?” My answer: very, very little and very, very limited.  

…

I am teaching Sports Law this semester, which is always fun.  I like to highlight other areas of the law for my students so that they can see that Sports Law is really an amalgamation of other areas: contract law, labor law, antitrust law, and yes, business organizations.  I sometimes cruise the internet for examples to make my point that they really need to have a firm grounding the basics of many areas of law to be a good sports lawyer.  Today, I found a solid example, and not in a good way.  

I found a site providing advice about “How to Start a Sports Agency” at the site https://www.managerskills.org.  This is site is new to me.  Anyway, it starts off okay: 

Ask any successful sports agent: education is the foundation upon which you will build your business. The first step is to earn your bachelor’s degree from an appropriately accredited institution.

. . . .

Once you have obtained your bachelor’s degree, the next step will be to pursue your master’s degree. Alternately, you may choose to pursue a law degree.

While a law degree is not required, the skills you acquire during your studies will be

…

Did I lose you with the title to this post? Do you have no idea what a DAO is? In its simplest terms, a DAO is a decentralized autonomous organization, whose decisions are made electronically by a written computer code or through the vote of its members. In theory, it eliminates the need for traditional documentation and people for governance. This post won’t explain any more about DAOs or the infamous hack of the Slock.it DAO in 2016. I chose this provocative title to inspire you to read an article entitled Legal Education in the Blockchain Revolution.

The authors Mark Fenwick, Wulf A. Kaal, and Erik P. M. Vermeulen discuss how technological innovations, including artificial intelligence and blockchain will change how we teach and practice law related to real property, IP, privacy, contracts, and employment law. If you’re a practicing lawyer, you have a duty of competence. You need to know what you don’t know so that you avoid advising on areas outside of your level of expertise. It may be exciting to advise a company on tax, IP, securities law or other legal issues related to cryptocurrency or blockchain, but you could subject yourself to discipline for doing so…

In a recent California appellate opinion disposing of the second appeal of an earlier judgment seems to have the court irritated.  It does appear the appellant was trying to relitigate a decided issue, so perhaps that’s right.  But the court makes its own goof.  After referring repeatedly to the “limited liability company” at issue, the court then goes down a familiar, and disappointing, path.  The court explains: 

In any event, the Supreme Court opinion which Foster contends we disregarded, Essex Ins. Co. v. Five Star Dye House, Inc. (2006) 38 Cal.4th 1252, 1259, has no relevance here. Essex decided whether an assignee of a bad faith claim could also recover attorney fees. (Ibid.) This holding has nothing to do with whether a limited liability corporation may assign its appellate rights in an improper attempt to circumvent the rules requiring corporations to be represented by attorneys.

JENNITA FOSTER, Plaintiff & Appellant, v. OLD REPUBLIC DEFAULT MANAGEMENT SERVICES, Defendant & Respondent., No. B280006, 2018 WL 4075910, at *2 (Cal. Ct. App. Aug. 27, 2018) (emphasis added).  
 
It’s not clear whether Essex Insurance Company is an LLC or a corporation, though it’s a strong bet it is a

…

Are corporations (and other business associations) political actors?  Of course.  Some of Marcia’s posts here on the BLPB have raised, for example, questions about the use of boycotts as firm political activity.  See, e.g., here.  Marcia also pointed out here that National Football League teams (typically owned by and operated through some form of business association) have been caught up in political activity surrounding the players-kneeling-during-the-national-anthem controversy.

The Vanderbilt Law Review has recently published an essay on the political corporation written by a Dream Team of sorts–two friends who are married to each other–at the University of South Carolina School of Law, Susan Kuo and Ben Means.  Susan teaches advocacy and dispute resolution courses (currently focusing on criminal law and procedure, conflicts, and social justice issues) and is the Associate Dean for Diversity and Inclusion.  Ben is likely known to many BLPB readers as a business law guy (with a special focus on small and family owned busnesses). He’s been a member of the executive committee for the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) Section on Business Associations and is past chair of the AALS Section on Agency, Partnership, LLCs, and Unincorporated Business Associations.  They bring their individual…

Two weeks ago, I blogged about why lawyers, law professors, and judges should care about blockchain. I’ll be speaking about blockchain, corporate governance, and enterprise risk management on September 14th at our second annual BLPB symposium at UT. To prepare, I’m reading as many articles as I can on blockchain, but it can be a bit mind numbing with all of the complexity. After hearing Carla Reyes speak at SEALS, I knew I had to read hers, if only because of the title If Rockefeller Were A Coder.

I recommend this article in general, but especially for those who teach business organizations and want to find a way to enliven your entity selection discussions. The abstract is below. 

The Ethereum Decentralized Autonomous Organization (“The DAO”), a decentralized, smart contract-based, investment fund with assets of $168 million, spectacularly crashed when one of its members exploited a flaw in the computer code and stole $55 million. In the wake of the exploit, many argued that participants in the DAO could be jointly and severally liable for the loss as partners in a general partnership. Others claimed that the DAO evidenced an entirely new form of business entity, one that current laws

…

Senator Elizabeth Warren last week released her Accountable Capitalism Act. My co-blogger Haskell Murray wrote about that here, as have a number of others, including Professor Bainbridge, who has written at least seven posts on his blog. Countless others have weighed in, as well.

There are fans of the idea, others who are agnostic, and still other who thinks it’s a terrible idea. I am not taking a position on any of that, because I am too busy working through all the flaws with regard to entity law itself to even think about the overall Act.

As a critic of how most people view entities, my expectations were low. On the plus side, the bill does not say “limited liability corporation” one time.  So that’s a win. Still, there are a number of entity law flaws that make the bill problematic before you even get to what it’s supposed to do.  The problem: the bill uses “corporation” too often where it means “entity” or “business.”

Let’s start with the Section 2. DEFINITIONS.  This section provides:

 (2) LARGE ENTITY.—

(A) IN GENERAL.—The term ‘‘large entity’’ means an entity that—

(i) is organized under the laws of a State as…

The following comes to us from Sergio Alberto Gramitto Ricci, Visiting Assistant Professor of Law and Assistant Director, Clarke Program on Corporations & Society, Cornell Law School.  I had the pleasure of listening to Sergio discuss this project at our recent SEALS discussion group on Masterpiece Cakeshop, and I found particularly interesting his conclusion that “Roman slaves could not own property, but ius naturale provided them with the right to exercise religion. To the contrary, Roman corporations could contract, own assets and bear liabilities, but they had no exercise rights as religion liberties were typical of personae—physically sound humans.”  The concept of robo-directors is also fascinating, and adds another layer to my ongoing dystopian (utopian?) novel plot wherein corporations are allowed to run for seats in Congress directly (as opposed to what some would argue is the current system wherein we get: “The Senator from [X], sponsored by Big Pharma Corp.”). You can download the full draft via SSRN here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3232816.

In an era where legal persons hold wealth and power comparable to those of nation states, shedding light on the nature of the corporate form and on the rights of business corporations is crucial for defining the…

On Tuesday, Elizabeth Warren penned an article in The Wall Street Journal entitled Companies Shouldn’t Be Accountable Only to Shareholders: My new bill would require corporations to answer to employees and other stakeholders as well.

The article announced and promoted her Accountable Capitalism Act. With Republicans in control of Congress and the White House, Warren’s bill almost certainly doesn’t stand a chance of passing in the short-term.

Yet, because the bill draws on benefit corporation governance, a main scholarly interest of mine, and because it may foreshadow moves by a Democrat-controlled Congress in the future, I decided to read the 28-page bill and report here briefly.

Portions of the bill summarized:

  • As has been widely reported, the bill only applies to companies with more than $1 billion in revenue.
  • The bill seeks to establish an “Office of United States Corporations” within the Department of Commerce, which will review, grant, and rescind charters for the large companies covered by the bill.
  • The bill takes language from benefit corporation law and requires that U.S. Corporations must have a purpose to serve a “general public benefit” – “a material positive impact on society resulting from the business and operations of

…