Corporations

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In her post on Saturday, co-blogger Ann Lipton offered observations about possible legal issues resulting from the President-Elect’s tweets regarding public companies.  She ends her post with the following:

So, it’s all a bit unsettled. Let’s just say these and other novel legal questions regarding the Trump administration are sure to provide endless fodder for academic analysis in the coming years.

Probably right.

Today, I take on a somewhat related topic.  I briefly explore the President-Elect’s conflicting interests through the lens of a corporate law advisor.  For the past few weeks, the media (see, e.g., here and here and here) and many folks I know have been concerned about the potential for conflict between the President-Elect’s role as the POTUS, public investor and leader of the United States, and his role as “The Donald,” private investor and leader of the Trump corporate empire.

The existence of a conflicting interest in an action or transaction is not, in and of itself, fatal or even necessarily problematic.  In a number of common situations, fiduciaries have interests in both sides of a transaction.  For example, a business founder who serves as a corporate director and officer may lease property she owns to the corporation.  What matters under…

This post is not about politics, although it does concern President-elect Trump’s cabinet pick, ExxonMobil head, Rex Tillerson. I first learned about Tillerson during some research on business and human rights in the extractive industries in 2012. I read the excellent book, “Private Empire” by Pultizer-prize winner Steve Coll to get insight into what I believe is the most powerful company in the world.

Although Coll spent most of his time talking about Tillerson’s predecessor, Lee Raymond, the book did a great job of describing the company’s world view on climate change, litigation tactics, and diplomatic relations. Coll writes, “Exxon’s far flung interests were at times distinct from Washington’s.” The CEO “did not manage the corporation as a subordinate instrument of American foreign policy; his was a private empire.” Raymond even boasted, “I am not a U.S. company and I don’t make decisions based on what’s good for the U.S.” Indeed, the book describes how ExxonMobil navigated through Indonesian guerilla warfare, dealt with kleptocrats in Africa, and deftly negotiated with Vladmir Putin and Hugo Chavez. 

Before I read the book, I knew that big business was powerful–after all I used to work for a Fortune 500 company. But Coll’s work described a company that…

UC Irvine law professor, David Min, has a new article titled, Corporate Political Activity and Non-Shareholder Agency Costs, in theYale Journal on Regulation.  Professor Min examines corporate constitutional law  in recent examples such as Citizens United, through the lens of nonshareholder dissenters.  

The courts have never considered the problem of dissenting nonshareholders in assessing regulatory restrictions on corporate political activity. This Article argues that they should. It is the first to explore the potential agency costs that corporate political activity creates for nonshareholders, and in so doing, it lays out two main arguments. First, these agency costs may be significant, as I illustrate through several case studies. Second, neither corporate law nor private ordering provides solutions to this agency problem. Indeed, because the theoretical arguments for shareholder primacy in corporate law are largely inapplicable for corporate political activity, corporate law may actually serve to exacerbate the agency problems that such activity creates for non-shareholders. Private ordering, which could take the form of contractual covenants restricting corporate political activity, also seems unlikely to solve this problem, due to the large economic frictions facing such covenants. These findings have potentially significant ramifications for the Court’s corporate political speech

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Below are some resources related to the integration of faith and work stemming from businesses or business people.

Companies 

Organizations

Presentations 

Books and Articles

A friend of mine is considering teaching his constitutional law seminar based almost entirely on current and future decisions by the President-elect. I would love to take that class. I thought of that when I saw this article about Mr. Trump’s creative use of Delaware LLCs for real estate and aircraft. Here in South Florida, we have a number of very wealthy residents, and my Business Associations students could value from learning about this real-life entity selection/jurisdictional exercise. Alas, I probably can’t squeeze a whole course out of his business interests. However, I am sure that using some examples from the headlines related to Trump and many of his appointees for key regulatory agencies will help bring some of the material to life.

Happy Grading!

Today, I share a quick teaching tip/suggestion.

I taught my last classes of the semester earlier today.  For my Business Associations class, which met at 8:00 am, I was looking for a way to end the class meeting, tying things from the past few classes up in some way.  I settled on using the facts from a case that I used to cover in a former casebook that is not in my current course text:  Coggins  et al. v. New England Patriots Football Club, Inc., et al.  Here are the facts I presented:

  • New England Patriots Football Club, Inc. (“NEPFC”), the corporation that owns the New England Patriots, has both voting and nonvoting shares of stock outstanding.
  • The former president and owner of all of the voting shares of NEPFC, Sullivan, takes out a personal loan that only can be repaid if he owns all of the NEPFC stock outstanding.
  • The board and Sullivan vote to merge NEPFC with and into a new corporation in which Sullivan would own all the shares.
  • In the merger, holders of the nonvoting shares receive $15 per share for their common stock cashed out in the merger.

From this, I noted that three legal actions are common…

Happy Thanksgiving from the Dominican Republic. I’m blogging from the Fathom Adonia, Carnival’s fledgling social impact cruise line. I’ve spent the past few days in Puerto Plata teaching English in schools and local communities. Other passengers worked on reforestation projects, built water filtration systems, installed concrete floors in homes, worked with women on cocoa farms, and learned how to recycle paper with local workers. Passengers can  also do typical excursions such as zip lining and snorkeling, or can lounge around in the $80 million dollar Amber Cove built up like a resort. But most people come on this cruise for the volunteer activities and don’t expect frills (our bus got stuck in the mud and we needed pig farmers in a truck to help push us out on the way back from teaching English 75 minutes outside of town). Fathom has restaurants, a spa, dancing, bars, onboard activities such as wine and paint, extremely friendly staff, and enthusiastic, young “impact guides” but no Vegas-style shows and only carries approximately 700 passengers.

Carnival has banked on profiting from people’s stated desire to do good in the world. Lots of surveys support this idea in theory. However, as regular readers of this…

I have been on hiatus for a few weeks, and had planned to post today about the compliance and corporate governance issues related to Wells Fargo. However, I have decided to delay posting on that topic in light of the unexpected election results and how it affects my research and work.

I am serving as a panelist and a moderator at the ABA’s annual Labor and Employment meeting tomorrow. Our topic is Advising Clients in Whistleblower Investigations. In our discussions and emails prior to the conference, we never raised the election in part because, based on the polls, no one expected Donald Trump to win. Now, of course, we have to address this unexpected development in light of the President-elect’s public statements that he plans to dismantle much of President Obama’s legacy, including a number of his executive orders.

President-elect Trump’s plan for his first 100 days includes, among other things: a hiring freeze on all federal employees to reduce federal workforce though attrition (exempting military, public safety, and public health); a requirement that for every new federal regulation, two existing regulations must be eliminated; renegotiation or withdrawal from NAFTA; withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership; canceling “every unconstitutional executive action…

Prof. Bainbridge the other day commented on the following, which is item 10 from the Modern Corporation Statement on Company Law (available here):  

Contrary to widespread belief, corporate directors generally are not under a legal obligation to maximise profits for their shareholders. This is reflected in the acceptance in nearly all jurisdictions of some version of the business judgment rule, under which disinterested and informed directors have the discretion to act in what they believe to be in the best long term interests of the company as a separate entity, even if this does not entail seeking to maximise short-term shareholder value. Where directors pursue the latter goal, it is usually a product not of legal obligation, but of the pressures imposed on them by financial markets, activist shareholders, the threat of a hostile takeover and/or stock-based compensation schemes.

Bainbridge take a contrary position, citing Delaware Supreme Court Chief Justice Strine, who says, “a clear-eyed look at the law of corporations in Delaware reveals that, within the limits of their discretion, directors must make stockholder welfare their sole end, and that other interests may be taken into consideration only as a means of promoting stockholder welfare.” Strine further…

Each year, I rethink how I teach fiduciary duties in the corporate law context in my Business Associations course.  My learning objectives for the students are both limited and involved.  On the one hand, there’s little room in my three-credit-hour course for a nuanced understanding of all of the contexts in which corporate fiduciary duty claims typically occur.  In particular, I have determined to leave out the public company mergers and acquisitions context almost completely.  On the other hand, I find myself juggling uncertain classifications of duty components, explanations of seemingly mismatched standards of conduct and liability, and judicial review standards in and outside the Delaware corporate law context.  It’s a handful.  It’s teaching complexity.

Of course, fiduciary duty is not the only complex matter that one must teach in Business Associations.  But it is, for me, one of the topics I am least confident that I “get right” in my interactions with students in and outside the classroom.  Accordingly, as I again head toward the end of the semester, I find myself wondering whether I could have done–or could do–more with the students in my Business Associations course this semester.  This leads me to ask my fellow business law professors (that’s you!) whether…