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The WVU College of Law’s Center for Energy and Sustainable Development is seeking a fellow for 2014-16, and the details are below.  As I  have written before, the Future of Business is the Future of Energy. Just today, the New York Times Dealbook has an article, Norway’s Sovereign Wealth Fund Ramps Up Investment Plans, which notes: 

Norway’s giant sovereign wealth fund said on Tuesday that it would manage its $884 billion portfolio more aggressively over the next three years, taking larger stakes in companies and increasing its real estate portfolio.

. . . .

The fund’s investments have grown increasingly sophisticated under Yngve Slyngstad, the chief executive of Norges Bank Investment Management, who came to the fund in 1998 to build an equity portfolio and became C.E.O. in 2008. Since the end of 2007, equities have increased as a percentage of the portfolio to about 61 percent from 42 percent.

Mr. Slyngstad has also diversified the holdings into smaller companies and into emerging markets, but the stock investments remain concentrated in Europe and North America. The fund’s largest equity holdings are all companies based in Europe, including Nestlé, Novartis, HSBC Holdings, the Vodafone Groupand Royal

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Regular readers of this blog have seen several posts discussing the materiality of various SEC disclosures. See here and here for recent examples. I have been vocal about my objection to the Dodd-Frank conflict minerals rule, which requires US issuers to disclose their use of tin, tungsten, tantalum and gold deriving from the Democratic Republic of Congo and surrounding nations, and describe the measures taken to conduct audits and due diligence of their supply chains. See this post and this law review article.

Last year SEC Chair Mary Jo White indicated that she has concerns about the amount and types of disclosures that companies put forth and whether or not they truly assist investors in making informed decisions.  In fact, the agency is undergoing a review of corporate disclosures and has recently announced that rather than focusing on disclosure “overload” the agency wants to look at “effectiveness,” duplication, and “holes in the regulatory regime where additional disclosure may be good for investors.”

I’m glad that the SEC is looking at these issues and I urge lawmakers to consider this SEC focus when drafting additional disclosure regulation. One possible test case is the Business Supply Chain Transparency on Trafficking and…

A new poll, conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, suggests that the desire for new Wall Street regulations has not been maximized by candidates for political office.  Here are some of the poll’s key findings.  The release about the poll states:

A strong, bipartisan majority of likely 2014 voters support stricter federal regulations on the way banks and other financial institutions conduct their business. Voters want accountability and do not want Wall Street pretending to police themselves: they want real cops back on the Wall Street beat enforcing the law.

As evidence, the release notes that David Brat’s upset win over Eric Cantor in the Virginia 7th District Republican primary, may have been related to Brat’s attack on Wall Street, sharing Brat’s words from a radio interview: “The crooks up on Wall Street and some of the big banks — I’m pro-business, I’m just talking about the crooks — they didn’t go to jail, they are on Eric’s Rolodex.”

The poll found that voters consider Wall Street and the large banks as “bad actors,” with 64% saying,  “the stock market is rigged for insiders and people who know how to manipulate the system.”  Another 60% want “stricter regulation on the way banks and other…

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…

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.

[CONTINUE AFTER THE BREAK]

Tomorrow kicks off the 2014 Law & Society Annual meeting in Minneapolis, MN.  Law & Society is a big tent conference that includes legal scholars of all areas, anthropologists, sociologists, economists, and the list goes on and on.  A group of female corporate law scholars, of which I am a part, organizes several corporate-law panels. The result is that we have a mini- business law conference of our own each year.  Below is a preview of the schedule…please join us for any and all panels listed below.

Thursday 5/29

Friday 5/30

Saturday 5/31

8:15-10:00

0575 Corp Governance & Locus of Power

U. St. Thomas MSL 458

Participants: Tamara Belinfanti, Jayne Barnard, Megan Shaner, Elizabeth Noweiki, and Christina Sautter

10:15-12:00

1412 Empirical Examinations of Corporate Law

U. St. Thomas MSL 458

Participants: Elisabeth De Fontenay, Connie Wagner, Lynne Dallas, Diane Dick & Cathy Hwang

12:45-2:30

1468 Theorizing Corp. Law

U. St. Thomas MSL 458

Participants: Elizabeth Pollman, Sarah Haan, Marcia Narine, Charlotte Garden, and Christyne Vachon

1:00 Business Meeting Board Rm 3

2:45-4:30

Roundtable on SEC Authority

View Abstract 2967

Participants: Christyne Vachon, Elizabeth Pollman, Joan Heminway, Donna Nagy, Hilary Allen

1473 Emerging International Questions in

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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.

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[The following post comes to us from Lawrence E. Mitchell, Joseph C. Hostetler – Baker & Hostetler Professor of Law at Case Western Reserve University School of Law.  All formatting errors should be attributed to me, Stefan Padfield.]

The March 5, 2014 oral argument in Halliburton Co. v. Erica P. John Fund, Inc.1 made clear that one of the issues being considered by the Supreme Court is whether to supplant the “market efficiency” analysis currently required at the class certification stage in securities fraud class action cases with a “price impact” analysis instead. Our purpose is not to debate the relative merits of that potential change. Rather, it is to identify a critical point that seemed to get lost in the argument: neither the Justices nor the advocates addressed what a price impact analysis would look like in the context of the most common securities fraud scenario—the making of false statements designed to mask bad news. While some of the briefing before the Court touches on the issue, the authors of a working paper cited by proponents of both sides have supplemented their views with a recent blog post that, while brief, discusses potential approaches to measuring the …

Last week the DC Circuit Court of Appeals generally upheld the Dodd-Frank conflict minerals rule but found that the law violated the First Amendment to the extent that it requires companies to report to the SEC and state on their websites that their products are not “DRC Conflict Free.” The case was remanded back to the district court on this issue.

As regular readers of the blog know I signed on to an amicus brief opposing the law as written  because of the potential for a boycott on the ground and the impact on the people of Congo, and not necessarily because it’s expensive for business (although I appreciate that argument as a former supply chain professional). I also don’t think it is having a measurable impact on the violence. In fact, because I work with an NGO that works with rape survivors and trains midwives and medical personnel in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, I get travel advisories from the State Department. Coinicidentally, I received one today as I was typing this post warning that “armed groups, bandits, and elements of the Congolese military [emphasis mine] remain security concerns in the eastern DRC….[they] are known to pillage, steal…