Legislation

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In my post last week, I mentioned the President’s invocation of the Defense Production Act during the current COVID-19 crisis.  I was immediately curious about this law when news of the President’s March 27 memorandum focused on General Motors and ventilator production hit my radar screen (a/k/a, my laptop, which has effectively become my lap these days).  Surely, it must be unusual for the U.S. government, I thought, to direct the nature, means, and timing of production and supply.  That seems antithetical to the spirit, if not the letter, of U.S. capitalism.  However, the more I read, the less curious and concerned I am, at least for the moment.  Perhaps some of the reporting in this area is more geared to generating a splashy news item than, well, alerting us to something truly unusual or troubling.  Nevertheless, I will make a few foundational points on the Act here.  I may have more to say later.

The Defense Production Act of 1950 can be found in Chapter 55 of Title 50 of the U.S. Code.  The Act recognizes that “the security of the United States is dependent on the ability of the domestic industrial base to supply materials and services…

COVID-19’s effects on financings and M&A, as well as contracts more generally (as covered here, here, and here among many other places), the rapid adoption of the Coronavirus Act, Relief, and Economic Security Act, a/k/a the “CARES Act” (key terms summarized briefly here and elsewhere), and the President’s invocation of the Defense Production Act have me feeling like I am drinking business law water out of a fire hose this past week.  Anyone else feeling that way?  Whew!

I am still sorting through it all.  I am sure that I will have more to say on some of this as time passes.  However, earlier today, in the process of reading online resources and watching and listening to others talk about the many legal aspects of the current pandemic, I came across this YouTube video, done by one of my former students, a local attorney who works with entrepreneurs, start-ups, and small businesses.

I have not fact-checked this video.  And he jumps in to correct himself.  But what I like about it is that it represents unvarnished, even humorous, boots-on-the-ground legal public service.  He does not want businesses in the local community to miss out or waste time/money shooting in…

Have you ever wanted to learn the basics about blockchain? Do you think it’s all hype and a passing fad? Whatever your view, take a look at my new article, Beyond Bitcoin: Leveraging Blockchain to Benefit Business and Society, co-authored with Rachel Epstein, counsel at Hedera Hashgraph.  I became interested in blockchain a year ago because I immediately saw potential use cases in supply chain, compliance, and corporate governance. I met Rachel at a Humanitarian Blockchain Summit and although I had already started the article, her practical experience in the field added balance, perspective, and nuance. 

The abstract is below:

Although many people equate blockchain with bitcoin, cryptocurrency, and smart contracts, the technology also has the potential to transform the way companies look at governance and enterprise risk management, and to assist governments and businesses in mitigating human rights impacts. This Article will discuss how state and non-state actors use the technology outside of the realm of cryptocurrency. Part I will provide an overview of blockchain technology. Part II will briefly describe how public and private actors use blockchain today to track food, address land grabs, protect refugee identity rights, combat bribery and corruption, eliminate voter fraud…

Bird

“Bird Scooter” by mikecogh is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 

Here in Nashville, Mayor David Briley announced that he is seeking to ban scooters. This announcement follows the first scooter-related death in the city.

Currently, I am working on a project that looks at how social value is measured and reported. As I dig deeper, I am becoming even more convinced that measuring social value may be too difficult for us to do well.

Let’s take scooters as an example. How would you measure (and report) the social value of these scooter companies? How many points should a “third-party standard” assign for the jobs created, for the gasoline saved, for the affordable transportation provided, for the fun produced? How many points should you subtract for a death, for injuries, for obstructing sidewalks? In the language of the Model Benefit Corporation Legislation, how do you know if a scooter company is producing “[a] material positive impact on society and the environment, taken as a whole”?

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been diving into the B Impact Assessment, (which is the top third-party standard used by benefit corporations) and, frankly, the points assigned seem somewhat arbitrary…

Back in 2011, I wrote, in a Harvard Business Law Review Online article, that the default rule in analyzing all LLC questions should be one taken from CML V, LLC v. Bax, 6 A.3d 238 (Del. Ch. Nov. 3, 2010): “[T]here is nothing absurd about different legal principles applying to corporations and LLCs.” I still believe that. I further argued:

Where legislatures have decided that distinctly corporate concepts should apply to LLCs—such as allowing piercing the veil or derivative lawsuits—those wishes (obviously) should be honored by the courts. And where state LLC laws are silent, the court should carefully consider the legislative context and history, as well as the policy implications of the possible answers to the questions presented. Courts should put forth cogent reasons for their decisions, rather than blindly applying corporate law principles in what are seemingly analogous situations between LLCs and corporations. [footnotes omitted]

In 2014, I discussed a case West Virginia case in a post here at Business Law Prof Blog, More LLC Veil Piercing Forced into State Statutes. In that post, I was critical of a West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals decision reading veil piercing into the state’s LLC statute.  My main…

Last week Dr. Denis Mukwege won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on gender-based violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). This short video interview describes what I saw when I went to DRC in 2011 to research the newly-enacted Dodd-Frank disclosure rule and to do the legwork for a non-profit that teaches midwives ways to deliver babies safely. For those unfamiliar with the legislation, U.S. issuers must disclose the efforts they have made to track and trace tin, tungsten, tantalum, and gold from the DRC and nine surrounding countries. Rebels and warlords control many of the mines by controlling the villages. DRC is one of the poorest nations in the world per capita but has an estimated $25 trillion in mineral reserves (including 65% of the world’s cobalt). Armed militia use rape and violence as a weapon of war in part so that they control the mineral wealth. 

The stated purpose of the Dodd-Frank rule was to help end the violence in DRC and to name and shame companies that do not disclose or that cannot certify that their goods are DRC-conflict free (although that labeling portion of the law was struck down on…

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…

We’re a month away from our second annual Business Law Professor Blog CLE, hosted at the University of Tennessee on Friday, September 14, 2018. We’ll discuss our latest research and receive comments from UT faculty and students. I’ve entitled my talk Beyond Bitcoin: Leveraging Blockchain for Corporate Governance, Corporate Social Responsibility, and Enterprise Risk Management, and will blog more about that after I finish the article. This is a really long post, but it’s chock full of helpful links for novices and experts alike and highlights some really interesting work from our colleagues at other law schools.

Two weeks ago, I posted some resources to help familiarize you with blockchain. Here’s a relatively simple definition from John Giordani at Forbes:

Blockchain is a public register in which transactions between two users belonging to the same network are stored in a secure, verifiable and permanent way. The data relating to the exchanges are saved inside cryptographic blocks, connected in a hierarchical manner to each other. This creates an endless chain of data blocks — hence the name blockchain — that allows you to trace and verify all the transactions you have ever made. The primary function of a…

I am both a business law professor and an energy law professor, which is sometimes surprising to people. That is, some folks are surprised that have a research focus in two areas that are seemingly very distinct.  In one sense, that’s true, at least in the academic realm.  Most energy law scholars tend to have a focus on more close related disciplines, such as environmental law, administrative law, and property law.  And business law scholars tend to trend toward things like commercial law, bankruptcy, tax, and contracts.  

There is substantial overlap, though, in the energy and business law spaces, as I have noted on this blog before. I am even working on some research that looks specifically at the role laws and regulations have on business and economic development.   My work with the WVU Center for Innovation in Gas Research and Utilization builds on this energy and business nexus. 

I am pleased to share a newly published article I wrote with Amy Stein from the University of Florida’s Levin College of Law. The piece is called Decarbonizing Light-Duty Vehicles, and it appears in the July issue of Environmental Law Reporter. It is available here. This article…

I often use my space here to complain about courts and lawmakers being imprecise with regard to limited liability companies (LLCs).  Today, I will focus on my home state of West Virginia, which recently passed a bill to support (and provide loans for cooperatives designed to provide) much-needed broadband development in the state. I applaud the effort, but the execution was not great.  

Here’s an example from the West Virginia Code: 

12-6C-11. Legislative findings; loans for industrial development; availability of funds and interest rates.

. . . .

(f) The directors of the board shall bear no fiduciary responsibility with regard to any of the loans contemplated in this section.

This applies to a cooperative board that takes on loans for broadband projects.  But it doesn’t make sense. I think they used “fiduciary” when they meant “financial,” as I assume they meant to say that the board members of the organization would not have “financial liability.”  I am pretty sure they did not mean to remove fiduciary duties.  Then again, who knows. Maybe they are fine with the directors using loans for personal vacations.  (Just kidding. I am pretty sure they’d care.)  I know that in finance, the term fiduciary…