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The results of Tuesday’s election stunned most people – including internal analysts within the Trump camp –  because the polling seemed to give Clinton an insurmountable lead.  She was ahead of Trump in many states, and though there was great room for uncertainty in each poll, everyone assumed that even if there were some polling errors, there were not enough to make a difference in outcome.  I.e., she could lose Ohio and Florida and still win so long as she held Pennsylvania and so forth, so it seemed as though even accounting for polling error, there was little chance she could lose.

That assumption, however, ignored the possibility that all of the errors were correlated – so that an error in one state’s polls meant that the same error would be replicated across multiple states.  That’s something that Nate Silver accounted for in his model, however, and others rejected, and it contributed to Silver’s more bearish Clinton predictions.

And of course, that’s what happened with respect to mortgage backed securities as well.  Everyone knew that some mortgages would fail – and that some RMBS tranches would fail – but the assumption was that there were enough of them…

Yesterday, while at the annual SEALSB conference, a group of professors and I ate at Bull City Burgers in Durham, NC. I was somewhat surprised to see a framed B Corp. Certification on the restaurant wall. This restaurant’s main menu items, as the name suggests, were greasy (but tasty) burgers. While the menu did talk about how the cows were grass fed, I think there may be a hot debate over whether burgers are good for “society and environment.”

This got me thinking about whether there are certain industries that should be excluded from the B corp certification process or the benefit corporation legal entity form. If so, which industries and why? My initial reaction is that most companies in most industries – including burger joints – can be run in a socially responsible manner and can do better than their competitors, even if the product can have some negative impacts on society if used incorrectly (as burgers can if not eaten in relative moderation). There may be some industries that are irredeemable, but I am guessing they are few and far between. Most companies, if managed well, can have a positive impact on society, and even though you might…

I’m traveling today so this will be quick (actually, I drafted this in advance to go up automatically and I’m very much hoping that whatever happens, the appeal won’t have been decided before this post appears).

Earlier this year, Chancellor Bouchard decided Sandys v. Pincus, regarding whether demand was excused in a derivative action against the board of Zynga.  And I love this case because it is a shockingly good teaching tool for the concept of demand excusal.  The plaintiffs filed three claims – I edit out the last one and just stick with counts I and II.

The opinion beautifully describes the nature of the inquiry, and it even has a nice chart showing the differences in composition between the board accused of wrongdoing, and the demand board.

In the first two counts, there is a sharp distinction drawn between board members who are potentially interested because of liability due to personal benefits/self-dealing, and board members who are potentially interested because they face personal liability for other reasons.

The court also clearly marches through the question of whether any disinterested board members are nonetheless dependent on interested directors, demonstrating how – despite rather extensive social and business ties…

A couple of interesting studies about gender in the business context have recently been released.

First, a study by A. Can Inci, M.P. Narayanan, and H. Nejat Seyhun concludes – based on profits earned from insider trading – that women executives have less access to inside information than do men with similar positions.  They attempt to control for the fact that women may simply be more risk averse by controlling for trade size; they find, however, that even when doing so, men make more than women.  Of particular interest is the fact that even though their study goes back to 1975 (when there were fewer women executives), they find that the gender differences are stronger in more recent years, from 1997-2012.  They believe that the differences are attributable to informal networking that grants men access to better information than women; these differences fall away for firms that have a greater proportion of women executives.

Second, the Rockefeller Foundation finds that when a company experiences a crisis and the CEO is a woman, eighty percent of news stories cite her as a problem; when the CEO is a man, only thirty-one percent of news stories cite him as a problem.

Of…

The Economist recently published an opinion piece arguing that bigotry has become a lucrative business.  As the magazine puts it:

The country is in an unusually flammable mood. This being America, there are plenty of businesspeople around to monetise the fury—to foment it, manipulate it and spin it into profits. These are the entrepreneurs of outrage and barons of bigotry who have paved the way for Donald Trump’s rise….

Breitbart News, in particular, has excelled in pushing boundaries. … It has provided platforms in its comment section for members of far-right hate groups who rail against immigration and Jews.

The outrage industry has clearly reached a milestone with Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. …He won the hearts of 13m Republican primary voters by recycling conservative media hits such as “build a wall” and “ban all Muslims”. …

There are big bucks in bigotry

Twitter has been a particularly virulent source of online bigotry and abuse.  Buzzfeed recently published an article on Twitter’s 10-year failure to halt hate speech – often targeted at particular users – that stems from a combination of corporate dysfunction, failure of (white, male) corporate leadership to recognize the problem, and business exigencies that emphasized user growth.  In…

    Does a partner have actual authority, simply as a matter of his “partner” status, to bind the partnership to an ordinary business transaction?  On the one hand, RUPA § 401(j) states that “[a] difference arising as to a matter in the ordinary course of business of a partnership may be decided by a majority of the partners.”  That suggests that a partner is not authorized to act absent a majority vote.  On the other hand, RUPA § 301(1) states that “[e]ach partner is an agent of the partnership,” and comment 2 states that “[t]he effect of Section 301(1) is to characterize a partner as a general managerial agent having both actual and apparent authority co-extensive in scope with the firm’s ordinary business” (emphasis added)).

    The comment to § 301 has always struck me as an odd place for discussing actual authority.  Actual authority is based on a partner’s relationship to the other partners and the partnership.  Section 301, however, is in the Article dealing with a partner’s relationship to non-partner outsiders.  Section 301(1) in particular is about apparent authority.  What supports the assertion in the comment, therefore, that a partner has ACTUAL authority co-extensive in scope with the firm’s ordinary business?

 

The following post comes to us from Prof. J. Scott Colesanti and a former student of his, Karen Eng. Scott is a Professor of Legal Writing at the Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University, a former co-editor of this blog, and author of “Legal Writing, All Business.”

F.A.A. VACATUR IN THE SECOND CIRCUIT: NOW THAT TOM BRADY HAS SAT, WHERE DO WE STAND?

By J. Scott Colesanti and Karen Eng (October 12, 2016)

  1. Introduction

Late in the summer, New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady announced that he would not further appeal the discipline imposed against him by the National Football League (“NFL”). That decision ended an 18-month ordeal which highlighted, among other things, the unpredictability of sports league sanctions, in general, and the finality of penalties under NFL Collective Bargaining Agreement (“CBA”) Article 46, in particular. This article examines the resulting state of the law in the Second Circuit regarding review of arbitrations under Sections 10(a)(2) and (3) of the Federal Arbitration Act (“F.A.A.”), which provided – in part – the means for Brady’s appeal.

That Pascal quote encapsulates why I strongly disagree with Noah Feldman’s Bloomberg column on the new word limits for federal appellate briefs. 

The new rules reduce the number of words in opening briefs by 1,000, and in reply briefs by 500.  Feldman argues that the reduction will cut down billable hours.  He’s wrong; it will do the opposite.

When I was in practice, I spent nearly as much time cutting words from briefs as I did doing the initial draft.  Every first draft clocked in at more than the then-limit of 14,000 words; in some cases, I was closer to 21,000 words my first time through.  Only after substantial editing – going over each sentence again and again, and (naturally) taking serious liberties with Bluebook format – was I able to bring briefs within the limit.  (I never went this far, though.)

(Note to Lexis:  You are at a disadvantage relative to Westlaw because your citation format for unpublished cases has more words. I did initial research on Lexis but then translated all citations to Westlaw to bring my word count down.  Rookie mistake, guys.)

For what it’s worth, I think the new limits are a travesty.  Judges often…