The SEC recently released a highly specific proposal for registered investment advisers with comments open until at least December 27th.  The proposal “would require advisers to conduct due diligence prior to engaging a service provider to perform certain services or functions. It would further require advisers to periodically monitor the performance and reassess the retention of the service provider in accordance with due diligence requirements to reasonably determine that it is appropriate to continue to outsource those services or functions to that service provider.”

My immediate reaction is that I’m generally in favor of RIAs performing appropriate due diligence, but that I’m a bit skeptical about the need for specific rules in a principles-based framework.  It’s certainly true that Advisers outsource a significant amount of work today.  And it is also true that, as the proposal details, problems at third party service providers have led to broader problems. 

It’s easy to see how concentration risk can grow in such an environment.  If a huge swath of the market outsources to a particular third-party firm, a failure at the third party could paralyze the market. 

It’ll be interesting to watch to see how RIAs react to this.

On Sunday, I posted a new paper to SSRN, forthcoming in the Wake Forest Law Review.  It’s called Inside Out (or, One State to Rule them All): New Challenges to the Internal Affairs Doctrine, and it covers a lot of territory I’ve touched on in blog posts, namely, litigation-limiting bylaws, the Salzberg decision, California’s board diversity law, and issues regarding the internal affairs doctrine and LLCs.  Here is the abstract:

The internal affairs doctrine provides that the law of the organizing state will apply to matters pertaining to a business entity’s internal governance, regardless of whether the entity has substantive ties to that jurisdiction. The internal affairs doctrine stands apart from other choice of law rules, which usually favor the jurisdiction with the greatest relationship to the dispute and limit parties’ ability to select another jurisdiction’s law. The doctrine is purportedly justified by business entities’ unique need for a single set of rules to apply to governance matters, and by the efficiency gains that flow from allowing investors and managers to select the law that will govern their relationship.

The contours of the internal affairs doctrine have never been defined with precision, but several recent developments have placed

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In prior posts, I’ve plugged a couple of legal history articles, essentially offering different accounts of how the corporation, with its distinctive features, came to be.  In particular, I highlighted Margaret Blair’s piece on how corporate law is inextricably tied to state recognition, and Taisu Zhang’s and John Morley’s paper on how modern corporate features are tied to a developed state capable of adjudicating the rights of far flung investors with consistency.

Into this mix I’ll introduce Robert Anderson’s new paper, The Sea Corporation, forthcoming in the Cornell Law Review, demonstrating that the features we think of as defining the corporate form – limited liability, tradeable shares, entity shielding, separate personality, and centralized management selected by the equity owners – were all associated with admiralty law for centuries before the development of the modern corporation, embodied in the form of the ship’s personality.  Anderson points out that, to some extent, these were necessary given the realities of maritime commerce: when a ship docked in a foreign port, identifying and litigating against its distant owners was nearly impossible.  Therefore, creditors necessarily could only bring an in rem action against the ship itself; if the claims were less than the…

Eight days ago, Scottsdale Capital Advisors and Alpine Securities Corp. filed a Complaint in the Middle District of Florida arguing that FINRA’s structure and operation violate the U.S. Constitution.  The firms argue that FINRA is unconstitutional under the Appointments Clause, separation of powers principles, and the nondelegation doctrine.  The case has attracted some coverage already.

The suit makes many of the arguments I previewed in Supreme Risk, which was recently published by the Florida Law Review.  When I foresaw this risk, I highlighted four doctrinal areas where the Supreme Court might invalidate or significantly limit SROs, including: (i) nondelegation doctrine; (ii) separation of powers doctrine; (iii) state action; and (iv) appointments clause issues.

While it’s still very early, this type of challenge now presents a colorable risk to self-regulatory organizations.  If these arguments succeed against FINRA, it’s likely to cause significant market disruption.  It also lowers the barrier to press the same arguments against any SRO with a similar structure.

I would expect a case like this to make its way through the courts and toward the Supreme Court eventually.  It would not surprise me if groups like the Pacific Legal Foundation seek to get involved as well.  As…

A lot of people are talking about this complaint against Meta, filed by James McRitchie, alleging that the Board violates its fiduciary duties to diversified shareholders because it seeks to maximize profits at Meta individually while externalizing costs that impact shareholders’ other investments.   The complaint further argues that the Board, whose personal holdings in Meta are undiversified, labors under a conflict with respect to diversified investors (seeking, apparently, to avoid the business judgment rule and obtain higher scrutiny of the Board’s actions).

The “universal ownership” theory of corporate shareholding has got a lot of traction recently; as I previously blogged, it’s appealing because it suggests that corporations can be forces for social good without actually changing anything about the structure of corporate law.

That said, academic champions of the theory do not necessarily argue in terms of fiduciary duty – that is, they aren’t claiming that either as a normative or descriptive matter, corporate boards are legally obligated to maximize wealth for shareholders at the portfolio level – instead, they tend to elide those kinds of claims and simply argue that as a matter of power, diversified investors have sufficient stakes and influence to control board…

I attended the BLPB “Connecting the Threads” symposium last week at the University of Tennessee and, as per usual, had an excellent time with the students, staff, and faculty associated with the Transactions journal.  Upon asking the regular bloggers in this space, I was assured that it was acceptable to “toot my own horn” about publications.  To that end, please allow me to mention that my article on Contracting Out of Partnership has (finally) come out in the most recent issue of the Journal of Corporation Law.  If interested, the abstract is as follows:

Can parties contract out of the general partnership form of business organization, even if their conduct would otherwise establish a partnership? Although a recent judicial decision suggests that they can, treating contractual disclaimers of partnership as dispositive is inconsistent with modern statutes. More importantly, permitting parties to contract out of partnership imposes substantial costs by undermining the protections of fiduciary duty, creating uncertainty about the operating rules for the business, and threatening to deny the rights of third parties. These costs outweigh the benefits of promoting freedom of contract and providing certainty on the partnership formation question, particularly because such benefits can largely be captured within…

At our wonderful BLPB conference a week ago (details here), I presented “An Introduction to Anti-ESG Legislation.” Thus, news that Louisiana Treasurer John Schroder plans to liquidate all BlackRock investments within three months over Blackrock’s ESG policies caught my eye. Here are some notable excerpts from the FOXBusiness article (here) on the news:

Louisiana Treasurer John Schroder penned a letter to BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, explaining the state would liquidate all BlackRock investments within three months and, over a period of time, divest nearly $800 million from the bank’s money market funds, mutual funds or exchange-traded funds. The state treasurer blasted Fink’s pursuit of so-called environmental, social and governance (ESG) standards that promote green energy over traditional fossil fuels. “Your blatantly anti-fossil fuel policies would destroy Louisiana’s economy,” Schroder wrote to Fink in the letter …. “Consumers’ Research applauds Treasurer Schroder’s commendable decision to withdraw the state’s assets from BlackRock’s misuse,” Will Hild, the executive director of Consumer’s Research, told FOX Business in a statement. “As noted in his letter, BlackRock is using the people of Louisiana’s money to advance a destructive agenda that raises costs for consumers in the state and across the country. The seeds

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