In a recently published article just posted to SSRN, I examine spousal misappropriation as a basis for an insider trading claim.  The article, Women Should Not Need to Watch Their Husbands Like [a] Hawk: Misappropriation Insider Trading in Spousal Relationships, leverages the facts of a specific Securities and Exchange Commission enforcement action (SEC v. Hawk, No. 5:14-cv-01466 (N.D. Cal.)), to undertake an analysis of applicable statutory and regulatory principles, existing decisional law, and the realities of the legal and social context.  The SSRN abstract, derived from the text of the article, follows.

This article endeavors to sort through and begin to resolve key unanswered questions regarding spousal misappropriation as a basis for U.S. insider trading liability, some of which apply to insider trading more broadly. It identifies and describes misappropriation insider trading liability under U.S. law, recounts and analyzes probative doctrine and policy relevant to spousal misappropriation cases, and (before briefly concluding) offers related observations about the impact of that doctrine and policy on a specific motivating Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) enforcement action and other spousal misappropriation cases.

The analysis undertaken in the article supports enforcement actions based on a strong threshold presumption of a relationship of trust and confidence in spousal relations, as recognized by the SEC through its adoption of Rule 10b5-2(b)(3). This support derives from a focus on two fundamental building blocks of spousal misappropriation cases addressed in the article—a broad understanding of deception as it is relevant to these cases and longstanding accepted sociolegal wisdom on the nature of marital relationships as evidenced in the spousal communications privilege. Essentially, marriage is best seen as a relationship of trust and confidence. To the extent a spouse’s breach of that trust or confidence is deceptive and occurs in connection with the purchase or sale of securities, the breach should be deemed to provide a basis for insider trading enforcement (and liability). Market integrity is damaged through marital deception in the same way that it is damaged through the deception by an attorney of a client or the attorney’s law firm partners. Market actors depend on the confidentiality of information shared in marriages as well as information shared in attorney-client relationships and partnerships.

The article is one of a number that were written for a symposium on insider trading stories held at The University of Tennessee College of Law last fall.  They all occupy the same issue of the Tennessee Journal of Law & Policy, which hosted the symposium.  The other authors include (in the order of their respective article’s appearance in the journal): Donna Nagy, BLPB co-editor John Anderson, Eric Chaffee, Mike Guttentag, Ellen Podgor, Kevin Douglas, and Jeremy Kidd.  The ideas for these articles were originally the subject of a discussion group convened by John Anderson and me at the 2019 Annual Conference of the Southeastern Association of Law Schools (“SEALS”). 

That reminds me to note for all that it is now time to submit proposals for the 2021 SEALS conference.  John Anderson and I will again convene an insider trading group for this meeting.  And I also will be proposing a discussion group (based in part on the colloquy between Ann Lipton and me here) on the treatment of business entity organic documents (including corporate charters and bylaws, limited liability company/operating agreements, and partnership agreements) as contracts and the application of contract law to their interpretation and enforcement.  If you have a desire to participate in either group or want to propose a program of your own (whether it be a panel or a discussion group), please let me know in the comments or by private message.

Friend of the blog Bernard Sharfman has posted The Conflict between Blackrock’s Shareholder Activism and ERISA’s Fiduciary Duties (Case Western Reserve Law Review, Forthcoming) on SSRN (here).  The abstract:

The focus of this Article is on the agency costs that may be created by the empty voting of investment advisers to index funds and how they can be mitigated so as to protect the value of private employee pension benefit plans. This Article focuses on BlackRock because it has taken a leadership role in the leveraging of its delegated voting authority. Therefore, the issue I address in this white paper is whether the fiduciary duties of a plan manager of an “employee pension benefit plan,” as authorized under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (“ERISA”), requires it to investigate BlackRock’s shareholder activism. This indirect approach is required as the fiduciary duties of ERISA do not generally extend to mutual funds and ETFs and their investment advisors.

This Article takes the position that a plan manager has a fiduciary duty, the duty of prudence, to investigate BlackRock’s shareholder activism. This duty applies not only to the BlackRock’s mutual funds or ETFs that an ERISA plan invests in but also to those BlackRock fund selections that it makes available to its participants and beneficiaries in self-directed accounts.

Given these fiduciary duties, this Article argues that if a plan manager were to investigate BlackRock’s shareholder activism, especially its engagement strategy, it would likely find it to be in conflict with the manager’s fiduciary duties. Such a finding would require a plan manager to seek out other reasonably available alternatives that is not associated with such shareholder activism.

While the focus of this Article is on BlackRock’s delegated voting authority and associated shareholder activism, it is meant to apply to any and all investment advisers who attempt to leverage their delegated voting authority for purposes of engaging in such activism. Moreover, the Department of Labor should provide guidance to plan managers on when the investment products of investment advisers with delegated voting authority need to be excluded.

This Article was presented at the George A. Leet Business Law Symposium (Case Western Reserve University School of Law) on Nov. 6, 2020.

The post below is the first in Lécia Vicente’s December series that I heralded in my post on Friday.  Due to a Typepad login issue, I am posting for her today.  We hope to get the issue corrected for her post for next week. 

*     *     *

My series of blog posts cover the recent “Study on Directors’ Duties and Sustainable Corporate Governance” (“Study on Directors’ Duties”) prepared by Ernst & Young for the European Commission. This study promises to set the tone of the EU’s policymaking in the fields of corporate law and corporate governance. The study explains that the “evidence collected over 1992-2018 period shows there is a trend for publicly listed companies within the EU to focus on short-term benefits of shareholders rather than on the long-term interests of the company.” The main objective of the study is to identify the causes of this short-termism in corporate governance and determine European Union (EU) level solutions that permit the achievement of the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the objectives of the Paris Agreement.

Both the United Nations 2030 Agenda and the Paris Agreement are trendsetters, for they have elevated the discussion on sustainable development and climate change mitigation to the global level. That discussion has been captured not only by governments and international environmental institutions but also by corporations. Several questions come to mind.

What is sustainability? This one is critical considering that the global level discussion is often monotone, with the blatant disregard of countries’ idiosyncrasies, the different historical contexts, regulatory frameworks, and political will to implement reforms. The UN defined sustainability as the ability of humanity “to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

The other question that comes to mind is: what is development? Is GDP the right benchmark, or should we be focusing on other factors? There is disagreement among economists on the merit of using GDP as a development measure. Some economists like Abhijit Banerjee & Esther Duflo say, “it makes no sense to get too emotionally involved with individual GDP numbers.” Those numbers do not give us the whole picture of a country’s development.

The Study on Directors’ Duties maintains as a general objective the development of more sustainable corporate governance and corporate directors’ accountability for the company’s sustainable value creation. This general objective would be specifically implemented either through soft law (non-legislative measures) or hard law (legislative measures) that redesign the role of directors (this includes the creation of a new board position, the Chief Value Officer) and directors’ fiduciary duties. This takes me to a third question.

What is the purpose of the company? In other words, what is it that directors should be prioritizing? In a recent blog post, Steve Bainbridge says

I don’t “disagree with the assertion that the law does not mandate that a corporation have as its purpose shareholder wealth maximization” but only because I don’t think it’s useful to ask the question of “what purpose does the law mandate the corporation pursue?

[…] Purpose is always associated with the intellect. In order to have a purpose or aim, it is necessary to come to a decision; and that is the function of the intellect. But just as the corporation has neither a soul to damn nor a body to kick, the corporation has no intellect.

Bainbridge prefers “to operationalize this discussion as a question of the fiduciary duties of corporate officers and directors rather than as a corporate purpose.”

Continue Reading A Purposive Approach to Corporate Governance Sustainability – Lécia Vicente Guest Post

This coming spring, I am on sabbatical.

Typically, I teach 4 courses per semester – each with 5 to 8 decent-sized assessments. Among other responsibilities, I am a pre-law advisor for our undergraduate students. So the school year tends to be a bit of blur.

Our fall semester ended just before Thanksgiving, and I already miss teaching. That said, I do feel fortunate to be on sabbatical during what will be another hybrid-teaching semester for us. While hybrid, masked teaching was O.K., it did not hold a candle to typical in-person teaching in my opinion.

In any event, I have my main writing project for the spring (somewhat) mapped out, but would love thoughts on sabbaticals in general for those who have taken them. Some of my plans are a bit uncertain, given the pandemic. In addition to research/writing, a few things I hope to do are – take another Open Yale Course, connect/reconnect with business lawyers/judges in Nashville, and give a few presentations (if COVID allows).

Anyway, feel free to e-mail me here or leave a comment below.

If you’re sipping some hot chocolate while reading this post or buying your Hanukah or Christmas candy, chances are you’re consuming a product made with cocoa beans harvested by child slaves in Africa. Almost twenty years ago, the eight largest chocolate companies, a US Senator, a Congressman,  the Ambassador to the Ivory Coast, NGOs, and the ILO pledged through the Harkin Engel Protocol to eliminate “the worst forms of” child slavery and forced labor in supply chains. In 2010, after seeing almost no progress, government representatives fom the US, Ghana, and the Ivory Coast released a Framework of Action to support the implementation and to reduce the use of child and forced labor by 70% by 2020. But, the number of child slaves has actually increased.

2020 has come and almost gone and one of the Harkin Engel signatories, Nestle, and another food conglomerate, Cargill, had to defend themselves in front of the Supreme Court this week in a case filed in 2005 by former child slaves. The John Does were allegedly kidnapped in Mali and forced to work on cocoa farms in the Ivory Coast, where they worked 12-14 hours a day in 100-degree weather, spoke a different language from the farmers, lived off dirty water and bowls of rice, and were never paid. According to counsel for the Respondents who gave a debrief earlier this week, the children were locked up at night, told to work or starve, whipped, and when one tried to escape, his feet were slashed and then hot chilis were rubbed into his soles. Respondents sued under the Alien Tort Statute, which Congress passed in 1789 to allow foreign citizens to sue in US federal courts for violations of “the law of nations” to avoid international tensions. In two recent cases, the Court has limited the use of the ATS against foreign corporations sued for acts against foreign plaintiffs because of jurisdictional grounds and ruled that foreign corporations were not subject to the ATS. But the Nestle and Cargill case is different. Respondents sued a US company and the US arm of a Swiss company. (Click here for access to the briefs and here to listen to the oral argument.) For an excellent symposium on the issues see here.

Respondents claim that the companies provided money and resources to the farmers in Africa and knew that child slaves harvested their cocoa. The two questions before the Court were:

  1. May an aiding and abetting claim against a domestic corporation brought under the Alien Tort Statute overcome the extraterritoriality bar where the claim is based on allegations of general corporate activity in the United States and where the Respondents cannot trace the alleged harms, which occurred abroad at the hands of unidentified foreign actors, to that activity?
  1. Does the judiciary have the authority under the Alien Tort Statute to impose liability on domestic corporations?

To those who obsess about business and human rights and ESG issues like I do, this case has huge potential implications. Regular readers of this blog know that I’ve written more than half a dozen posts, law review articles, and an amicus brief on the Dodd-Frank conflict minerals disclosures, which purport to inform consumers about the use of forced labor and child slaves in the harvesting of tin, tungsten, tantalum, and gold. I’ve been skeptical of those disclosure rules that don’t have real penalties. The Nestle case could change all of that by crafting a cognizable cause of action.

To my surprise, the Justices weren’t completely hostile to the thought of corporate liability under the ATS. Here are some of the more telling questions to the counsel for the companies:

Justice Alito: Mr. Katyal, many of your arguments lead to results that are pretty hard to take. So suppose a U.S. corporation makes a big show of supporting every cause de jure but then surreptitiously hires agents in Africa to kidnap children and keep them in bondage on a plantation so that the corporation can buy cocoa or coffee or some other agricultural product at bargain prices. You would say that the victims who couldn’t possibly get any recovery in the courts of the country where they had been held should be thrown out of court in the United States, where this corporation is headquartered and does business?

Justice Breyer: …I don’t see why exempt all corporations, including domestic corporations, from this — the scope of the statute.

Justice Kagan: If you could bring a suit against 10 slaveholders, when those 10 slaveholders form a corporation, why can’t you bring a suit against the corporation?

Justice Kavanaugh: The  Alien  Tort  Statute was once an engine of international human rights protection. Your position, however, would allow suits by aliens only against individuals, as you’ve said, and only for torts international law recognized that occurred in the United States. And Professor Koh’s amicus brief on behalf of former government officials, for example, says that your position would “gut the statute.” So why should we do that?

Here are some of the more interesting questions to the government, which supports the companies’ positions against application of the ATS to corporations:

Chief Justice Roberts: We don’t have objections from foreign countries in this case. As far as we can tell, they’re perfectly comfortable having U.S. citizens, U.S. corporations hailed into their U — in U.S. courts. What should we make of that, and doesn’t that suggest we ought to be a little more — a little less cautious about finding a cause of action here?

Justice Breyer: …what’s new about suing corporations? When I looked it up once, there were 180 ATS lawsuits against corporations. Most of them lost but on other grounds. So why not sue a domestic corporation? You can’t sue the individual because, in my hypothetical, the individuals have all moved to Lithuania. All you have is the corporate assets in the bank and minutes that prove it was a corporate decision. What’s new about it? Why is it creating a form of action?

Justice Alito: Won’t your arguments about aiding and abetting and extraterritoriality all lead to essentially the same result as holding that a domestic corporation cannot be sued under the ATS? Corporations always act through natural persons, so if a corporation can’t aid and abet, there — there will be only a sliver of activity where they could be responsible under respondeat superior, isn’t that true?

Justice Amy Coney Barrett:  You say that the focus of the tort should be the primary conduct, so, here, what was happening in Cote d’Ivoire, rather than the aiding and abetting, which you characterize as secondary. But why should that be so? I mean, let’s imagine you have a U.S. corporation or even a U.S. individual that is making plans to facilitate the use of child slaves, you know, making phone calls, sending money specifically for that purpose, writing e-mails to that effect.Why isn’t that conduct that occurs in the United States something that touches and concerns, you know, or should be the focus of conduct, however you want to state the test?

Finally, here are some of the tough questions posed to counsel for the Respondents:

Justice Thomas: The TVPA [Trafficking Victims Protection Act] seems to suggest that Congress does not see the ATS the way you do. Obviously, there, you don’t have corporate liability and you don’t have aiding and abetting liability. So why shouldn’t we take that as an indication that Congress sought limitations on — on the ATS jurisdiction?

Justice Breyer: Assume that there is corporate liability for domestic corporations. Assume that there is aiding and abetting liability. Now what counts as aiding and abetting for purposes of this statute? When I read through your complaint, it seemed to me that all or virtually all of your complaint amount to doing business with these people.They help pay for the farm. And that’s about it.And they knowingly do it. Well, unfortunately, child labor, it’s terrible, but it exists throughout the world in many, many places. And if we take this as the norm, particularly when Congress is now working in the area, that will mean throughout the world this is the norm. And I don’t know, but I have concern that treating this allegation, the six that you make here, as aiding and abetting falling within that term for purposes of this statute, if other nations do the same, and we do the same, could have very, very significant effects. I’m just saying I’m worried about that.

Justice Alito: So, after 15 years, is it too much to ask that you allege specifically that the — the defendants involved — the defendants who are before us here specifically knew that forced child labor was being used on the farms or farm cooperatives with which they did business? Is that too much to ask?

 

To be fair, Nestle and Cargill have worked to remedy these issues. Nestle’s 2019 Shared Values Report tracks its commitments to individuals and families, communities, and the planet to the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Among other things, the report highlights Nestle’s work to reduce human rights abuses and links to its December 2019 report on child labor and cocoa farms. The company touts its progress but admits it has a long way to go. Cargill has a separate Cocoa Sustainability Progress Report, which describes its 2012 Cargill Cocoa Promise for capacity building and a more transparent supply chain. But is it enough?

In any event, we won’t know what the Court decides until Spring. In the meantime, despite the best efforts of the companies, almost two million children still work in the cocoa harvesting business and most aren’t kidnapped anymore. They need the work. The local governments have taken notice in part due to the terrible publicity from the media. Allegedly, however, Hershey and Mars are trying to avoid the $400 a ton premium that the West African governments are levying to provide more funding for the farmers. The companies deny these allegations. But there’s now a chocolate war. This means your chocolate may get more expensive, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

How will this all shake out? There’s a chance that the Court could find for the Respondents. More likely, though advocates will focus on convincing Congress to expand the Trafficking Victims Protection Act to include corporations. Some NGOs are already talking about increasing consumer awareness and spurring boycotts. Perhaps, advocates will put pressure on the Biden administration to ban the import on chocolate harvested with child labor, similar to the ban on some products produced by Uighurs in China.I expect that there will be a lot of lobbying at the state and federal level to deal with the larger issue of whether corporations that have some of the rights of natural persons should also have the responsibilities. Boards and companies should get prepared. In the meantime, do you plan to give up chocolate?

I am delighted to announce that Professor Lécia Vicente from LSU Law is joining us as a guest blogger at the BLPB this month. Her posts will be on Sundays through the end of the month.  You can find her work on SSRN here.

Professor Vicente teaches Business Associations, a Comparative Corporate Law Seminar, the Louisiana Law of Obligations, and Western Legal Traditions (a comparative and legal methodology course). Her recent scholarship focuses on the several dimensions of property rights within the firm’s contractual framework. She is also expanding her research to include law and development as a result of her consultancy work with developing countries and various other professional engagements, including her roles as:

  • a delegate to the 74th Session of the United Nations General Assembly in 2019;
  • the Head of Delegation of the African Union at the United Nations’ High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development under the auspices of the United Nations Economic and Social Council in 2016; and
  • an advisor of the African Union at the United Nations Sustainable Development Summit for the adoption of the Post-2015 development agenda.

Professor Vicente holds an LL.M. in Comparative, European and International Laws and a Ph.D. from the European University Institute, Florence, Italy.  Her undergraduate degree was earned at the Faculty of Law, Catholic University of Portugal.  She beings unique interdisciplinary perspectives to her scholarship and teaching–and now to our blog!  Please join me in welcoming her to our pandemic “virtual pod” as she posts over the next few weeks.

Sarah Haan recently posted a new detailed and meticulously documented draft article that we’ll likely be talking about for years to come.  In it, she presents a forgotten history of an era when women came to outnumber men as the stockholders of public corporations.  At the time, many corporations disclosed the gender breakdowns for their stockholders.  Early on, the Wall Street Journal covered the rise of women as shareholders, revealing that more women than men held stock in American Express, Western Union, and Eastman Kodak as of 1916.  Women bought stock at a robust clip for years afterward as well and gained clear per capita majorities at many public companies.

Haan points out that women likely sought stock ownership and participation earnestly because it allowed them a much greater measure of equality than the labor market.  Each share received the same dividend, regardless of the owner’s gender.  In contrast, the labor markets reduced (and continue to reduce) women’s returns.

Women began to outnumber men as shareholders around the time Berle and Means shaped the course of corporate law and theory with their distinction between dispersed, uninformed, and passive shareholders and active management.  Haan explains that modern scholars have largely forgotten that this was a gendered distinction.  “Passive” women were shareholders while “active” men served as managers.  

As corporate law swallowed this distinction, it shaped corporate law’s development.  Many corporate law rules now complicate shareholder participation and defer to market-based solutions over empowering shareholder perspectives.  (This is a subject Haan has explored in another article.). Some early corporate law scholars such as William W. Cook had first pushed for vigorous roles for shareholders in corporate governance.  Yet these theorists changed their minds about shareholder participation as women began to hold stock, vote, and affect corporate affairs. 

But the reality is far more complex.  These dispersed shareholders were somewhat active and did actively press for women to receive board seats at companies where women owned a majority of the stock.  Although they were, on occasion, successful when men needed to ally with them in fights for control, women failed to win equality in the boardroom with men continuing to dominate board positions.  This continues today, with the NASDAQ pushing its listed companies to have at least two board members who are not white, heterosexual men.

Early reaction to the draft has been significant and may shift how some present the early development of large public corporations.

 

After reading it, it seems inescapable that a great bulk of corporate scholarship has missed the gendered history and the gender politics behind the development of modern corporate law.  The paper also puts the rise of institutional shareholders into a different, gendered perspective.  The development had the effect of shifting voting power from dispersed women and concentrating it in the hands of a small number of predominantly male asset managers.  

As Haan explained, the article opens a door to more conversations “about gender, power, and the evolution of corporate law.”  

Via Forbes:

The world lost an intellectual giant this week when the economist Walter E. Williams passed away. Williams was the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics at George Mason University, an economist’s economist, a scholar’s scholar, and an unparalleled communicator of economic wisdom and ideas. He loved liberty, defended it eloquently, and went to great lengths to show how good intentions don’t readily translate into good outcomes.

Thomas Sowell, as quoted by his Twitter tribute account:

There was a time when the black conservative community would have consisted of me and Walter Williams. I know Walter used to say the two of us should never fly on the same plane otherwise the whole movement will disappear if the plane goes down. 

But see:

Here are some prominent Conservative Black Intellectuals who have written extensively on race/ethnic relations. Many have argued, with evidence, that affirmative action does not largely help its intended beneficiaries, and that statistical disparities do not imply discrimination[: Thomas Sowell, Walter E. Williams, Shelby Steele, Jason Riley, Candace Owens, Clarence Thomas, Ben Carson, John McWhorter, Larry Elder, Star Parker.] Will any of their books and articles be included in the enhanced efforts to study and reduce “racial injustice?” Probably not.

Dominic Pino:

Williams was an Army veteran, a Ph.D. economist published in numerous peer-reviewed journals, an author of 11 books, a syndicated columnist whose work appeared in newspapers across the country, a substitute radio host whose voice was heard by millions, a subject of two documentaries, a former chair of the Mason Economics department and a professor at Mason since 1980….

As Williams persisted well beyond retirement age, his passion for economics undimmed, he was the kind of man that made you say, “He’s going to teach until the day he dies.” On Dec. 1, he taught his last class of ECON 811 to complete the semester, ending the 7:20-10:00 p.m. block around 30 minutes early, as was typical. Fewer than 12 hours later, he died, aged 84. R.I.P.

Walter Williams’s last syndicated weekly newspaper column:

Several years ago, Project Baltimore began an investigation of Baltimore’s school system. What they found was an utter disgrace. In 19 of Baltimore’s 39 high schools, out of 3,804 students, only 14 of them, or less than 1%, were proficient in math. In 13 of Baltimore’s high schools, not a single student scored proficient in math. In five Baltimore City high schools, not a single student scored proficient in math or reading. Despite these academic deficiencies, about 70% of the students graduate and are conferred a high school diploma — a fraudulent high school diploma.

The Detroit Public Schools Community District scored the lowest in the nation compared to 26 other urban districts for reading and mathematics at the fourth- and eighth-grade levels. A recent video captures some of this miseducation in Milwaukee high schools: In two city high schools, only one student tested proficient in math and none are proficient in English. Yet, the schools spent a full week learning about “systemic racism” and “Black Lives Matter activism.” ….

Should we blame this education tragedy on racial discrimination or claim that it is a legacy of slavery? Dr. Thomas Sowell’s research in “Education: Assumptions Versus History” documents academic excellence at Baltimore’s Frederick Douglass High School and others.

And:

Some say that educational expenditures explain the gap, but is that true? Look at educational per pupil expenditures: Baltimore city ranks fifth in the U.S. for per pupil spending at $15,793. The Detroit Public Schools Community District spends more per student than all but eight of the nation’s 100 largest school districts, or $14,259…. There appears to be little relationship between educational expenditures and academic achievement.

 

Over the summer, I had the good fortune of hearing Professor Christina Parajon Skinner present her important and timely work on Central Banks and Climate Change.  I was thrilled to see that this article was recently posted to SSRN (here) and I’m reading it now!  Here’s the abstract:

Central banks are increasingly called upon to address climate change. Proposals for central bank action on climate change range from programs of “green” quantitative easing, to increases in risk-based capital requirements to deter banks from lending to climate-unfriendly business. Politicians and academics alike have urged climate risk as both macroeconomic and financial stability risk. Nevertheless, in the U.S., the Federal Reserve has been measured in its response to climate change.

This article considers the scope of the Fed’s policy and legal authority to address climate change. Drawing on insights from corporate finance and macroeconomics, the article first considers how climate risk presents risks that are policy problems for the Fed. From that policy basis, the article constructs a legal framework — stitching together a variety of Fed laws, regulations, and precedents of practice — to discern where the Fed can legitimately move forward on climate change and the areas that, at present, sit outside the Fed’s legal remit.

The article concludes that the Fed’s authority to address climate change is strongest in a responsive posture — that is, to respond to climate-related economic shocks and to tailor supervision to better account for encroaching operational risks and asset-quality deterioration. However, the Fed lacks a solid legal basis for seeking to proactively make the financial system greener. Ultimately, the article prompts some reflection on the ideal role of the Fed vis-à-vis the fiscal authority of the Treasury, the political actors in Congress, and the Executive.   

In September of 2015, I did a Westlaw search, which returned 4575 cases referring to a “limited liability corporation,” rather than the proper “limited liability company” or LLC.   That search followed one that I had done on May 2011, and the 2015 search showed a jump of 1802 new cases.  Today’s search returned 5,211 such cases, an increase of 636 cases in five and a half years. That’s still more than 100 cases per year, but it’s a reduction of about half the rate we were seeing between 2011 and 2015.  (I concede this is not especially scientific, but it’s still instructive.) 

It appears, then, that we’re making progress, but two steps forward, one step back. Even Jeopardy — Jeopardy! — recently got this wrong.  I thank Professor Samantha Prince at Penn State Dickinson Law for bringing this to my attention, upsetting as it is.   

In addition, a recent tax court opinion followed suit: “All limited liability corporations, or LLCs, mentioned in this opinion are entities treated as partnerships for federal tax purposes.” Padda v. Comm’r of Internal Revenue, T.C.M. (RIA) 2020-154, at n.3 (T.C. 2020) (emphasis added).  

So, there’s clearly a lot of work left to do, but I remain hopeful that we’re trending in the right direction. LLCs are still not corporations, and we need to keep reminding folks. Stay vigilant, good people!