I don’t know if it’s the time of year or if I am just a little off, but I am generally grumpy today. So, I am going to vent a bit.  

First, a regular irritation that is no shock to regular readers is the “limited liability corporation.” I probably should have stopped the Westlaw alert for that terms, which comes through nearly every single day with multiple cases and news items.  A new case from the U.S. District Court in Kansas, Pipeline Prods., Inc. v. Horsepower Entm’t, No. CV 15-4890-KHV, 2017 WL 698504, at *1 (D. Kan. Feb. 22, 2017), is typical.  The court states: 

Pipeline Productions, Inc. is a Kansas corporation with its principal place of business in Lawrence, Kansas. Backwood Enterprises, LLC is an Arkansas limited liability corporation with its principal place of business in Lawrence, Kansas. . . . 

The Madison Companies, LLC is a Delaware limited liability company with its principal place of business in Greenwood Village, Colorado. Horsepower Entertainment, a Delaware limited liability company, is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Madison with its principal place of business in Greenwood Village, Colorado.

Irritation 1: Arkansas does not have an entity called a “limited liability corporation.” Arkansas, as is typical, has a corporation entity and a limited liability company entity.  They are different.  The fact that the court gets the entity right for the two Delaware LLCs suggests to me that the filings from Backwood Enterprises, LLC, is the likely source of the language.  Still, courts should be getting this right.  (It won’t shock me if my obsession with this is irritating more than one reader. C’est la vie.) 

Irritation 2: The case also references a “wholly-owned subsidiary.”  This is a common reference, but “wholly owned” does not need a hyphen when used a compound adjective.  This source cites the one I tend to follow, from my public relations days: 

When a compound modifier–two or more words that express a single concept–precedes a noun, use hyphens to link all the words in the compound except the adverb very and all adverbs that end in -ly. —AP Stylebook, 2013 edition. Boldface added.

Spot on.  The site also provides a good hint:

*Warning: Not every word that ends in -ly is an adverb. Watch out for nouns like family and supply, and adjectives like only. For example, “family-oriented websites”; supply-side economics”; “only-begotten son.”

Since Americans (in particular) love threes, I will follow the Rule of 3s, and add one more. 

Irritation 3: The word “articulate.”  Yeah, this is kind of random, but I am done with that word. I cannot come up with a time when another word won’t serve as a good substitute, and the loaded way in which the term has evolved means it should be skipped.  See, e.g., here.  This article provides more good background and quotes Condoleezza Rice’s former communications counselor, Anna Perez: 

The word perfectly conveys, to quote George Bush, the soft bigotry of low expectations. It literally comes down to that. When people say it, what they are really saying is that someone is articulate … for a black person.

Before anyone wants to get mad at me for being too “PC,” calm down.  I am not saying you can’t say it. I am saying you will irritate me if you do.  And if you say it to or about an African-American person, you probably are showing the bias Ms. Perez described. And, yeah, I have heard it said about and to African-Americans in my presence, and it’s usually pretty clear the bias is there.  It’s an irritation to me, and it’s demeaning, even though I think it is, from time to time, well intentioned, if ignorant.  Time to move forward.  What was once “progressive thinking” is not anymore.  Try to catch up if you’re really trying to be nice.

I know, everyone has things that irritate them.  It’s good to vent now and again. No person attacks or freak outs. Just a good, old-fashioned vent.  Happy Mardi Gras.  

 

Later this week, I will head to Indiana to present at and attend a social enterprise law conference at The Law School at the University of Notre Dame.  The conference includes presentations by participating authors in the forthcoming Cambridge Handbook of Social Enterprise Law, edited by Ben Means and Joe Yockey.  The range of presentations/chapters is impressive.  Fellow BLPB editors Haskell Murray and Anne Tucker also are conference presenters and book contributors.

Interestingly (at least for me), my chapter relates to Haskell’s post from last Friday.  The title of my chapter is “Financing Social Enterprise: Is the Crowd the Answer?”  Set forth below is the précis I submitted for distribution to the conference participants.

Crowdfunding is an open call for financial backing: the solicitation of funding from, and the provision of funding by, an undifferentiated, unrestricted mass of individuals (the “crowd”), commonly over the Internet. Crowdfunding in its various forms (e.g., donative, reward, presale, and securities crowdfunding) may implicate many different areas of law and intersects in the business setting with choice of entity as well as business finance (comprising funding, restructuring, and investment exit considerations, including mergers and acquisitions). In operation, crowdfunding uses technology to transform traditional fundraising processes by, among other things, increasing the base of potential funders for a business or project. The crowdfunding movement—if we can label it as such—has principally been a populist adventure in which the public at large has clamored for participation rights in markets from which they had been largely excluded.

Similarly, the current popularity of social enterprise, including the movement toward benefit corporations and the legislative adoption of other social enterprise business entities, also stems from populist roots. By focusing on a double or triple bottom line—serving social or environmental objectives as well as shareholder financial wealth—social enterprises represent a distinct approach to organizing and conducting business operations. Reacting to a perceived gap in the markets for business forms, charters, and tax benefits, social enterprise (and, in particular, benefit corporations) offer venturers business formation and operation alternatives not available in a market environment oriented narrowly around the maximization or absence of the private inurement of financial value to business owners, principals, or employees.

Perhaps it is unsurprising then, that social enterprise has been relatively quick to engage crowdfunding as a means of financing new and ongoing ventures. In addition, early data in the United States for offerings conducted under Regulation CF (promulgated under the CROWDFUND Act, Title III of the JOBS Act) indicates a relatively high incidence of securities crowdfunding by social enterprise firms. The common account of crowdfunding and social enterprise as grassroots movements striking out against structures deemed to be elitist or exclusive may underlie the use of crowdfunding by social enterprise firms in funding their operations.

Yet, social enterprise’s early-adopter status and general significance in the crowdfunding realm is understudied and undertheorized to date. This chapter offers information that aims to address in part that deficit in the literature by illuminating and commenting on the history, present experience, and future prospects of financing social enterprise through crowdfunding—especially securities crowdfunding. The chapter has a modest objective: to make salient observations about crowdfunding social enterprise initiatives the based on doctrine, policy, theory, and practice.

Specifically, to achieve this objective, the chapter begins by briefly tracing the populist-oriented foundations of the current manifestations of crowdfunding and social enterprise. Next, the chapter addresses the financing of social enterprise through crowdfunding, focusing on the relatively recent advent of securities crowdfunding (including specifically the May 2016 introduction of offerings under Regulation CF in the United States). The remainder of the chapter reflects on these foundational matters by contextualizing crowdfunded social enterprise as a part of the overall market for social enterprise finance and making related observations about litigation risk and possible impacts of securities crowdfunding on social enterprise (and vice versa).

Please let me know if you have thoughts on any of the matters I am covering in my chapter or resources to recommend in finishing writing the chapter that I may not have found.  I seem to find new articles that touch on the subject of the chapter every week.  I will have more to say on my chapter and the other chapters of the Handbook after the conference and as the book proceeds toward publication.  

I have updated my business law professor jobs list here. 

While many of the schools on this list, which was originally posted this past summer, have likely now filled those positions, there are a few new postions posted in the last month or so.

Those new position postings include two in law schools: NYU (a law & social enterprise fellowship) and Victoria University (New Zealand). And five new postings are legal studies positions in business schools: Appalachian State University, Minnesota State University, Morgan State University, St. Peter’s University, and Warner University.

It’s Mardi Gras season here in NOLA, so I’m afraid I’ve been a little distracted.  It’s hard to concentrate when this is what’s going on a block away ….

Muses2

Muses1

Muses3

So, for this Saturday, I offer you a game: The Unicorn Startup Simulator.  The goal is to reach a billion dollar valuation while keeping your employees happy – it took me a few tries, but I managed it.   Good luck!

 

The following comes to us from Professor Stephen Diamond, Santa Clara University School of Law.

The Santa Clara University School of Law, the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University, the University of Washington School of Law, the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, the Rutgers Center for Corporate Law and Governance and the Business and Human Rights Journal announce the Third Business and Human Rights Scholars Conference, to be held September 15-16, 2017 at Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, California. Conference participants will present and discuss scholarship at the intersection of business and human rights issues. Upon request, participants’ papers may be considered for publication in the Business and Human Rights Journal (BHRJ), published by Cambridge University Press.

The Conference is interdisciplinary: scholars from all disciplines are invited to apply, including law, business, human rights, and global affairs. The papers must be unpublished at the time of presentation. Each participant will present his/her own paper and be asked to comment on at least one other paper during the workshop. Participants will be expected to have read other papers and to participate actively in discussion and analysis of the various works in progress.

To apply, please submit an abstract of no more than 250 words to bhrconf@gmail.com with the subject line “Business & Human Rights Conference Proposal.” Please include your name, affiliation, contact information, and curriculum vitae. The deadline for submission is March 15, 2017. We will begin reviewing submissions on a rolling basis on March 1, 2017. Scholars whose submissions are selected for the symposium will be notified no later than April 15, 2017. Final papers will be due August 25, 2017.

One of the many questions surrounding benefit corporations is whether their choice of legal entity form will scare away investors.

As previously reported, we now have our first publicly traded benefit corporation. And in this week’s news certified B corp and benefit corporation Data.world announced a 18.7 million dollar raise. This raise ranks in the top-ten largest raises by a benefit corporation, according to the information I have seen on benefit corporations. I compiled the publicly available information I was able to uncover on social enterprise raises (including by benefit corporations) in a forthcoming symposium article for the Seattle University Law Review. It is quite possible that there are raises that have been kept quiet and that I have not seen. This Data.world news was announced days after final edits and will not be in my article.

As is often the case in social enterprise news, this news could be seen as encouraging or discouraging for supporters of the benefit corporation form.

On one hand, this is a fairly sizeable raise and a bit of evidence that not all serious investors are scared away by a legal form that mandates a general public benefit purpose.

On the other hand, the mere fact that a raise of under $20 million dollars is big news in the benefit corporation world (commanding its own announcement e-mail from benefit corporation proponent organization B Lab) shows that the benefit corporation form has yet to go mainstream. A raise under $20 million dollars hardly qualifies as news in the traditional financial world. And, as mentioned, to date, there have only been a handful of raises of this size for companies using the social enterprise forms.

Still, I think it is fair to say that benefit corporations have already come further than harsh critics originally thought was possible. The benefit corporation form still needs to evolve significantly, in my opinion, but the form is still growing and the positive news for the form has not yet stopped.  

A few weeks ago I blogged about the spate of boycotts and buycotts responding to President Trump’s travel ban. Since that time, the #grabyourwallet campaign has taken credit for a number of stores dropping Ivanka Trump’s merchandise. In response, celebrities and others flocked to Nordstrom after criticism by the President’s surrogates about the retailer’s decision to drop the products, even though Nordstrom cited falling sales. Within days, news outlets reported that her perfume was a top seller on Amazon, and that many reviewers indicated that they had bought the product to show support for the President. 

Yesterday, NPR reported that the United Auto Workers will revive its 1980s Buy American campaign, which will not only promote American-made products but will also encourage the boycott of cars made by American companies overseas. I’ve argued in the past that boycotts don’t work, and the NPR story provided some support from a professor who noted, “these campaigns, even with catchy song lyrics, almost never work. For instance, garment work essentially left the U.S. almost completely a few years after [the look for the union label ad] ran, and after the last UAW campaign, the American car companies continued to lose market share.” The New York Times has also examined whether these boycotts have long term effect.

The back and forth between boycotts and buycotts related to the President’s family may prove conventional wisdom wrong. It may be time for an empirical study (not by me) of when and how the boycott/boycott movement can sustain itself.

Christopher Bruner has posted Center-Left Politics and Corporate Governance: What Is the ‘Progressive’ Agenda? on SSRN. You can download the paper here.  Here is the abstract:

For as long as corporations have existed, debates have persisted among scholars, judges, and policymakers regarding how best to describe their form and function as a positive matter, and how best to organize relations among their various stakeholders as a normative matter. This is hardly surprising given the economic and political stakes involved with control over vast and growing “corporate” resources, and it has become commonplace to speak of various approaches to corporate law in decidedly political terms. In particular, on the fundamental normative issue of the aims to which corporate decision-making ought to be directed, shareholder-centric conceptions of the corporation have long been described as politically right-leaning while stakeholder-oriented conceptions have conversely been described as politically left-leaning. When the frame of reference for this normative debate shifts away from state corporate law, however, a curious reversal occurs. Notably, when the debate shifts to federal political and judicial contexts, one often finds actors associated with the political left championing expansion of shareholders’ corporate governance powers, and those associated with the political right advancing more stakeholder-centric conceptions of the corporation.

The aim of this article is to explain this disconnect and explore its implications for the development of U.S. corporate governance, with particular reference to the varied and evolving corporate governance views of the political left – the side of the spectrum where, I argue, the more dramatic and illuminating shifts have occurred over recent decades, and where the state/federal divide is more difficult to explain. A widespread and fundamental reorientation of the Democratic Party toward decidedly centrist national politics fundamentally altered the role of corporate governance and related issues in the project of assembling a competitive coalition capable of appealing to working- and middle-class voters. Grappling with the legal, regulatory, and institutional frameworks – as well as the economic and cultural trends – that conditioned and incentivized this shift will prove critical to understanding the state/federal divide regarding what the “progressive” corporate governance agenda ought to be and how the situation might change as the Democratic Party formulates responses to the November 2016 election.

I begin with a brief terminological discussion, examining how various labels associated with the political left tend to be employed in relevant contexts, as well as varying ways of defining the field of “corporate governance” itself. I then provide an overview of “progressive” thinking about corporate governance in the context of state corporate law, contrasting those views with the very different perspectives associated with center-left political actors at the federal level.

Based on this descriptive account, I then examine various legal, regulatory, and institutional frameworks, as well as important economic and cultural trends, that have played consequential roles in prompting and/or exacerbating the state/federal divide. These include fundamental distinctions between state corporate law and federal securities regulation; the differing postures of lawmakers in Delaware and Washington, DC; the rise of institutional investors; the evolution of organized labor interests; certain unintended consequences of extra-corporate regulation; and the Democratic Party’s sharp rightward shift since the late 1980s. The article closes with a brief discussion of the prospects for state/federal convergence, concluding that the U.S. corporate governance system will likely remain theoretically incoherent for the foreseeable future due to the extraordinary range of relevant actors and the fundamentally divergent forces at work in the very different legal and political settings they inhabit.

Here is a rundown of recent business news headlines:

The Yahoo/Verizon deal takes a $350M haircut to compensate for Yahoo data security breaches in 2013 and 2014.

The Snapchat parent company, SNAP, scheduled blockbuster IPO ($20-23B) is plagued with news that it lost  $514.6 million in 2016, there are questions about the sustainability of its user base, and, for the governance folks out there, there is NO VOTING STOCK being offered.

In what is being called a “whopper” of a deal, Restaurant Brands, the owner of Burger King and Tim Hortons, announced earlier this week a deal to acquire Popeye’s Louisiana Kitchen, the fried chicken restaurant chain, for $1.8 billion in cash. 

Kraft withdrew its $143B takeover offer for Unilever less than 48 hours after the announcement amid political concerns over the merger.  While Unilever evaluates its next steps, Kraft is perhaps feeling the effects of its controversial takeover of Britain’s beloved Cadbury. 

A final item to note, for me personally, is that today is my last regular contribution to the Business Law Professor Blog. I will remain as a contributing editor, but will miss the ritual of a weekly post–a habit now nearly 4 years in the making.  Thanks to all of the readers and other editors who gave me great incentive to learn new information each week, think critically, connect with teaching, and generally feel a part of a vibrant and smart community of folks with similar interests. 

With gratitude,

Anne Tucker