Stoll Keenon Ogden PLLC’s Corporate Transparency Act (“CTA”) guidance, about which I posted back in June, was recently updated.  You can find the update here.  Hat tip to friend-of-the-BLPB Tom Rutledge from Stoll Keenon Odgen on this development. 

I know many are struggling to interpret and apply the CTA.  I appreciate the work firms and individual lawyers are undertaking to help enlighten that effort.  Please feel free to send me links to guidance you may have seen that you believe to be particularly useful.

Widener Law Commonwealth seeks entry-level or pre-tenure lateral faculty members to fill three or more tenure track positions starting in the 2025-2026 academic year. We have specific needs in our year-long Contracts and Property courses.  As to the rest of the teaching package, we have flexibility, but we have particular needs in the areas of Legal Methods, Administrative Law, Commercial Law, Environmental Law, and Intellectual Property.  
 
Established in 1989, Widener Law Commonwealth is an independently accredited law school within Widener University.  Located in Harrisburg, PA, the law school’s location in the capital of Pennsylvania provides impactful experiences for both our faculty and students.  
 
WLC is a dynamic community of teachers and scholars.  We pride ourselves on our dedication to our students, our engagement with teaching, and our scholarly impact.  Many of our scholars are actively engaged in law reform efforts at both the state and federal level.
 
The law school is committed to fostering an environment in which faculty, staff, and students from a variety of backgrounds, cultures, and personal experiences are welcomed and can thrive. Faculty and staff are active participants in our work to enhance diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging.  We welcome applications from members of historically underrepresented groups.
 
We are looking for candidates with strong academic backgrounds, commitment to excellence in teaching, and demonstrated potential to be productive scholars.  Candidates must possess at least a JD degree or its equivalent.  
 
Application can be submitted by submitting a cover letter, CV, and list of three references to the appointments committee at clsappointments@wumail.onmicrosoft.com.  Please contact Professor Robyn Meadows, Appointments Committee Chair (rlmeadows@widener.edu), with any questions.
The University of Missouri School of Law invites applications for multiple tenure-track or tenured positions. We are seeking candidates with a strong commitment to scholarship, teaching, and public service; a strong academic record; and either legal practice experience or advanced academic training. A J.D. or Ph.D. in a related field is required.
 
Our hiring needs are flexible, and we invite candidates in any subject matter to apply. We are especially interested in applicants planning to teach Property, Civil Procedure, Constitutional Law, Environmental Law, and corporate law topics.
 
Lateral candidates may be considered for hiring under Mizzou Forward. Mizzou Forward is a transformational effort to strengthen research innovation and improve the lives of people around the world. The initiative is an investment by the University of Missouri to hire up to 150 world-class faculty over the next several years. A successful Mizzou Forward candidate is a research leader with a robust publication and citation record, national awards and/or membership in national academies and external research funding or publication of at least one book. Candidates will also be committed to student success and university service. 
 
The University of Missouri-Columbia is the flagship campus of the University of Missouri system and is one of only 33 public universities in the country belonging to the Association of American Universities, a group of elite research universities. As both a research and land grant university, we have extraordinary opportunities for interdisciplinary interaction. In addition, Columbia is a wonderful college town halfway between St. Louis and Kansas City that is regularly ranked as one of the most livable cities in the country.
 
Application Procedure: Review of applications will begin August 15, 2024 and continue until the position is filled. To apply, please submit a cover letter, CV, and references for job ID 52095 at hr.missouri.edu/job-openings. Inquiries should be directed to Associate Dean Sandra Sperino at sandra.sperino@missouri.edu or 573-882-1799.
 
Additional information about the School of Law is available at www.law.missouri.edu. The University of Missouri is an equal opportunity/ADA institution. The University of Missouri is fully committed to achieving the goal of an inclusive academic community of faculty, staff and students. We seek individuals who are committed to this goal and our core campus values of respect, responsibility, discovery and excellence. To request ADA accommodations, please call the Disability Inclusion and ADA Compliance Manager at 573-884-7278.

StetsonLawLogoSTETSON UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF LAW seeks to fill four entry-level or lateral tenure-track positions.  Our hiring needs will focus on candidates willing and eager to extend our existing institutional strengths and help us build into new areas of excellence. We specifically seek candidates with expertise in the areas of legal research and writing, public and private international law, transactional and corporate law, advocacy, elder law, professional responsibility, data privacy, cybersecurity, and compliance. We also seek candidates who will build upon our teaching depth in all our first-year courses.

Stetson Law was Florida’s first law school, founded in 1900.  Stetson Law has a national reputation for its advocacy program, ranked #1 in the nation, and its legal writing program, ranked #3 in the nation, by U.S. News and World Report.  It also boasts renowned centers, institutes, and clinics in various fields, such as advocacy, elder law, higher education, biodiversity and the environment, legal communication, Caribbean law, and veterans law. 

Stetson Law is part of a private university, which includes a College of Arts and Sciences, a School of Music, and a School of Business Administration, the latter of which supports the law school’s joint JD/MBA program.  Stetson nurtures a vibrant intellectual community, situated on a beautiful campus, just minutes from Florida’s Gulf Coast, in the Tampa Bay area, the nation’s 17th largest metro area. We encourage potential applicants to visit our website at https://www.stetson.edu/portal/law/ to learn more about our school, our community, and our programs. 

Stetson encourages applications from women, persons of color, LGBTQ+ candidates, and others who will contribute to our stimulating and diverse cultural and intellectual environment. Stetson’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy is available at: https://www.stetson.edu/law/career/nondiscrimination-policy-for-employers.php.

Applicants should email a cover letter that explains your teaching and scholarly interests, attaching a current curriculum vitae and contact information for at least three professional references.  Please send the email to Professors Rebecca Morgan and Stacey-Rae Simcox at facultyappointments@law.stetson.edu.  You may also apply by paper mail to Professors Morgan and Simcox, Stetson University College of Law, 1401 61st Street South, Gulfport, FL 33707.  The Faculty Appointments Committee will continue to review applications until positions are filled. 

The Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University invites applications for up to three entry-level or junior tenure-track or newly-tenured faculty members, to begin in Fall 2025. We seek candidates with a strong record of or potential for significant scholarship and commitment to excellence in teaching who will bring diverse experiences and perspectives to enrich our law school community. We seek candidates across all subject areas, but have particular interest in fulfilling curricular needs in Constitutional Law, Criminal Law, Property, Environmental Law, and Intellectual Property.

Located on Long Island, less than thirty miles from midtown Manhattan, Hofstra Law is known as an innovator in legal education, from being one of the first schools to implement clinical education as a means of graduating practice-ready lawyers to recent advancements in experiential learning and interdisciplinary programming.  Hofstra’s strong national reputation is the product of a demonstrated commitment to attracting and supporting talented and productive faculty through summer research grants, sustained teaching load reductions, and other resources for both teaching and research initiatives. 

Applications should be submitted electronically at this link on the Hofstra portal and include the following: 

• A letter of application
• CV
• Scholarly agenda
• Proposed job talk topic or paper

Questions may be directed to Alafair Burke and Dan Greenwood, Co-Chairs of the Faculty Appointments Committee, at Alafair.S.Burke@hofstra.edu and Daniel.Greenwood@hofstra.edu, respectively.

This week I just direct your attention to various items.

First, the NYSE recently proposed a rule change that would exempt closed end funds from the requirement of holding annual shareholder meetings.  Closed-end funds are frequently the subject of activist attacks – here I blogged about a Second Circuit case that struck down a takeover defense measure in a Nuveen fund – so a rule change here would be, you know, significant.  Anyway, here is the link to the comments the SEC has received, and the one I found particularly useful, was by the Working Group on Market Efficiency and Investor Protection in Closed-End Funds, which is a collection of law and business professors.

Second, Project 2025 is all in the news these days as a preview of what a second Trump administration might look like, and it turns out, there are proposals for changes to the federal securities laws.

We have the usual conservative stuff, like, get rid of disclosure requirements pertaining to “social, ideological, political, or ‘human capital’ information that is not material to investors’ financial, economic, or pecuniary risks or returns.”  Obviously, the issue here, unaddressed in the document, is that most commenters would agree that only financially material information should be required; the disagreement is over what that means.  And that becomes very obvious in the document, because it singles out the climate change disclosure rules as expensive and therefore ripe for repeal, but it never argues that they require disclosure of immaterial information (though to be fair, the document is full of proposals to repeal climate change-related regulation, and I haven’t read all of it; maybe somewhere else there’s an argument that climate change is financially immaterial).

Anyway, there’s also a proposal that three SEC commissioners be permitted to override the Chair with respect to placing items on the agenda, and pace Jarkesy, they’d allow defendants to choose whether their cases are heard in federal court or administrative courts (which incidentally seems similar to a proposal by Christopher Walker and David Zaring, though their paper is not cited). 

Digital assets would be commodities unless the holder has a contractual right to a share of earnings, or, in the case of liquidation, a claim on the assets.

They’d also simplify firm categories to public, private, and small (based on public float or – interestingly, beneficial owners rather than street name owners), and remove accreditation requirements.  Which as I understand it would functionally mean that companies could choose whether to file registration statements or not.  Intriguingly, however, they do propose to:

Abolish Rule 144 and other regulations that restrict securities resales and instead require a company that has sold securities to provide sufficient current information to the market to permit reasonable investment decisions and secondary sales.

I’m not sure how that proposal interacts with the earlier proposal to segment the market cleanly into public, private, and small firms, but there you go. 

Third, a historian at the University of Delaware, Professor Dael Norwood, is researching Delaware’s history of permitting corporations to vote in local elections; he’s blogged about his findings here and here.

And finally, here is a story about how the new trend of retail stores locking up products is backfiring, because it makes it harder for customers to actually, you know, buy stuff.  What intrigues me is how it seems as though stores are making these decisions based more on vibes than actual data, and rejecting the obvious solutions like hiring more staff to police the aisles (or even just to open the cabinets).  Efficient markets are supposed to force corporate managers to make more reasoned choices, no?  But apparently the heuristic “employees are an expense, do everything but hire people” is very tough to combat.  Even at companies like Walmart, which adopt pay for performance metrics.

ASSISTANT/ASSOCIATE/PROFESSOR OF LAW
 
ALBANY LAW SCHOOL, in New York’s Capital City, invites applications from entry-level and lateral candidates for multiple faculty positions beginning in July 2025. We are committed to the diversity of our student body and faculty. We seek candidates with experience in teaching and mentoring students from groups historically excluded from higher education and the legal profession and whose work advances critical thinking on questions of importance to society. We welcome applications from qualified candidates across all areas and specializations, from core first-year classes to specialty upper-level courses. In addition, we have particular interest in candidates with expertise in the following primary areas: business law (including contracts, corporate, commercial and transactional law courses); clinic (including the Director of the Immigration Law Clinic and Director of a new Housing Clinic); Introduction to Lawyering. Secondary areas include: administrative law, legislation, regulation, tax, law & technology, intellectual property, criminal law, evidence, constitutional law and environmental/energy law.
As part of our unitary tenure system, tenure-track opportunities are available across all positions. In addition, Albany Law School is poised to begin new programming that will increase online opportunities for our students and our faculty. Applicants should express their potential interest in teaching in an online format, although an applicant’s preference with respect to teaching format will not impact their candidacy.

Qualifications
We seek candidates with a strong academic record, capacity for scholarly merit, and whose work encourages innovative and critical thinking. Applicants must hold a J.D. degree or the equivalent and demonstrate a commitment to teaching excellence. Appointment rank will be determined commensurate with the candidate’s qualifications and experience.

Application Instructions
For full consideration, applicants should apply by September 15, 2024, but we recommend that you submit your materials as soon as possible. To apply, please submit a cover letter, curriculum vitae, research agenda, writing sample, diversity statement, and the contact information for at least three references. Applicants seeking a lateral appointment are encouraged to apply as soon as possible and will be considered on a rolling basis. For more information about these opportunities, please contact Professor Jennifer Martin, Recruitment Committee Chair, at jmart@albanylaw.edu. All applications must be submitted on our employment webpage.

 
Compensation
The estimated salary range for this position is $90,000-$160,000 per year, plus comprehensive benefits package. Salary will be based on the rank and tenure status of appointment offered, the successful candidate’s relevant experience, knowledge, skills and abilities, and in consideration of internal equity.
 
ABOUT ALBANY LAW SCHOOL: Established in 1851, ALBANY LAW SCHOOL is the oldest independent law school in the nation and the oldest law school in New York State. Our faculty are productive, collaborative, and growth oriented. We are committed to admitting and retaining a student body that represents the diversity of the society in which we live. Our students enter the law school from undergraduate institutions, other graduate studies, industry, and often as part of a career progression or change. Our graduates consistently secure employment and career advancement across several areas of practice, including government service, Big Law, and public interest. Our most recent graduating class performed over 52,176 hours of pro bono and public service work during their law school careers.
Albany Law School’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion means that our community does not discriminate on the basis of gender, gender identity or expression, race, creed, color, national origin, ethnicity, religion, disability, sexual orientation, marital status, familial status, pregnancy, domestic violence victim status, military or veteran status, genetic predisposition status, age, or any other protected characteristic under applicable local, state or federal law, in its programs and activities. We are committed to building and sustaining a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive community to address specific forms of discrimination that have historically affected the legal profession in particular. To that end, we take active steps to support this goal, including but not limited to: promoting Anti-Racism, working to actively oppose racism by advocating for changes in political, economic, and social life where necessary to overcome racial inequality; promoting Gender Justice, advocating changes necessary to ensure that everyone is treated equally and with respect and enjoys full rights and equal dignity regardless of their gender, transgender or nonbinary identity or expression, or lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer existence; and, promoting Disability Equity, committing to ensuring the profession values access, self-determination, and an expectation and valuing of difference in terms of disability, identity, and culture.
 
ABOUT NEW YORK’S CAPITAL DISTRICT: As the home of the state capital of New York, the Capital District is a vibrant and diverse area with significant political impact both at the state and national levels. Albany, Troy, Schenectady, and Saratoga Springs are the four cities around which New York’s Capital District-a metro region with over one million in population-is centered. Boasting some of the best schools in New York, access to mountain ranges and lakes, and the robust artistic life of the Hudson Valley, the region is especially attractive for its work-life balance. In addition, the Capital District is a short drive to major metropolitan regions including Boston, New York City, and Montreal.

Dear BLPB Readers:

“The American University Business Law Review (AUBLR) is placing a call for submissions of original legal articles and scholarly commentaries for its forthcoming issues.  As a distinguished publication committed to advancing scholarship in business law, AUBLR is dedicated to publishing high-quality and impactful pieces that address the complex challenges facing business today.  AUBLR is the first law review in Washington, D.C. dedicated solely to business issues and is ranked #15 in Business, Corporations, and Securities Law journals by Washington and Lee Law Journal Rankings.

We welcome submissions from academics, practitioners, and American University Law students, and we review submissions for possible publication on a rolling basis.  Submitting your work to AUBLR provides an excellent opportunity to contribute to the academic discourse in business law and to showcase your expertise to a wide audience. If you have pieces ready for submission or if you would like more information about our submission guidelines, please reach out to Zach Schumacher, AUBLR’s Senior Articles Editor at blr-sae@wcl.american.edu.  Additionally, you can find more details about AUBLR on our website: https://aublr.org.”

THE UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY ROSENBERG COLLEGE OF LAW invites applications for an entry-level or lateral, tenure-track faculty position at the rank of Assistant or Associate Professor, beginning in August 2025. The College is seeking to fill needs in several areas of law, up to two faculty positions this year. We are interested in considering candidates who teach and/or research in Commercial Law, Contracts, Secured Transactions, and Bankruptcy as well as others not included in this list of priorities. We may consider an applicant for a full Professor position. The Rosenberg College of Law is an important part of a major research university and offers a collegial and supportive atmosphere for its faculty, staff, and students. Applicants should have a J.D. or equivalent law degree, a record of high academic achievement, and a demonstrated potential for excellence in teaching and in scholarly productivity. Salary for this position will be commensurate with experience.

To receive consideration for this position, applicants must apply through the University of Kentucky’s Integrated Employment System at https://ukjobs.uky.edu/postings/540069 where they can submit a letter of application and resume. Please send any questions to Faculty Appointments Committee Chair Alan Kluegel, alan.kluegel@uky.edu, or by mail at the University of Kentucky Rosenberg College of Law, 620 South Limestone, Lexington, KY 40506-0048.

The University of Kentucky provides a range of employee benefits to its faculty. There are several healthcare plans available. Faculty are also eligible to participate in the University’s retirement plan. Essentially, the University will deduct five percent of your salary and contribute it to the plan of your choice (among several investment alternatives), and the University contributes an additional ten percent to the plan. Several other insurance policies are available to faculty members. We can help you obtain further information on these benefits from Human Resources, or you can go to their website for additional Information (https://hr.uky.edu/insurance-and-retirement).

Lexington is in the center of the Bluegrass, an internationally acclaimed cultural landscape, and in close proximity to Louisville and Cincinnati. It is a community of 300,000 and is distinguished by its rating as one of the top 10 most educated cities in the nation (according to the U.S. Census), top 5 cities for young professionals (Kiplinger), top 3 mid-sized cities for lowest cost of living (KPMG LLP), and top 5 cities to raise a family (Forbes). More information on Lexington is available at http://www.visitlex.com and http://www.aceweekly.com.

The University of Kentucky is an Equal Opportunity University that values diversity and inclusion. Individuals with disabilities, individuals from minoritized populations, veterans, women, and members of other underrepresented groups are encouraged to apply.