In 13 Things We Learned about Money in Politics in 2013, written by Stetson Professor Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, numbers 9 and 10 highlight the intersection of corporate and campaign finance laws.

10. Disappointing nearly 700,000 members of the public who had asked for more transparency from public companies, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) refused to require transparency for corporate political spending — for now.

9. Shareholder suits over corporate political spending bookended the year. In January, the Comptroller of New York sued Qualcomm, as a shareholder under Delaware law, to get their books and records of political spending. In December, the insurance giant Aetna was suedby a shareholder represented by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) for hiding its political spending.

To access the rest of the list and other campaign finance information provided by the Brennan Center for Justice, click here.

-Anne Tucker

The main question is whether or not the Fed will begin tappering its current bond buying policy which has been in place since 2008.  NPR did a quick and accessible print and radio story on the Fed and the issue of tappering.  Both versions of the story are available here.  I’ve also posted on this blog before on the issues facing the Fed as leadership is about to change hands.

Watch it live at 2:30 pm today here.  

[editted today at 3:15]– Summary of Fed Policy Announcements:

  • Fed will reduce (tapper) its bond buying program from $85 billion to $75 billion per month, with additional tapering expected as the economy continues to strengthen.

 

  • The policy at the Fed is dependent, in part, upon the rate of inflation, which has been running below the 2% benchmark.  “The [Fed] recognizes that inflation persistently below its 2 percent objective could pose risks to economic performance, and it is monitoring inflation developments carefully for evidence that inflation will move back toward it objective over the medium term.”

 

  • Short-term interest rates are expected to hold steady through 2014 with some anticipated increase in 2015, especially if the unemployment rate falls below 6.5% (as it is expected to do in 2014).

 

  • Today’s announcements are consistent with the policy outlined in the September meeting of the Fed, and indicate a gradually strengthening economy with a rising gross domestic product and falling jobless rate.

-Anne Tucker

As someone who has focused his research, scholarship, and teaching on business law and energy law, it’s long been my argument that energy is the key to long-term prosperity and quality of life.  Access to energy is critical, as are sustainable practices to ensure access to energy goes along with, and is not in lieu of, access to clean air and clean water.  See, e.g., my article: North Dakota Expertise: A Chance to Lead in Economically and Environmentally Sustainable Hydraulic Fracturing.

As I often do, this morning I visited the Harvard Business Law Review Online to see what topical issues were taking center stage.  A quick look reveals that three of the eight articles under the U.S. Business Law heading were energy related.  The articles are worth a look.  Here’s a quick link to each:

The Regulatory Challenge Of Distributed Generation, by David B. Raskin

Investing in U.S. Pipeline Infrastructure: Could the Proposed Master Limited Partnerships Parity Act Spur New Investment?, by Linda E. Carlisle, Daniel A. Hagan & Jane E. Rueger

Why Are Foreign Investments in Domestic Energy Projects Now Under CFIUS Scrutiny?, by Stephen Heifetz & Michael Gershberg

As my friend and colleague Marie Reilly so elegantly stated nearly six years ago, Energy Policy is Everything Policy.  It really is.  

I have been pondering one of the provisions in the SEC’s proposed crowdfunding rules, and I have decided that it’s extremely dangerous to crowdfunding intermediaries.

Reducing the Risk of Fraud: The Statutory Requirement

Section 4A(a)(5) of the Securities Act, added by the JOBS Act, requires crowdfunding intermediaries (brokers and funding portals) to take steps to reduce the risk of fraud with respect to crowdfunding transactions. The SEC is given rulemaking authority to specify the required steps, although the statute specifically requires “a background and securities enforcement regulatory history check” on crowdfunding issuer’s officers and directors and shareholders holding more than 20% of the issuer’s outstanding equity.

Proposed Rule 301

Proposed Rule 301 of the crowdfunding regulation implements this requirement.

A couple of the requirements of Rule 301 don’t really relate to fraud, even though the section is captioned “Measures to reduce risk of fraud.” Rule 301(a) requires the intermediary to have a reasonable basis for believing that the issuer is in compliance with the statutory requirements and the related rules. Rule 301(b) requires the intermediary to have a reasonable basis for believing that the issuer has means to keep accurate records of the holders of the securities it’s selling. Neither of these requirements is particularly onerous because, in each case, the intermediary may rely on the issuer’s representations unless the intermediary has reason to doubt those representations.

Rule 301(c)(2) enforces the background check requirement, as well as the “bad actor” disqualifications in Rule 503. The intermediary must not allow any issuer to use its crowdfunding platform unless the intermediary has a reasonable basis for believing that the issuer, its officers and directors, and its 20% equity holders are not disqualified by Rule 503.  To satisfy this requirement, the intermediary “must, at a minimum, conduct a background and securities enforcement regulatory history check” on each such person.

The Problematic Provision

The part of Rule 301 that really troubles me is the final requirement, in Rule 301(c)(2). The intermediary must deny issuers access to its platform if the intermediary “[b]elieves that the issuer or the offering presents the potential for fraud or otherwise raises concerns regarding investor protection.” If an intermediary becomes aware of such information after its has already granted access to the issuer, the intermediary “must promptly remove the offering from its platform, cancel the offering, and return (or, for funding portals, direct the return of) any funds that have been committed by investors in the offering.”

If this was all the regulation said, it would make sense: an intermediary can’t let known or suspected bad actors use its platform. But that’s not all it says. Rule 301(c)(2) adds this little nugget:

“In satisfying this requirement, an intermediary must deny access if it believes that it is unable to adequately or effectively assess the risk of fraud of the issuer or its potential offering.”

It’s one thing to say an intermediary should shut down the issuer if it’s aware of problems or if there are red flags that should reasonably cause concern. But this last provision requires the intermediary to refuse access to the issuer unless it can affirmatively determine that the issuer poses no risk of fraud. And, of course, the only way to “adequately or effectively assess the risk of fraud” is through a full investigation of the issuer and its principals. The cost of fully investigating every issuer on the platform would be prohibitive, and certainly too much for the returns likely to be generated by hosting offerings of less than $1 million.

Intermediaries should be required to deny their platforms to issuers who they know pose a risk of fraud and intermediaries should be required to pursue any red flags that arise. But that should be it. Crowdfunding intermediaries should not be insurers against fraud, which is what this provision is trying to make them.

Over at The Race to the Bottom, Jay Brown has compiled a series of post on the recent proxy advisory services roundtable.  Here are the relevant links:

  • Introduction (“To be frank … roundtables do not often move the issue forward.  Comments can be random or incomplete. In a room full of experts, they can be woefully unprepared and tendentious. Statements can be predictable and provide little additional value to the debate.  This Roundtable, however, was different. It was very well done.”).
  • The Participants (“There was a good cross section of views to say the least.”).
  • The Data (“[T]he evidence presented at the Roundtable indicated that the largest asset managers (BlackRock for example) viewed the recommendations as an input, not a controlling influence.”).
  • Voting Decisions and the Need for Data Tagging (“Mutual funds must file voting data on Form N-PX…. [we should] require the filing of the data in an interactive format.”).
  • The Issue of Concentration (“Concentration is … a structural issue that exists in many places in the securities markets and the proxy process.”).
  • Plumbing Problems (“Michelle Edkins from BlackRock … noted that BlackRock retained ISS not only for advice but for other services as well. Some of these services arose out of the ‘operating environment.’ She described the voting environment as ‘highly complex, terribly inefficient’ and ‘prone to error.’”).
  • The View of Consumers (“The discussion brought home several points.  First, investors want the services provided by the proxy advisory firms, an obvious enough point given that they pay for it.  But the comments demonstrated the role that demand played in the structure of the proxy process.”).
  • The View of Issuers (“Issuers and their allies raised a number of concerns about proxy advisory firms.  They ranged from industry concentration to conflicts of interest to the propensity to make mistakes in making recommendations.  The fact that the firms make recommendations yet seek business from issuers raised concerns, as Trevor Norwitz (2:37) said, about being ‘shaken down when approached by the governance side . . .’”).
  • The Regulatory Privilege (“An interesting issue that arose off and on during the day was the role played by the Commission in connection with the use of proxy advisory firms and the creation of the current market structure.”).

All the information you need is on the registration page.  Here are some relevant excerpts:

The Society of Socio-Economists (SOS) is a society of law teachers, teachers of economics and other disciplines, and other professionals and interested people who approach economic issues in harmony with the principles articulated in the statement of principles entitled “What Is Socio-Economics.” [Please see excerpt below.]  SOS holds an annual meeting in conjunction with the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) in coordination with the AALS Section on Socio-Economics….

Statement of Socio-Economics Principles

Socio-economics begins with the assumption that economic behavior and phenomena are not wholly governed or described by any one analytical discipline, but are embedded in society, polity, culture, and nature.  Drawing upon economics, sociology, political science, psychology, anthropology, biology and other social and natural sciences, philosophy, history, law, management, and other disciplines, socio-economics regards competitive behavior as a subset of human behavior within a societal and natural context that both enables and constrains competition and cooperation.  Rather than assume that the individual pursuit of self-interest automatically or generally tends toward an optimal allocation of resources, socio-economics assumes that societal sources of order are necessary for people and markets to function efficiently.  Rather than assume that people act only rationally, or that they pursue only self-interest, socio-economics seeks to advance a more encompassing interdisciplinary understanding of economic behavior open to the assumption that individual choices are shaped not only by notions of rationality but also by emotions, social bonds, beliefs, expectations, and a sense of morality.

Socio-economics is both a positive and a normative science. It is dedicated to the empirical, reality testing approach to knowledge.  It respects both inductive and deductive reasoning.  But it also openly recognizes the policy relevance of teaching and research and seeks to be self-aware of its normative implications rather than maintaining the mantle of an exclusively positive science.  Although it sees questions of value inextricably connected with individual and group economic choices, socio-economics does not entail a commitment to any one paradigm or ideological position, but is open to a range of thinking that treats economic behavior as involving the whole person and all facets of society within a continually evolving natural context.

Unique among interdisciplinary approaches, however, socio-economics recognizes the pervasive and powerful influence of the neoclassical paradigm on contemporary thought.  Recognizing that people first adopt paradigms of thought and then perform their inductive, deductive, and empirical analyses, socio-economists seek to examine the assumptions of the neoclassical paradigm, develop a rigorous understanding of its limitations, improve upon its application, and develop alternative, perhaps complementary, approaches that are predictive, exemplary, and morally sound.

The National Business Law Scholars Conference (NBLSC) will be held on Thursday, June 19th and Friday, June 20th at Loyola Law School, Los Angeles. This is the fifth annual meeting of the NBLSC, a conference which annually draws together dozens of legal scholars from across the United States and around the world. We welcome all scholarly submissions relating to business law. Presentations should focus on research appropriate for publication in academic journals, especially law reviews, and should make a contribution to the existing scholarly literature. We will attempt to provide the opportunity for everyone to actively participate. Junior scholars and those considering entering the legal academy are especially encouraged to participate.

To submit a presentation, email Professor Eric C. Chaffee at eric.chaffee@utoledo.edu with an abstract or paper by April 4, 2014. Please title the email “NBLSC Submission – {Name}”. If you would like to attend, but not present, email Professor Chaffee with an email entitled “NBLSC Attendance.” Please specify in your email whether you are willing to serve as a commentator or moderator. A conference schedule will be circulated in late May.  More information is available here:  http://lls.edu/resources/events/listofevents/eventtitle,81539,en/

 

Conference Organizers

Barbara Black (The University of Cincinnati College of Law)
Eric C. Chaffee (The University of Toledo College of Law)
Steven M. Davidoff (The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law)
Kristin N. Johnson (Seton Hall University School of Law)
Elizabeth Pollman (Loyola Law School, Los Angeles)
Margaret V. Sachs (University of Georgia Law)

 

Last week I attended the UN Forum on Business and Human Rights in Geneva.  The Forum was designed to discuss barriers and best practices related to the promotion and implementation of the non-binding UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, which discuss the state’s duty to protect human rights, the corporation’s duty to respect human rights, and the joint duty to provide access to judicial and non-judicial remedies for human rights abuses. This is the second year that nation states, NGOs, businesses, civil society organizations, academics and others have met to discuss multi-stakeholder initiatives, how businesses can better assess their human rights impact, and how to conduct due diligence in the supply chain.

Released in 2011 after unanimous endorsement by the UN Human Rights Council, the Guiding Principles are considered the first globally-accepted set of standards on the relationship between states and business as it relates to human rights. The US State Department and the Department of Labor have designed policies around the Principles, and a number of companies have adopted them in whole or in part, because they provide a relatively detailed framework as to expectations.  Some companies faced shareholder proposals seeking the adoption of the Principles in 2013, and more will likely hear about the Principles in 2014 from socially responsible investors.  Several international law firms discussed the advice that they are now providing to multinationals about adopting the Principles without providing a new basis for liability for private litigants.

Although the organizers did not have the level of business representation as they would have liked of one-third of the attendees, it was still a worthwhile event with Rio Tinto, Unilever, Microsoft, Google, Nestle, Barrick Gold, UBS, Petrobras, Total, SA, and other multinationals serving as panelists. Members of the European Union Parliament, the European Union Commission and other state delegates also held leadership roles in shaping the discussion on panels and from the audience.

Some of the more interesting panels concerned protecting human rights in the digital domain; case studies on responsible investment in Myanmar (by the State Department), the palm oil industry in Indonesia and indigenous peoples in the Americas; the dangers faced by human and environmental rights defenders (including torture and murder); how to conduct business in conflict zones; public procurement and human rights; developments in transnational litigation (one lawyer claimed that 6,000 of his plaintiffs have had their cases dismissed since the Supreme Court Kiobel decision about the Alien Tort Statute); mobilizing lawyers to advance business and human rights; the various comply or explain regimes and how countries are mandating or recommending integrated reporting on environmental, social and governance factors; tax avoidance and human rights; human rights in international investment policies and contracts; and corporate governance and the Guiding Principles.

As a former businessperson, many of the implementation challenges outlined by the corporate representatives resonated with me. As an academic, the conference reaffirmed how little law students know about these issues.  Our graduates may need to advise clients about risk management, international labor issues, corporate social responsibility, supply chain concerns, investor relations, and new disclosure regimes. Dodd-Frank conflict minerals and the upcoming European counterpart were frequently mentioned and there are executive orders and state laws dealing with human rights as well.

Traditional human rights courses do not typically address most of these issues in depth and business law courses don’t either. Only a few law firms have practice areas specifically devoted to this area- typically in the corporate social responsibility group- but many transactional lawyers and litigators are rapidly getting up to speed out of necessity. Small and medium-sized enterprises must also consider these issues, and we need to remember that “human rights” is not just an international issue. As business law professors, we may want to consider how we can prepare our students for this new frontier so that they can be both more marketable and more capable of advising their clients in this burgeoning area of the law.  For those who want to read about human rights and business on a more frequent basis, I recommend Professor Jena Martin’s blog.  

With winter break nearly upon us this means grading, writing projects, and possibly some conference travel with the upcoming AALS annual meeting.  I plan on putting together my AALS talk (on incorporating experiential exercises in teaching LLCs) next week, and have drawn inspiration from the following image:

Conference Image

The Business Law programs are on Saturday, January 4th and are listed below. If you would like to highlight other programs, please respond in the comments, and I will add to the list.

  • The program will explore:  The … topic of effectively teaching LLCs.  

 

  • 2:00 pm – 3:45 pm Business Associations
    The Value Proposition for Business Associations in Tomorrow’s Legal Education
  • The panel will be exploring: How does business associations teaching and scholarship contribute to the U.S. program of legal education?  How could or should it contribute?  What role does the basic law school course on business associations play in an optimized law school curriculum?  What course content, pedagogy, and teaching tools best support that role?  How does business associations scholarship inform and support that role?    

 

  •  On the thirtieth anniversary of the influential article by Professor Ronald Gilson’s “Value Creation by Business Lawyers” this program will re-examine Professor Gilson’s thesis, evaluate the impact of the article, and discuss the prospects for business lawyers creating value in the 21st Century.  The panel will feature Professor Gilson, invited participants, and scholarly works selected from a call for papers.

This is my first year attending the AALS conference, and am going whole hog with plans to also attend the mid-year meeting in June, which will be a workshop on Blurring Boundaries in Financial and Corporate Law. The call for papers (expired)  includes a program description and is available here:  http://www.aals.org/mm2014/AALS_2014_MM_RFP.pdf 

-Anne Tucker

 

 

When the SEC adopted the Rule 506(c) amendment allowing general solicitation in certain Regulation D offerings, it also proposed a number of changes to Regulation D. The Federal Regulation of Securities Committee of the American Bar Association’ s Business Law Section, recently submitted a very thoughtful comment letter on those proposed changes. It’s available here.

I have been a member of the Federal Regulation of Securities Committee and several of its subcommittees for over two decades. Almost all of the country’s top securities lawyers are members. (I’m not sure why they let me join.) I don’t always agree with the committee’s views, but its positions are always thoughtful and well-reasoned. This letter is no exception (and, in this case, I happen to agree with most of it). It’s worth reading.