I’m continuing to read my way through Hilary Allen‘s Driverless Finance.  The first chapter breaks down the need for financial regulators to embrace the precautionary principle. 

At the outset, Allen draws a distinction between measurable and manageable risks and true Knightian uncertainty.  Essentially, Knightian uncertainty refers to those “unknown unknowns” where no real way to evaluate risks exists.  Allen seems correct that an inability to precisely measure risks doesn’t mean we should just trapse forward into the uncertain future without taking reasonable precautions and regulating with an eye toward preserving financial stability.  She details the human costs of financial crises by looking at the widespread harms fairly attributable to the 2008 financial crisis.  These kinds of events wreck economic growth and they wreck lives.  People die.  They die from depression, suicide, foregone preventative medical care, and from other reasons attributable to these crises. Although a financial crisis visits widespread harm across the globe, the damage isn’t spread evenly across society.  The most vulnerable pay the cost. 

Allen convinced me that when we’re evaluating financial innovation, we shouldn’t blindly trust innovators to take systemic risks into account.  Innovators are poorly positioned to think about how competitors and the financial system as a whole may respond to the introduction of new technology.  Innovators also have the wrong incentives.  Financial stability benefits everyone, but innovators may personally benefit from introducing innovations that make them rich while driving up systemic risk.  Once you have enough cash on hand, you’re likely well-insulated from any global catastrophe financial innovation may unleash.

This means that we need to have properly-resourced regulators participating in the integration of new financial innovations into the financial system.  This requires investing in expertise and ensuring that regulators have the ability to understand new innovations.  Appropriately skeptical regulators will be positioned to restrain developments that needlessly increase complexity and risk without helping the financial system do its actual job any better.  Allen explains that we already take this approach with introducing new drugs into the market.  The FDA requires pharma to establish safety and efficacy before dosing millions.  This may be an easier sell because people can easily envision the costs of medical mistakes.

To help the reader see and understand the problem, Allen asks the reader to envision what would have happened in 2008 if credit default swaps had been automated through smart contracts.  When AIG faced collateral calls from Goldman because of its CDS contracts, the parties negotiated and reached a resolution, allowing time for Congress to come through with a bailout.  Smart contracts automatically executing capital calls could have thrown AIG into instant insolvency.  

Allen’s likely right that inaction on financial innovation now increases risks.  It may also make it much harder to restrain innovation as the crypto-asset industry grows.  With crypto swelling from billions into trillions, freshly funded hordes of lobbyists see poised to descend on attempts to restrain financial innovation.  A profit-maximizing industry aiming to forestall regulation will likely point to compliance costs, foregone profits and other “losses” they will experience if regulators restrain or shift the course of financial innovation.  There may be some real costs to adopting a thorough precautionary approach.  But we must also counterbalance this and count the cost of a financial crisis.  Successful financial regulation may always be decried by opponents looking at a lopsided ledger.  They see only the industry’s expense and never take into account the costs of a crisis sensible regulation may avoid.

On the whole, Allen makes a convincing case for embracing a precautionary approach to financial innovation.  She acknowledges the necessary tradeoffs and makes a strong case that it’s worth it to venture cautiously into the unknown.  

The following comes to us from the Law & Economics Center at Scalia Law.

The Law & Economics Center at Scalia Law to Hold Virtual Panel Discussion Analyzing Reforms to the Bankruptcy Code and Examining Case Law Developments in Mass Tort Bankruptcies Next Week

On Friday, March 18, 2022, from 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM EST, the Law & Economics Center at the George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School will host a virtual event entitled Bankruptcy and Mass Torts: Examining the Economics, Purposes, and Structure of Bankruptcy Law in Light of Developments in Congress and the Courts. A panel of experts will address the questions and concerns facing Congress as it debates reforms to the Bankruptcy Code and discuss case law developments.

The time-tested law that has developed under the United States Bankruptcy Code creates a sophisticated set of rules, structures, and procedures to preserve value in distressed businesses to protect stakeholders and maximize the return to creditors. Recent uses of legal mechanisms to take advantage of Chapter 11 and other provisions of the Code—including corporate restructuring and divisional mergers by companies facing liabilities from mass tort litigation—have drawn criticism in Congress and challenges in court.

Are these filings employing useful mechanisms to maximize the intended economic benefits of the Bankruptcy Code, or are they abuses of process? How do these bankruptcies affect litigants’ rights to recover? Are safeguards in the Bankruptcy Code and corporate law sufficient to control fraud, or are reforms necessary? Is there a problem with the Code that needs solving? What are the unintended consequences of tinkering with the Bankruptcy Code? These are questions facing Congress as it debates reforms to the Bankruptcy Code and for courts determining whether to allow bankruptcies to proceed under these circumstances.

To take part in the virtual discussion, register here. The panelists: Anthony Casey (Deputy Dean and Donald M. Ephraim Professor of Law and Economics, The University of Chicago Law School), Alexandra Lahav (Ellen Ash Peters Professor of Law, University of Connecticut School of Law), Samir Parikh (Professor of Law, Lewis & Clark Law School), and Lindsey Simon (Assistant Professor of Law, University of Georgia School of Law). The panel will be moderated by Donald J. Kochan (Professor of Law and Deputy Executive Director, Law & Economics Center, George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School).

Reposting this notice and FAQ distributed last week by the Southeastern Association of Law Schools (SEALS) for those interested in/planning on joining the law academy.

*     *     *

Each year, SEALS hosts a Prospective Law Teachers Workshop (PLTW), which provides intensive opportunities for VAPs, fellows, and practitioners to network and participate in mock interviews and mock job talks—prior to the actual teaching market. The Workshop also includes a luncheon (separate ticket purchase is required) and 1-on-1 sessions for candidates to receive faculty feedback on their CVs and FAR forms. This year’s Prospective Law Teachers Workshop will be held at The Sandestin Golf and Beach Resort, Florida on Thursday, July 28 through Saturday, July 30, 2022, although the full SEALS conference runs from Wednesday, July 27 through Wednesday, August 3. If you are interested in participating specifically in the Prospective Law Teachers Workshop, please send your CV, and a brief statement explaining your interest, to Professor Leah Chan Grinvald lgrinvald@suffolk.edu. Please also confirm that you are planning on entering the teaching market in August 2022. Applications are due by March 21, 2022, with decisions made no later than March 30, as registration for SEALS opens on April 1. Past PLTW participants have secured tenure-track appointments at an impressive array of law schools.

Independently from the PLTW, SEALS also offers a workshop that is broader programming for anyone considering academia—even if one is earlier in the process. Anyone may simply attend the Aspiring Law Teachers Workshop by attending SEALS. The programming includes a demonstration of faculty-candidate interviews and sessions on designing your teaching package, navigating the market as a nontraditional candidate, mapping academic opportunities, what’s in a job talk, crafting scholarship goals, the art of self-promotion, as well as a luncheon (separate ticket purchase required when registering for SEALS). The Aspiring Workshop occurs between Wednesday, July 27–Sunday, July 31.

The goal of these two workshops is, in tandem, to provide robust opportunities for those who hope to one day enter legal academia.

Frequently Asked Questions:

They both sound great. What exactly is the difference?

The Prospective Workshop is designed for those who are going on the market this fall (and will be submitting their FAR form or applying to law teaching positions), in 2022, and desiring a chance to moot job talks and interviews in advance of that time. The Aspiring Workshop is designed for anyone considering academia, including those who may not yet be ready to moot a job talk in the summer. Participation in the Prospective Workshop is by acceptance-only while the Aspiring Workshop is open to everyone.

Can I attend both workshops?

Possibly. Some of the times may conflict, but the Aspiring Law Teachers Workshop will be generally open to anyone wishing to attend. Attendance in the Prospective Workshop is in contrast only by acceptance through our competitive selection process, although the PLTW session on Navigating the Market is open to all SEALS attendees.

Is this the new faculty recruitment initiative that I heard SEALS has put together?

No, this is not the new hiring initiative that SEALS is conducting. That process is entirely separate. Information about SEALS’ new faculty recruitment initiative can be found at the following link: https://www.sealslawschools.org/recruitment/applicants/.

CNBC recently reported on BlackRock’s previously-announced plan to permit pass-through voting for institutional investors in its index funds.  According to the report, the plan will cover about 40% of those funds, which works out to about $1.92 trillion of assets.

It seems obvious to me that BlackRock is feeling the political/regulatory heat from its existing voting power – there’s been lots of GOP pushback on its climate policies, concerns about antitrust (including FTC proposals that would paralyze BlackRock with regulation), it gets protestors outside its offices due to its control over particular companies, all of which caused BlackRock to go on an – obviously failed – campaign to convince people that it does not hold the power it holds (as I described in my book chapter, ESG Investing, or if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em).  Pass through voting feels like BlackRock voluntarily giving up at least some of its tremendous influence in the face of that scrutiny.  Or, to put it another way, perhaps that power does not translate into financial benefits to BlackRock, at least, not enough to make it worth the regulatory costs.

I have no idea how this will play out or what this will look like, but I have so many thoughts and questions.  Here are a few, in no particular order:

1)            Is this something investors will seek out, which will give BlackRock a competitive edge? The CNBC article linked above suggests so.

2)            What are the fiduciary duties of institutions in this scenario?  The article suggests many of them already have voting policies for shares they directly own, but if they don’t, or if BlackRock’s policy expands, how do institutions make this call?  Do they decide whether the expense of determining their vote – maybe paying for a proxy advisor – is equal to the benefit?  Do they have to choose BlackRock over another fund complex because of the benefits of pass through voting?

3)            If an institution decides to cast its own votes, does it get a reduction on fees from BlackRock, since it’s no longer paying for voting services?

4)            Will clients have the option of going with BlackRock on some issues and not others?  Sean Griffith, for example, has proposed that pass through voting apply to ESG matters and not other kinds of votes, like mergers, where the fund has more expertise. 

5)            If so, will clients know in advance how BlackRock intends to vote?  Will that be nonpublic information?  There are proposals for better disclosure on mutual funds’ voting patterns; I gather clients may not always know how BlackRock is casting its votes, let alone know in advance of the vote itself, but that may be relevant information if there’s a pass-through option.

6)            Also on lending: How will BlackRock manage the share lending program, given that votes often are sacrificed for the lending fees?

7)            Speaking of disclosure of mutual fund voting, how will BlackRock disclose the pass through votes?  Can BlackRock take advantage of the informational content of those votes before they are disclosed (leave aside any active trading that BlackRock handles; as Joshua Mitts points out, even passive funds can use information to dictate their share lending programs).

8)            As the CNBC article points out, if BlackRock hands its voting power to its clients, it will lose leverage with portfolio companies and – due to the dispersed nature of its own client base – that’s leverage that will not be recaptured.  So that may mean less shareholder power overall.  Among other things, will Delaware react – by, for example, relaxing things like the Corwin doctrine?

9)            If BlackRock maintains a significant amount of voting power, it presumably will continue to have some influence in the boardroom.  Will its fiduciary duties be altered if it lobbies for governance changes that appear to be at odds with how the pass-through votes are cast?

That’s all I’ve got for starters – anything else?

The Law and Economics Center at the George Mason University Antonin Scalia School of law is hosting a Research Roundtable on Capitalism and the Rule of Law this week in Destin, Florida. My co-author, Professor Jeremy Kidd (Drake University School of Law) and I are honored to present a draft of our current work-in-progress, “Market Failure and Censorship in the Marketplace of Ideas,” at tomorrow’s (March 5, 2022) session. We look forward to receiving feedback from all the brilliant scholars in attendance. Here’s an abstract of the current draft. We look forward to sharing a link to the full draft soon:

As one author notes, the familiar metaphor of the exchange of ideas as a “marketplace” has “permeate[d] the Supreme Court’s first amendment jurisprudence.” If the test for efficiency in the marketplace for goods is wealth maximization, the test for efficiency in the marketplace of ideas has historically been understood in terms of its ability to reliably arrive at truth, or at least the most socially beneficial ideas within the grasp of a community of discourse. And consistent with economic free-market advocates, the received expectation in Western liberal democracies has been that “a process of robust debate, if uninhibited by government [or other] interference, will” best achieve this end. In other words, the assumption is that the market of ideas is most efficient when it is free. As Thomas Jefferson famously claimed, “Truth is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from conflict, unless by human interposition, disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate.” Similarly, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes later noted, “the best test of truth is the power of thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.”

But even the most fervent economic free-market advocates recognize the possibility of market failure. Market failure is “a market characteristic that prevents the market from maximizing consumer welfare.” The exercise of monopoly power, for example, is a common source of market failure. Most economists agree that government or other regulatory interference with market freedom may be justified to correct a market failure.

The last few years have witnessed increased calls (from both government officials and the private sector) for censorship of speech and research pertaining to a variety of subjects (e.g., climate change; COVID-19 sources and treatments; and viewpoints concerning race, gender, and sexual orientation) across a variety of venues (e.g., social media, the classroom, internet searches, corporations, and even persons’ private bookshelves). The consistent refrain in favor of this censorship is that the spread of false or misleading information is preventing access to or distorting the truth and thereby inhibiting social progress: undermining democracy, fomenting bigotry, costing lives, and even threating the existence of the planet.

Do these increasing calls for censorship respond to a market failure in the marketplace of ideas? For example, could a majority race so dominate the terms of conditions of public and private discourse that minority voices are effectively barred from entry? If so, calls for censorship of expressly or implicitly racially biased voices may be an appropriate response to a market failure in the marketplace of ideas. If not, however, pervasive success at censorship (whether public or private) may itself create inefficiencies equivalent to market failure.

In this Article, the authors draw upon familiar economic principles to explore the possibility of market failure in the marketplace of ideas. The authors then rely on philosophical arguments articulated by liberal thinkers from John Milton and John Stuart Mill to Isaiah Berlin and Richard Rorty to argue (in response to classical and post-modern critiques) that the spread of false or misleading information does not on its own reflect a market failure warranting censorship as a corrective. Instead, it is argued recent successful efforts at silencing and deplatforming dissenting voices (particularly in the context of social media, but also in academia and the workplace) reflects the real market failure in need of correction.

The Article proceeds as follows: Part I offers examples of recent calls for (and efforts at) censorship in the market of ideas concerning a variety of subjects and forums. Part II explores the idea of the marketplace of ideas as an economic concept, defines its components, considers the possibility of associated market failures, and highlights some common fallacies in the application of the concept of market failure more broadly. Part III explores the principal philosophical arguments for the utility of freedom of expression, focusing on the arguments articulated in John Stuart Mill’s classic, On Liberty. Part IV argues that, in light of these arguments (and taking into account contemporary post-modern critiques), the threat of false and misleading expression does not reflect market failure in today’s marketplace of ideas. To the contrary, Part V argues that the ease with which recent public and private efforts at censorship have succeeded itself reflects a market failure warranting correction—if not through legislation or the courts, then by social sanction and the court of public opinion.

The University of Illinois College of Law, in partnership with UCLA School of Law, University of Richmond School of Law, and Vanderbilt Law School, invites submissions for the Ninth Annual Workshop for Corporate & Securities Litigation. This workshop will be held on Friday, September 23 and Saturday, September 24, 2022 in Chicago, Illinois.

Overview

This annual workshop brings together scholars focused on corporate and securities litigation to present their scholarly works. Papers addressing any aspect of corporate and securities litigation or enforcement are eligible, including securities class actions, fiduciary duty litigation, and SEC enforcement actions. We welcome scholars working in a variety of methodologies, as well as both completed papers and works-in-progress.

Authors whose papers are selected will be invited to present their work at a workshop hosted by the University of Illinois College of Law. Participants will pay for their own travel, lodging, and other expenses.

Submissions

If you are interested in participating, please send the paper you would like to present or an abstract of the paper to corpandsecworkshop@gmail.com by Friday, May 13, 2022. Please include your name, current position, and contact information in the e-mail accompanying the submission. Authors of accepted papers will be notified in June.

Questions

Any questions concerning the workshop should be directed to the organizers: Verity Winship (vwinship@illinois.edu), Jessica Erickson (jerickso@richmond.edu), Jim Park (James.park@law.ucla.edu), and Amanda Rose (amanda.rose@vanderbilt.edu).

Hilary Allen’s new book, Driverless Finance, is out.  I’ve decided to dedicate some blog posts to it as I read my way through to help introduce it to readers.  

It begins with a short prologue set in 2031 and takes the form of a report on the causes of the 2030 financial and economic crisis.  This struck me as a solid way to begin and help people understand the risks.  We’ve had many financial crises.  We will likely have more of them.  It’s important to be thinking now about how the next one might arise.  The report makes a case that the next financial crisis might be tied to the rise of cryptoassets and artificially intelligent trading algorithms.  But the report doesn’t stop there.  It touches on developing risks to payment systems, a general lack of preparedness, corporate governance failures, and failed financial regulation.  Although there is no way to know how the next crisis will play out, the prologue’s 2031 retrospective struck me as fairly plausible from where we are right now.

Allen’s introduction makes a compelling case that we need to pay more attention to what’s happening right now in the financial system before things escalate in a way that threatens financial stability.  I’m looking forward to getting deeper into it in the weeks ahead.

 

National Business Law Scholars Conference (NBLSC)
June 16-17, 2022
Call for Papers

The National Business Law Scholars Conference (NBLSC) will be held on Thursday and Friday, June 16-17, 2022, at the University of Oklahoma College of Law.

This is the thirteenth meeting of the NBLSC, an annual conference that draws legal scholars from across the United States and around the world. We welcome all scholarly submissions relating to business law. Junior scholars and those considering entering the academy are especially encouraged to participate. If you are thinking about entering the academy and would like to receive informal mentoring and learn more about job market dynamics, please let us know when you make your submission.

Please fill out this form to register and submit an abstract by Friday, April 1, 2022. If you have any questions, concerns, or special requests regarding the schedule, please email Professor Eric C. Chaffee at eric.chaffee@utoledo.edu. We will respond to submissions with notifications of acceptance a few weeks after the submission deadline. We anticipate the conference schedule will be circulated in May.

Conference Organizers:

Afra Afsharipour (University of California, Davis, School of Law)
Tony Casey (The University of Chicago Law School)
Eric C. Chaffee (The University of Toledo College of Law)
Steven Davidoff Solomon (University of California, Berkeley School of Law)
Joan MacLeod Heminway (The University of Tennessee College of Law)
Kristin N. Johnson (Emory University School of Law)
Elizabeth Pollman (University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School)
Jeff Schwartz (University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law)
Megan Wischmeier Shaner (University of Oklahoma College of Law)

Professor Lev Menand has written another must read article on the Fed, The Logic and Limits of the Federal Reserve Act.  It’s a timely and incredibly important piece that I recommend to all BLPB readers.  Here’s the abstract:

“Over the past fourteen years, the U.S. Federal Reserve has rescued overleveraged financial companies, purchased trillions of dollars of mortgage-backed securities, and created novel facilities to support ordinary businesses, nonprofits, and local governments. While some argue that the Fed has gone too far, others believe that it should expand its ambit further still to address issues such as climate change, racial injustice, and crumbling infrastructure. This Article seeks to clarify the nature and stakes of this debate by recovering the logic and limits of the Federal Reserve Act. It argues that to understand the Fed it is necessary first to understand the U.S. system of money and banking. That system uses publicly chartered, investor-owned banks to issue most of the money supply. Congress designed the Fed for a limited purpose: to administer the banking system. And Congress equipped the Fed with an integrated set of tools to achieve a specific objective: ensure that the banking system creates enough money to keep economic resources productively employed nationwide. The rise of shadow banks—firms that issue money instruments without a bank charter—has impaired the Fed’s tools. As the Fed has scrambled to adapt, it has taken on tasks it was never designed to handle. This has prompted calls for it to do more and pleas for it to do less. These conflicting demands reflect rival visions about how to divide responsibility for creating money between politicians, technocrats, and private interests. These visions are often untethered from the considerations that animate existing law, sidelining politicians and elevating technocrats and investors. Only by reexamining the Fed’s statutory framework can we appreciate the fault lines in the present debate and evaluate the Fed’s capacity in the future.”

 

2022 Online Symposium – Mainstreet vs. Wallstreet: The Democratization of Investing

I’m thrilled to moderate two panels this Friday and one features our rock star BLPB editor, Ben Edwards. 

                                                                     REGISTER HERE

The University of Miami Business Law Review is hosting its 2022 online symposium on Friday, March 4, 2022. The symposium will run from 12:30 PM to 3:30 PM. The symposium will be conducted via Zoom. Attendees can apply to receive CLE credits for attending this event—3.5 CLE credits have been approved by the Florida Bar. 

The symposium will host two sessions with expert panelists discussing the gamification of trading platforms and the growing popularity of aligning investments with personal values.

The panels will be moderated by Professor Marcia Narine Weldon, who is the director of the Transactional Skills Program, Faculty Coordinator of the Business Compliance & Sustainability Concentration, and a Lecturer in Law at the University of Miami School of Law.

Panel 1: Gamification of Trading 

This panel will focus on the role of social media and “gamification” of trading apps/platforms in democratizing investing, and the risks that such technology may influence investor behavior (i.e., increase in trading, higher risk trading strategies like options and margin use, etc.).

Gerri Walsh:

Gerri Walsh is Senior Vice President of Investor Education at the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA). In this capacity, she is responsible for the development and operations of FINRA’s investor education program. She is also President of the FINRA Investor Education Foundation, where she manages the Foundation’s strategic initiatives to educate and protect investors and to benchmark and foster financial capability for all Americans, especially underserved audiences. Ms. Walsh was the founding executive sponsor of FINRA’s Military Community Employee Resource Group. She serves on the Advisory Council to the Stanford Center on Longevity and represents FINRA on IOSCO’s standing policy committee on retail investor education, the Jump$tart Coalition for Personal Financial Literacy, NASAA’s Senior Investor Advisory Council and the Wharton Pension Research Council.

Prior to joining FINRA in May 2006, Ms. Walsh was Deputy Director of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Office of Investor Education and Assistance (OIEA) and, before that, Special Counsel to the Director of OIEA. She also served as a senior attorney in the SEC’s Division of Enforcement, investigating and prosecuting violators of the federal securities laws. Before that, she practiced law as an associate with Hogan Lovells in Washington, D.C.

Ari Bargil:

Ari Bargil is an attorney with the Institute for Justice. He joined IJ’s Miami Office in September of 2012, and litigates constitutional cases protecting economic liberty, property rights, school choice, and free speech in both federal and state courts.

In 2019, Ari successfully defended two of Florida’s most popular school choice programs, the McKay Program for Students with Disabilities and the Florida Tax Credit Program, before the Florida Supreme Court. As a direct result of the victory, over 120,000 students in Florida have access to scholarships that empower them to attend the schools of their choice.

Ari also regularly defends property owners battling aggressive zoning regulations and excessive fines in state and federal court nationwide and litigates on behalf of entrepreneurs in cutting-edge First Amendment cases. He was co-counsel in a federal appellate court victory vindicating the right of a Florida dairy creamery to tell the truth on its labels, and he is currently litigating in federal appellate court to secure a holistic health coach’s right to share advice about nutrition with her clients. In 2017, Ari was honored by the Daily Business Review as one of South Florida’s “Most Effective Lawyers.”

In addition to litigation, Ari regularly testifies before state and local legislative bodies and committees on issues ranging from occupational licensing to property rights regulation. Ari has also spearheaded several successful legislative campaigns in Florida, including the effort to legalize the sale of 64-ounce “growlers” by craft breweries and the Florida Legislature’s passage of the Right to Garden Act—a reform which made it unlawful for local governments to ban residential vegetable gardens throughout the state.

Ari’s work has been featured by USA Today, NPR, Fox News, Washington Post, Miami Herald, Dallas Morning News and other national and local publications.

Christine Lazaro:

Christine Lazaro is Director of the Securities Arbitration Clinic at St. John’s University School of Law. She joined the faculty at St. John’s in 2007 as the Clinic’s Supervising Attorney. She is also a faculty advisor for the Corporate and Securities Law Society.

Prior to joining the Securities Arbitration Clinic, Professor Lazaro was an associate at the boutique law firm of Davidson & Grannum, LLP.  At the firm, she represented broker-dealers and individual brokers in disputes with clients in both arbitration and mediation.  She also handled employment law cases and debt collection cases.  Professor Lazaro was the primary attorney in the firm’s area of practice that dealt with advising broker-dealers regarding investment contracts they had with various municipalities and government entities.  Professor Lazaro is also of Counsel to the Law Offices of Brent A. Burns, LLC, where she consults on securities arbitration and regulatory matters.

Professor Lazaro is a member of the New York State and the American Bar Associations, and the Public Investors Arbitration Bar Association (PIABA). Professor Lazaro is a past President of PIABA and is a member of the Board of Directors.  She is also a co-chair of PIABA’S Fiduciary Standards Committee, and is a member of the Executive, Legislation, Securities Law Seminar, and SRO Committees. Additionally, Professor Lazaro is the co-chair of the Securities Disputes Committee in the Dispute Resolution Section of the New York State Bar Association and serves on the FINRA Investor Issues Advisory Committee. 

Panel 2: ESG Investing

The second panel will address the growing popularity of ESG funds among investors that want to align their investments with their personal values, and the questions/concerns that arise with ESG funds, including: 1) explaining what they are; 2) discussing the varying definitions and disclosure issues; 3) exploring if investors really give up better market performance if they invest in funds that align with their values; and 4) asking if the increased interest in ESG funds affect corporate change? 

Thomas Riesenberg:

Mr. Riesenberg is Senior Regulatory Advisor to Ceres, working on climate change issues. He previously worked as an advisor to EY Global’s Office of Public Policy on ESG regulatory issues. Before that he worked as the Director of Legal and Regulatory Policy at The Sustainability Accounting Standards Board pursuant to a secondment from EY. At SASB he worked on a range of US and non-US policy matters for nearly seven years. He served for more than 20 years as counsel to EY, including as the Deputy General Counsel responsible for regulatory matters, primarily involving the SEC and the PCAOB. Previously he served for seven years as an Assistant General Counsel at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission where he handled court of appeals and Supreme Court cases involving issues such as insider trading, broker-dealer regulation, and financial fraud. While at the SEC he received the Manuel Cohen Outstanding Younger Lawyer Award for his work on significant enforcement cases. He also worked as a law clerk for a federal district court judge in Washington, D.C., as a litigator on environmental matters at the U.S. Department of Justice, and as an associate at a major Washington, D.C. law firm.

Mr. Riesenberg graduated from the New York University School of Law, where he was a member of the Law Review and a Root-Tilden Scholar (full-tuition scholarship). He received a bachelor’s degree from Oberlin College, where he graduated with honors and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He is a former chair of the Law and Accounting Committee of the American Bar Association, former president of the Association of SEC Alumni, former treasurer of the SEC Historical Society, and a current member of the Advisory Board of the BNA Securities Regulation and Law Report. For seven years he was an adjunct professor of securities law at the Georgetown University Law Center. He is an elected member of the American Law Institute. He serves on the boards of several nonprofit organizations, including the D.C. Jewish Community Relations Council and the Washington Tennis & Education Foundation. He is the author of numerous articles on securities law and ESG disclosure issues.

Benjamin Edwards:

Benjamin Edwards joined the faculty of the William S. Boyd School of Law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in 2017. In addition to being the Director of the Public Policy Clinic, he researches and writes about business and securities law, corporate governance, arbitration, and consumer protection. Prior to teaching, Professor Edwards practiced as a securities litigator in the New York office of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP. At Skadden, he represented clients in complex civil litigation, including securities class actions arising out of the Madoff Ponzi scheme and litigation arising out of the 2008 financial crisis.

Max Schatzow:

Max Schatzow is a co-founder and partner of RIA Lawyers LLC—a boutique law firm that focuses almost exclusively on representing investment advisers with legal and regulatory issues. Prior to RIA Lawyers, Max worked at Morgan Lewis representing some of the largest financial institutions in the United States and at another law firm where he represented investment advisers and broker-dealers. Max is a business-minded regulatory lawyer that always tries to put himself in the client’s position. He assists clients in all aspects of forming, registering, owning, and operating an investment adviser. He prides himself in preparing clients and their compliance programs to avert regulatory issues, but also assists clients through examinations and enforcement issues. In addition, Max assists advisers that manage private investment funds. In his little spare time, Max enjoys the Peloton (both stationary and road), golf, craft beer, and spending time with his wife and two children.