Symbiotic Federalism and the Structure of Corporate Law

Enron. Worldcom. Adelphia. Global Crossing. Tyco. Corporate scandals have made the front pages. Congress has gotten in the act. Members have held numerous hearings, given speeches, and, ultimately, passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. The Securities and Exchange Commission ( SEC ) has been busy writing regulations and leaning on the stock exchanges to modify their listing requirements, all in order to restore investor confidence. Federal prosecutors have indicted executives of Enron, Worldcom, and Adelphia and their minions in the auditing and investment banking industries. State officials have also been active. Several states have passed statutes that resemble or go beyond the strictures of Sarbanes-Oxley. Robert Morgenthau, the Manhattan District Attorney, has indicted the CEO and other officers of Tyco. And New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer has vastly increased his political standing by taking on the brokerage houses, perhaps following in the footsteps of Rudolf Giuliani, another renowned prosecutor of corporate criminals. The leaders of corporate America have been galvanized to action, forming committees and task forces, issuing reports, and giving speeches. But where has Delaware been through all this? No bills have been introduced in Delaware\u27s legislature; no hearings held by its committees; its law enforcement agents have taken no action; and its executives have stayed mum. How is it that Delaware-the home of what has long been viewed as the de facto national corporate law-has sat on the sidelines

Price Discrimination in the Market for Corporate Law

This Article shows how Delaware uses its power in the market for incorporations to increase its profits through price discrimination. Price discrimination entails charging different prices to different consumers according to their willingness to pay. Two features of Delaware law constitute price discrimination. First, Delaware's uniquely structured franchise tax schedule assesses a higher tax to public than to nonpublic firms and, among public firms, to larger firms and firms more likely to be involved in future acquisitions. Second, Delaware's litigation-intensive corporate law effectively price discriminates between firms according to the level of their involvement in corporate disputes. From the perspective of social welfare, price discrimination between public and nonpublic firms is likely to enhance efficiency (although the efficiency effect of franchise tax price discrimination among public firms is indeterminate). By contrast, price discrimination through litigation-intensive corporate law is likely to reduce efficiency

Path Dependence in Corporate Contracting: Increasing Returns, Herd Behavior and Cognitive Biases

Part I of this Article reviews our prior analysis of increasing returns in corporate contract terms. Within the rubric of increasing returns, we discuss learning and network externalities in corporate contracts. Parts II and III examine how agency costs and behavioral biases can lead to standardization

Corporate Governance Regulation through Nonprosecution

Over the last decade, federal corporate criminal enforcement policy has undergone a significant transformation. Firms that commit crimes are no longer simply required to pay fines. Instead, prosecutors and firms enter into pretrial diversion agreements (PDAs). Prosecutors regularly use PDAs to impose mandates on firms, creating new duties that alter firms’ internal operations or governance structures. DOJ policy favors the use of such mandates for any firm with a deficient compliance program at the time of the crime. This Article evaluates PDA mandates to determine when and how prosecutors should use them to deter corporate crime. We find that the current DOJ policy on mandates is misguided and that mandates should be imposed more selectively. Specifically, mandates are appropriate only if a firm is plagued by policing agency costs—in that the firm’s managers did not act to deter or report wrongdoing because they benefited personally from tolerating wrongdoing or from deficient corporate policing. Moreover, only mandates that are properly designed to reduce policing agency costs are appropriate. The policing agency cost justification for mandates that we develop calls into question both the extent to which mandates are used and the type of mandates that are imposed by prosecutors

Forum-Selection Provisions in Corporate Contracts

We consider the emergent practice of including clauses in corporate certificates of incorporation or bylaws that specify an exclusive judicial forum for lawsuits. According to their proponents and most courts that have considered the question, such forum-terms are, and should be, enforceable as contractual choice-of-forum provisions. We argue that treating corporate charter and bylaw forum-terms as a matter of ordinary contract doctrine is neither logical nor justified. Because charters and bylaws involve the state in ways that are at odds with private-ordering principles and because they entail only a limited form of “consent,” an analysis of enforceability must account for the hybrid nature—public and private—of such terms. Specifically, the state’s role should render forum-terms invalid that oust federal courts of diversity jurisdiction. Likewise, because of a lack of any meaningful consent, a forum-term that applies to a claim that is neither derivative nor brought by a shareholder should not be enforced. In other situations, courts should consider, before enforcing a corporate forum-term, whether adjudicating the entire dispute in the designated forum would be efficient (e.g., whether the court has subject-matter jurisdiction over all claims) or fair (e.g., whether the procedural rules, including the limitations period, of the designated forum are substantially more advantageous to the parties who decided to adopt the forum-term than those of the state that supplies the substantive law). In some cases, efficiency and fairness factors will argue against the forum-term’s enforcement. On the other hand, several factors in other corporate settings and, in particular, in merger-related representative suits, may tip the balance towards enforcement. First, the fact that “consent” by class members to these suits is also limited counter-balances concerns about the limited consent shareholders may have given to the forum-term. Second, a forum-term reduces the ability to avoid the crack-down on “disclosure-only” settlements—that provide broad releases, but entail minimal recovery—that Delaware courts have embarked on. Finally, we consider the implications of corporate forum-terms to debates about interstate competition for incorporation and for corporate litigation. A state may adopt forum-term legislation to enhance its attractiveness as a corporate domicile or to protect shareholders in domestic corporations. However, legislation that discriminates against out-of-state courts and seeks to centralize corporate litigation in the state’s own courts for the benefit of its local bar may be vulnerable to non-enforcement in the courts of sister states

Hedge Funds in Corporate Governance and Corporate Control.

Hedge funds have become critical players in both corporate governance and corporate control. In this article, we document and examine the nature of hedge fund activism, how and why it differs from activism by traditional institutional investors, and its implications for corporate governance and regulatory reform. We argue that hedge fund activism differs from activism by traditional institutions in several ways: it is directed at significant changes in individual companies (rather than small, systemic changes), it entails higher costs, and it is strategic and ex ante (rather than intermittent and ex post). The reasons for these differences may lie in the incentive structures of hedge fund managers as well as in the fact that traditional institutions face regulatory barriers, political constraints, or conflicts of interest that make activism less profitable than it is for hedge funds. But the differences may also be due to the fact that traditional institutions pursue a diversification strategy that is difficult to combine with strategic activism. Although hedge funds hold great promise as active shareholders, their intense involvement in corporate governance and control also potentially raises two kinds of problems: The interests of hedge funds sometimes diverge from those of their fellow shareholders; and the intensity of hedge fund activism imposes substantial stress that the regulatory system may not be able to withstand. The resulting problems, however, are relatively isolated and narrow, do not broadly undermine the value of hedge fund activism as a whole, and do not warrant major additional regulatory interventions. The sharpest accusation leveled against activist funds is that activism is designed to achieve a short-term payoff at the expense of long-term profitability. Although we consider this a potentially serious problem that arguably pervades hedge fund activism, we conclude that a sufficient case for legal intervention has not been made. This conclusion results from the uncertainties about whether short-termism is in fact a real problem and how much hedge fund activism is driven by excessive short-termism. But, most importantly, it stems from our view that market forces and adaptive devices taken by companies individually are better designed than regulation to deal with the potential negative effects of hedge fund short-termism while preserving the positive effects of hedge-fund activism