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Four Seniors Who Received Fulbright Award

Uncovering the Hidden Conflicts in Securities Class Action Litigation: Lessons from the State Street Case

Courts, Congress, and commentators have long worried that stockholder plaintiffs in securities and M&A litigation and their counsel may pursue suits that benefit themselves rather than absent stockholders or the corporations in which they invest. Following congressional reforms that encouraged the appointment of institutional stockholders as lead plaintiffs in securities actions, significant academic commentary has focused on the problem of “pay to play”—the possibility that class action law firms encourage litigation by making donations to politicians with influence over institutional stockholders, particularly public sector pension funds. A recent federal securities class action in the District of Massachusetts, however, suggests that the networks of influence between class plaintiffs and their counsel are much more complex and difficult to detect. After appointing a special master to look into fee issues, the court discovered that a large class action firm had paid over $4 million in “bare referral” fees to an attorney who did little work on the case but had recommended the larger firm to a public sector pension fund “after considerable favors, political activity, money spent and time dedicated in Arkansas.” This is only one of the less-visible ways that class counsel may route benefits to class plaintiffs. Current class action processes do not routinely identify these potential conflicts of interest. Instead, they tend to surface when nonlitigants bring them to public attention. Because neither the lead plaintiff nor the defendants have a strong incentive to voluntarily address these conflicts, we propose revisions to the class certification process that would require class plaintiffs to disclose more information regarding their relationships with class counsel. We also propose that courts routinely appoint special masters or class guardians as part of the settlement approval process to ensure that class plaintiffs’ statements are subject to discovery and adversarial review

Pits and the architecture of deposition narratives of social practice in the neolithic of North-East England

This doctoral thesis examines the practice of depositing material culture and its relationship with social change during the Neolithic period in north-east England. For the purposes of this study the Neolithic is defined as the period in which the pottery styles of Carinated Ware, Impressed Ware and Grooved Ware were made and used. The study area encompasses County Durham, Northumberland and the now defunct county of Tyne and Wear. Previous work on Neolithic deposition has been apt to confine it within a series of dichotomous relationships: the potency of material culture versus the power of performance; rubbish versus 'meaningful' material; and the structured versus the unstructured deposit. This study demonstrates how these oppositions are unnecessarily reductive and result from modern classifications of artefacts - norms concerning the value of refuse and the role of 'symbolic' material - that have come to be imposed upon the past. By undertaking a statistical and comparative analysis of deposited material culture from the North-East, this research emphasises the complexity of past artefact classification, and the transformative role that depositional practices can have upon whole societies. It also shows how acts of deposition are intimately connected with architectural forms, be they single posts in pits, or complexes of henges. By utilising a biographical and narrative approach to interpretation, eschewing the search for the 'symbolic' in artefact disposal, the deposition of material culture is exposed as central to the ontological security of Neolithic communities and the built environment that they created

Monitoring: Ensuring Country Representatives Efficiency and Accountability

This study is a review of Exit Interviews (EIs) of World For World Organization (WFWO) appointed Country Representatives (CRs) who have served their various terms of office from 2008-2015 and WFWO executive management’s internal Performance Score assigned to each CR during the same period. The review was done with the view to uncovering potential operational loophole and monitoring deficiency that may have contributed to the CRs inefficiency, mismanagement, and fraudulent activities that have triggered concerns among executive management, sponsors, and other stakeholders. Following, it applies qualitative comparative analysis to measure the impact the deficiency and loophole have on the CRs’ efficiency (i.e., their Performance Score).https://orb.binghamton.edu/mpa_capstone/1024/thumbnail.jp