The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu The leading online blog in the fields of corporate governance and financial regulation. Wed, 29 Apr 2026 14:12:57 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.5.8 https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/cropped-photography-4-e1706898544564-1-32x32.png The SEC is Now Actively Considering the Rulemaking Petition on Corporate Political Spending – The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu 32 32 The SEC is Now Actively Considering the Rulemaking Petition on Corporate Political Spending https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/11/09/the-sec-is-now-actively-considering-the-rulemaking-petition-on-corporate-political-spending/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-sec-is-now-actively-considering-the-rulemaking-petition-on-corporate-political-spending https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/11/09/the-sec-is-now-actively-considering-the-rulemaking-petition-on-corporate-political-spending/#comments Fri, 09 Nov 2012 14:12:57 +0000 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/corpgov/?p=36041?d=20150105105138EST Posted by Lucian Bebchuk, Harvard Law School, and Robert J. Jackson, Jr., Columbia Law School, on Friday, November 9, 2012
Editor's Note:

Lucian Bebchuk is Professor of Law, Economics, and Finance at Harvard Law School. Robert J. Jackson, Jr. is Associate Professor of Law and Milton Handler Fellow at Columbia Law School. Bebchuk and Jackson served as co-chairs of the Committee on Disclosure of Corporate Political Spending, which filed a rulemaking petition concerning political spending, discussed on the Forum here and here. Posts discussing their articles on corporate political spending, Corporate Political Speech: Who Decides?, and Shining Light on Corporate Political Spending, are available here.

According to a WSJ.com report, the Director and Deputy Director of the SEC’s Division of Corporate Finance indicated that the Division is now actively considering a rulemaking petition that was submitted by a committee of ten law professors that we co-chaired. The petition urged the SEC to adopt rules that would require public companies to disclose information about their political spending. At a conference this week, both the Director and Deputy Director indicated that the Division is currently looking into whether to recommend that the SEC issue such a rule.

As the Journal report notes, so far the SEC has received more than 300,000 comments on our petition—to our knowledge, more than any other rulemaking proposal in the Commission’s history. The overwhelming majority of these comments are supportive of the petition, leading the Director of the SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance to observe that the proposal “obviously [involves] an issue that’s extremely important to many.” In addition to the comments in the regulatory file, the petition has received support from a sitting Commissioner of the SEC, a substantial number of members of both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, and editorials in the New York Times and Bloomberg News.

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