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. Fri, 07 Aug 2026 11:32:32 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.5.9 https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/cropped-photography-4-e1706898544564-1-32x32.png Responding to Objections to Shining Light on Corporate Political Spending (1): The Claim of Immateriality – The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu 32 32 Responding to Objections to Shining Light on Corporate Political Spending (1): The Claim of Immateriality https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2013/04/04/responding-to-objections-to-shining-light-on-corporate-political-spending-1-the-claim-of-immateriality/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=responding-to-objections-to-shining-light-on-corporate-political-spending-1-the-claim-of-immateriality https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2013/04/04/responding-to-objections-to-shining-light-on-corporate-political-spending-1-the-claim-of-immateriality/#comments Thu, 04 Apr 2013 13:26:44 +0000 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/corpgov/?p=43080?d=20150105102722EST Posted by Lucian Bebchuk, Harvard Law School, and Robert J. Jackson, Jr., Columbia Law School, on Thursday, April 4, 2013
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 requesting that the SEC require all public companies to disclose their political spending, discussed on the Forum here. Bebchuk and Jackson are also co-authors of Corporate Political Speech: Who Decides? and Shining Light on Corporate Political Spending, coming out this month in the Georgetown Law Journal. This post is the first in a series of posts, based on the Shining Light article, in which Bebchuk and Jackson respond to objections to an SEC rule requiring disclosure of corporate political spending; the full series of posts is available here.

A committee of academics that we co-chaired has submitted a rulemaking petition urging that the SEC develop rules requiring disclosure of corporate political spending. Our petition has attracted more than 490,000 comment letters, the overwhelming majority of which support the petition. The petition has also attracted opponents, including prominent members of Congress, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, legal academics, and intermediaries that facilitate undisclosed corporate political spending such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. And the SEC has indicated that the agency plans to address the petition’s request for rules in this area during 2013.

Given the expected SEC consideration of the subject, we have written an article, Shining Light on Corporate Political Spending, coming out this month in the Georgetown Law Journal, that puts forward a comprehensive case for the rulemaking we advocated in the petition and responds to each of the ten objections that opponents have raised in comment letters filed with the SEC or elsewhere. We show in this article that these objections, either individually or collectively, provide no basis for opposing rules requiring public companies to disclose political spending to their investors.

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