Author Archives: Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation

The Shifting Balance of Power Between Shareholders and the Board

I have recently completed a paper, entitled “The Shifting Balance of Power Between Shareholders and the Board: News Corp’s Exodus to Delaware and Other Antipodean Tales”. The paper is posted on SSRN here. The abstract to the paper is as follows: The balance of power between shareholders and the board of directors is a contentious […]

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Improving the Structure of Executives’ Equity-based Pay Arrangements

I have just posted on SSRN a paper that put forwards a new approach to improving the structure of executives’ equity-based pay arrangements, Hands-Off Options. The current draft is available here. The abstract is as follows: Despite recent reforms, public company executives can still use inside information to time their stock sales, secretly boosting their […]

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Contractarians, Waiver of Liability Provisions, and the Race to the Bottom

We have just posted a paper on SSRN, Opting Only In: Contractarians, Waiver of Liability Provisions, and the Race to the Bottom, challenging one of the core positions of the contractarian approach to corporate law. Contractarians espouse an enabling approach to regulation allowing corporations to opt in or opt out and oppose a mandatory approach […]

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Posted in Academic Research, Boards of Directors, Empirical Research, Legislative & Regulatory Developments | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

‘Law and Finance’ Revisited

I have just released a working paper on the measurement of shareholder protection around the world, entitled “’Law and Finance’ Revisited” and available on SSRN here. The abstract is as follows: The “Antidirector Rights Index” from La Porta et al.’s “Law and Finance” (1998) has been used as a measure of shareholder protection in almost […]

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Blog and Program Members Included in the “500 Leading Lawyers” List

Lawdragon magazine presented its third annual list of the “500 Leading Lawyers in America,” and the list includes eight individuals who are affiliated with the Harvard Law School Program on Corporate Governance and/or the Harvard Law School Corporate Governance Blog. The 500 Leading Lawyers list includes professor Lucian Bebchuk (Harvard Law School), who serves as […]

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SEC Advisory Committee Interim Report on Improvements to Financial Reporting

On February 14, the SEC Advisory Committee on Improvements to Financial Reporting presented its interim report to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The report includes 12 developed proposals, conceptual approaches representing the Committee’s initial views on matters, and currently identified matters for further consideration. The key themes of the report are the following: increasing emphasis […]

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Shareholder-Centric vs. Director-Centric Corporate Governance

I’ve been giving some thought to the dust up last year between Marty Lipton and other governance experts as to whether Pfizer’s initiative of having several of its independent directors meet with its largest institutional investors represented a landmark in the decline of director-centric corporate governance, and have also been thinking about what we mean […]

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Posted in Boards of Directors, Practitioner Publications | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Does a Director Qua Director Have Standing to Sue Derivatively?

Editor’s Note: This post is from Steven M. Haas of Hunton & Williams LLP. This post is part of the Delaware law series, which is cosponsored by the Forum and Corporation Service Company; links to other posts in the series are available here. Does a Director Qua Director Have Standing to Sue Derivatively? No, so […]

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Say-on-Pay in the UK and Australia – and now in the US?

Verizon, Par Pharmaceutical and Aflac became the first US companies over the last year to adopt policies requiring an advisory vote of shareholders on company executive compensation practices. A network of over 70 institutional and individual investors lead by AFSCME and Walden Asset Management announced in January that adoption of this ‘say on pay’ policy […]

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On Being a Corporate Lawyer

On Monday February 4, HLS Professor John C. Coates IV delivered his inaugural lecture “On Being a Corporate Lawyer” on the occasion of his appointment as the John F. Cogan, Jr. Professor of Law and Economics. Coates’ lecture surveyed recent trends in corporate law practice—the field, he said, which continues to draw the majority of […]

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