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

We are thirty-four senior professors from seventeen leading law schools whose teaching and research focus on corporate and securities law. We write to respectfully urge SEC Commissioner Daniel M. Gallagher, and his co-author Professor Joseph Grundfest, to withdraw the allegations, issued in a paper released last month (described on the Forum here), that Harvard and the Shareholder Rights Project (SRP), a clinic at its law school, violated the securities laws by assisting institutional investors in submitting shareholder proposals to declassify corporate boards.

We conduct our teaching and research at seventeen different law schools throughout the United States, including at Boston University, Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, Duke, George Washington, Georgetown, Harvard, Michigan, New York University, Northwestern, Stanford, Texas, UCLA, Vanderbilt, Virginia and Yale. We write in our individual capacities; our institutional affiliations are noted below for identification purposes only.

Members of our bipartisan group differ widely in our views on corporate law issues, including on the appropriate use of staggered boards and shareholder proposals. However, we all agree that Commissioner Gallagher and Professor Grundfest should withdraw their accusations.

First, the authors’ allegations are meritless. The Gallagher/Grundfest paper accuses Harvard and the SRP of violating federal securities law by assisting investors with shareholder proposals that did not include sufficient references to certain academic studies. These accusations are deeply flawed. (For a detailed analysis of flaws in the paper, see the posts by Professor Jonathan Macey available here, here, and here). For example, the proposals were consistent with the SEC’s long-standing policy on shareholder proposals; none of the more than one hundred public companies receiving proposals, many represented by the country’s premier law firms, raised any of the claims put forward by the authors; and there is no precedent for an enforcement action or private suit against shareholder proponents, let alone those assisting them, of the type that the paper urged against Harvard and the SRP. Members of our group do not all share the same view on each of these and the other flaws in the authors’ analysis. However, we all agree that the allegations of securities law violations in the Gallagher/Grundfest paper are meritless.

Furthermore, while it is always regrettable when meritless allegations are raised by any author, we are especially concerned that a sitting SEC Commissioner has chosen to issue such allegations without support from a prior investigation by the SEC staff and without due process of law. While the Commissioner has indicated his interest in changing the SEC’s long-held policy in this area, meritless accusations against private parties should not be part of an effort to bring about such a change. We worry that Commissioner Gallagher’s decision to level meritless allegations against specific private parties will have adverse consequences for the important work that the SEC must do.

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