The emerging position of Compliance Officers (COs) poses issues concerning their status and relations to Law Officers (LOs). Both professionals deal with law, However, LO’s position is recognized and established. Compliance is a recently recognized profession. Moreover, their services differ.

LOs advise and represent their institutions in legal matters. COs monitor their institutions’ activities for violations of the law and help prevent violations. LO is telling managements what they can do. CO is telling managements what their institutions should not do. Compliance programs might reduce corporate legal risks, but, may conflict with short-term business considerations. COs cannot shelter their corporation’ information, as LOs can. Arguably, LO’s focus on clients’ legal interests; COs act to prevent client’s legal violations.

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Introduction

Fiduciary rules appear in family law, surrogate decision-making, laws of agency, employment, pensions, remedies, banking, financial institutions, corporations, charities, not for profit organizations, medical services and international law. Fiduciary concepts guide areas of knowledge: economics, psychology; moral norms; and pluralism. Fiduciary law was recognized in Roman law and the British common law. It was embedded decades ago in religious Jewish, Christian, and Islamic laws. Internationally, fiduciary law appears in European, Chinese, Japanese and Indian laws.

What explains the expansion and predicts the future of fiduciary principles? Part One offers a short description of fiduciary relationships. Part Two describes the growth of expertise in living beings—from genetic to chosen cooperative specialization. Part Three notes the law’s encouragement of the relationships while discouraging its potential abuses. Part Four highlights criticisms of fiduciary law. Part Five speculates about the future of fiduciary law.

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In an earlier post (available here), I expressed concerns about Commissioner Gallagher’s decision to issue (jointly with Professor Joseph Grundfest) a paper accusing Harvard University and the Shareholder Rights Project (SRP) of violating securities laws when they assisted investors submitting declassification proposals. Subsequently, a group of thirty-four senior corporate and securities law professors (including myself) issued a joint statement (available on the Forum here). In addition to opining that the allegations in the paper were meritless, the joint statement expressed concerns that a sitting SEC Commissioner has chosen to issue such allegations. However, others have taken the view that sitting Commissioners should be as free as other individuals to express opinions that specific individuals or organizations violated the law. I beg to differ, for the following reasons.

Sitting Commissioners may, and should be encouraged, to publicly discuss policy problems and issues. However, they should avoid publishing accusations against specific individuals or organizations, except as part of the SEC process. Publishing such accusations should not be an acceptable behavior by a sitting SEC Commissioners. That is even though during their tenure, SEC Commissioners are likely to disagree with others about potential legal accusations against specific parties.

So what is wrong with a publication of a Commissioner’s views about possible actions against Harvard University? Most persons could do the same with impunity. The answer is that the Commissioner is bestowed with power to participate in a decision to bring a suit by the SEC. None of us has this power. Yet, the Commissioner’s power is not granted for his own use. The power to participate in these decisions is bestowed on the Commissioner as a fiduciary for the purpose of serving this country and only pursuant to the processes of the Agency.

I hope that this Commissioner and future Commissioners will distinguish between expressing a policy opinion and issuing accusations of legal violations against specific parties. I hope that the discussions and disagreement on this issue will guide future Commissioners’ speeches: Please speak your mind. But do not give any whiff of accusations against specific parties except by following carefully and fully the Commission’s process. Thus, regardless of scholarly and legal arguments, and regardless of the motivation of the Commissioner’s actions, his inappropriate statements are at issue, and I am very sorry he made them.

One of the many positive attributes of the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation (“Forum”) is that it is democratic. It accepts and posts submissions on its website reflecting a valuable diversity of opinion, philosophy and perspective. Nowhere is this better borne out than in the ongoing back-and-forth discussion regarding a recent, substantively valuable, paper (here) co-authored by SEC Commissioner Dan Gallagher and Stanford Law Professor (and former SEC Commissioner) Joseph Grundfest (summarized on the Forum here). The Paper was critiqued with valuable substantive observations by Professor Jonathan Macey (here, here, and here), some of which were, in turn, responded to by Professor Grundfest (here and here). I foolishly entered this debate on the Forum, acknowledging the valuable insights Professors Grundfest and Macey both were offering, recommending that their continuing debate, and any other contributors to it, focus on the important substance of the Gallagher/Grundfest Paper (here). I had hoped thereby that we all might be spared from certain forms of future commentary (especially of a personal nature) that strayed from the Paper’s and Professor Macey’s scholarly substantive analysis.

In my Forum post, I confirmed the correctness of the Gallagher/Grundfest Paper’s unassailable core observation—irrespective of whether any particular proposal (or the proponent of that proposal) espousing the elimination of staggered boards in fact violated the SEC’s proxy fraud rules—those antifraud rules, by their terms, undoubtedly apply to proponents of shareholder proposals as well as to public companies’ proxy solicitation materials. In submitting my post, I suppose I anticipated that—no matter how balanced a presentation I might endeavor to offer—if emotion were to become a substitute for analysis—I might soon be swept up in any subsequent cross-fire. What I did not expect, however, was that a new voice—belonging to Boston University School of Law’s Professor Tamar Frankel, one of the Country’s pre-eminent legal experts on the application of the federal securities laws to mutual funds and other investment companies (as well as those who advise and manage collective portfolios), would enter the fray, and question the accuracy of my response to a newspaper reporter about prior precedent for a sitting SEC Commissioner to express his views on whether current/recent activities might violate of the law (here).

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Recently SEC Commissioner Daniel M. Gallagher issued a paper, titled Did Harvard Violate Federal Securities Law? (described on the Forum here and in a WSJ article here). The paper, co-authored with Professor Joseph Grundfest, expressed the Commissioner’s opinions regarding shareholder proposals and the Harvard Law School clinic that assisted public pension funds filing those proposals in the previous three years. The Commissioner did not mince his words. In his opinion, Harvard University and its clinic violated the securities laws by assisting proponents that failed to include references to academic studies contrary to the views of those proponents. The Commissioner was clearly presenting a threat to the University and its clinic. However, his statements also raise a number of questions about his own behavior.

To begin with, the Commissioner should have recognized that, as Professor Macey has shown in a series of posts (available on the Forum here, here, and here), his accusations are without merit and the proposals were entirely consistent with current SEC rules, policies and practices. Furthermore, in making his accusations, the Commissioner deviated from standard SEC procedures and practices.

I am unaware of any case in which a sitting SEC Commissioner released a paper accusing particular individuals or organizations of legal violations, and urging enforcement action and/or private suits against them, or used such public accusations as an instrument for urging other Commissioners or the SEC staff to change their policy. In a recent comment to the New York Times, Harvey Pitt brought up as a possible precedent a 1974 speech by then-Commissioner A.A. Sommer who expressed concerns about “going-private” transactions. However, Sommer’s speech (available on the SEC website here) did not mention (let alone accuse) any particular individuals or organizations (the only mention of any names in the Speech is in footnote citations to past court cases). There is a big difference between discussing general policy problems, which SEC Commissioners should be doing, and attacking or urging actions against particular individuals and organizations, which SEC Commissioners should not be doing.

The SEC Canon of Ethics (available here), which is binding on SEC Commissioners, warns SEC officials to be wary of using their “power to defame and destroy”. The Cannon of Ethics guides SEC officials to avoid defaming individuals or organizations. The Canon provides:

“§ 200.66 Investigations. The power to investigate carries with it the power to defame and destroy. In determining to exercise their investigatory power, members should concern themselves only with the facts known to them and the reasonable inferences from those facts. A member should never suggest, vote for, or participate in an investigation aimed at a particular individual for reasons of animus, prejudice or vindictiveness. The requirements of the particular case alone should induce the exercise of the investigatory power, and no public pronouncement of the pendency of such an investigation should be made in the absence of reasonable evidence that the law has been violated and that the public welfare demand it.”

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Mammoth bank holding companies (BHCs) have contributed to the 2008 crisis. Their “contribution” may stem from their structure.

Most BHCs are not banks but “financial malls,” of “shops” serving as brokers-dealers, underwriters, advisers (to mutual funds, trust funds, and wealthy individuals), banks proper, insurance, lending, “securitizers,” guarantors and traders for the BHCs’ own account, and more. A BHC owns the mall’s financial shops, collects their revenues, and raises funds from investors. Its management finances the shops and rewards shop managers. Managing the variety of shops that closely reflect the entire financial system is difficult. Not surprisingly, BHCs periodically produce enormous profits and bear enormous losses.

Compare BHCs structure to other malls: In business malls, mall owners serve all the shops’ needs. But these shops (pharmacies or restaurants) have different owners, customers, and regulators. Mutual fund “malls” are serviced by one adviser but owned by investors. Displeased investors can decimate their funds by redeeming their shares. Under the structure of Vanguard, the largest in the United States today, the shops—the funds (their investors) own the mall, and pay for its services. As to performance, each fund “sits on its own bottom,” judged by its shareholders, rather than by a management or a holding company’s shareholders. Yet, a fund’s failure does not shake the economy and taxpayers do not bear the cost.

The BHC structural model raises serious disadvantages for their investors, and for the financial system, against which current regulation does not effectively protect:

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