Sky Blog
A committee of law professors that I co-chair with Lucian Bebchuk has petitioned the SEC to develop rules requiring public companies to disclose the use of shareholder money on politics. The petition has received unprecedented support, including comments from more …
A panel of three judges in the D.C. Circuit stunned Washington on Friday by striking down President Obama’s recess appointments to the NLRB in Noel Canning v. NLRB on a basis much more sweeping than had been anticipated. The two …
Many domestic and foreign companies that file periodic reports with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC” or “Commission”) are now coming to grips with three novel and highly prescriptive disclosure requirements dictated by Congress. What distinguishes these new requirements …
William Cary’s opinion for the SEC in In re Cady, Roberts & Co. built the foundation on which the modern law of insider trading rests. Today, we have a stable framework of three distinct legal theories—the classical theory, the misappropriation …
More than 30 years have passed since I completed the interviews for the first edition of The Transformation of Wall Street.
My interview with Bill Cary on October 28th and 29th, 1980 was particularly memorable. I …
The majority of pundits and market observers have only tuned into the effectiveness of the SEC as financial market regulator since 2008, when the financial system nearly collapsed. So far, criticism has been relatively shallow. But when one of the …
Over the past fifteen years, the SEC’s reputation has been routinely sullied – in the press, by the Courts and certainly in the halls of Congress. Although the mud slung at the SEC has intensified since the 2008 financial crisis …
Increasing amounts of communications by and relating to companies are taking place through social media. Broadly defined, social media refers to forms of electronic communication through which users share information, ideas and other content (using text, audio, video and images). …
On January 14, Robert S. Khuzami and George S. Canellos published their response in the National Law Journal to my earlier column, “SEC Enforcement: What Has Gone Wrong?” Their column—“Unfair Claims, Untenable Solution”(available here)—minces no words, but …
Since 2010, when the U.S. Supreme Court unleashed corporate political spending in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, shareholder advocates have been warning of the dire consequences of secret campaign contributions and demanding that corporations reveal their political spending. …
This is the eighth year that we have provided an annual review of key Delaware corporate and commercial decisions. During 2012, we reviewed and summarized over 200 decisions from Delaware’s Supreme Court and Court of Chancery on corporate and commercial …
The humbling of two global banks in recent weeks has been greeted very differently on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Still, from the perspective of either side, large fines for interest rate rigging by Swiss bank UBS, and money-laundering by …
In a second Chancery transcript ruling on the subject in recent weeks, Chancellor Leo E. Strine, Jr. has made clear that Delaware has no per se rule against “Don’t Ask, Don’t Waive” standstill provisions (which prohibit a party subject to …
In two recent rulings, the Chancery Court of the State of Delaware has provided important guidance on how so-called “don’t ask, don’t waive” standstill provisions—which are designed to encourage bidders to provide their best offers during an auction—will be viewed …
In the policy-oriented paper, “Re-energizing the IPO Market,”which will be published in the 2013 Brookings Press book Restructuring to Speed Economic Recovery, I summarize results from a number of my related co-authored papers and address why IPO …
Yesterday, Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP released its January 2013 Dodd-Frank Progress Report, which can be found here. This report is one in a series of Davis Polk presentations that illustrate graphically the progress of the rulemaking work that …
A disturbingly persistent pattern has emerged in U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission enforcement cases that involves three key elements: (1) The commission rarely sues individual defendants at large financial institutions, settling instead with the entity only; (2) when it does …