VOLUME 13 • ISSUE 1 • PRINT
MANDATORY DISCLOSURE FOR ETHICAL SUPPLY CHAINS: MARKET RESPONSES TO CONFLICT MINERAL REPORTS
Maria Maciá
Mandatory disclosure requirements for corporate supply chains have the potential to leverage consumer and investor sensibilities to incentivize corporations to source ethically. Despite their growing prevalence, there are few empirical studies of whether they actually put pressure on companies. This Article examines the consumer and investor responses to corporate supply chain disclosures made pursuant to Section 1502 of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. The act requires publicly traded companies to disclose to the Securities and Exchange Commission whether their supply chain contains “conflict minerals” (minerals whose sourcing can fund human rights violations in the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo and surrounding areas).
VOLUME 13 • ISSUE 1 • PRINT
THE ESOTERIC QUESTION OF WHETHER CORRUPTION VIOLATES HUMAN RIGHTS AND THE REAL-WORLD PRACTICE OF COMPLIANCE
Philip M. Nichols
Corruption inflicts extraordinary damage on and presents significant challenges to society, people, and the planet. In response, polities around the world have knit together a global anticorruption regime, a network of local laws, treaties, arbitral rules, and administrative regulations. Although styled as universal and as aimed at corruption, this article’s analysis of the regime finds that it aims squarely at bribery, and that imposes the greatest burden on individual business firms. Individual business firms must create effective programs to prevent people associated with those firms from participating in bribery. The lively debate among legal scholars over whether or not corruption violates human rights may seem to have little to do with the important practicalities of developing effective anticorruption programs. This article finds, however, an important connection. The most effective anticorruption programs require development of organizational cultures that guide people toward compliance. Organizational culture consists of norms and rules for making decisions and acting. The debate over corruption and human rights reflects two competing frameworks for ethical decision-making. Frameworks are akin to norms and rules, thus resolution of the debate could strongly influence how business firms construct cultures. Unfortunately, however, the two positions in this debate seem irreconcilable. This article identifies the as-yet unacknowledged danger that contemplation of an irreconcilable debate might introduce uncertainty into a firm’s organizational culture. This article does not conclude that business firms should eschew contemplation of the debate, but instead suggests that firms rely on other moral or social justifications, and flex their “ethical muscles” by developing creative anticorruption programs.
VOLUME 11 • ONLINE
PATENT ENFORCEMENT, SHAREHOLDER VALUE, AND FIRM INNOVATIONS: EVIDENCE FROM THE SUPREME COURT RULING IN TC HEARTLAND (2017)
Andy Law, Buhui Qiu, and Teng Wang1Andy Law is affiliated with the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Constitution Ave, N.W., Washington, DC 20551, USA; Email: andy.law@frb.gov. Buhui Qiu is affiliated with the University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia; Email: buhui.qiu@sydney.edu.au. Teng Wang is affiliated with the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Constitution Ave, N.W., Washington, DC 20551, USA; Email: teng.wang@frb.gov. We are greatly indebted to Annie Zhou for her great help with the patent data collection. The views expressed in this article are the authors’ alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Federal Reserve Board or the United States government.
This paper studies the impact of patent enforcement on shareholder value and firms’ innovation patterns. Using the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case TC Heartland LLC v. Kraft Foods Group Brands LLC (2017), which significantly constrained forum shopping practices in patent litigation, we find that the weakening of patent holders’ ability to enforce intellectual property protection leads to more negative stock return reactions for firms that are more innovation-intensive before the ruling. We further find that weakened enforcement of patent protection shifted firms’ innovation patterns. While innovation-intensive firms do not reduce their overall R&D investment, they choose to keep their innovation outputs as trade secrets and apply for patents significantly less frequently. Our findings shed new light on the current debate on intellectual property protection.
VOLUME 11 • ONLINE
GE ENERGY V. OUTOKUMPU: NON-SIGNATORIES CAN NOW ENFORCE INTERNATIONAL COMMERCIAL ARBITRATION AGREEMENTS ON EQUITABLE ESTOPPEL GROUNDS
Tamar Meshel2Assistant Professor, University of Alberta Faculty of Law
The recent unanimous decision of the United States Supreme Court (“Supreme Court” or “Court”) in GE Energy Power Conversion France SAS, Corp. v. Outokumpu Stainless USA, LLC (“Outokumpu”) resolves a relatively straightforward question: whether a non-signatory to an international commercial arbitration agreement can enforce it on the basis of the equitable estoppel doctrine. The United States Courts of Appeals for the Eleventh and Ninth Circuits had categorically ruled out the availability of equitable estoppel in this context. In contrast, the First and Fourth Circuits had applied the doctrine to enforce international commercial arbitration agreements by or against non-signatories. Answering the question in the affirmative and reversing the Eleventh Circuit, the Supreme Court has now resolved this split among the circuit courts. Its decision also brings much-needed clarity and predictability to the enforcement of international commercial arbitration agreements in the United States. However, in its narrow judgment the Supreme Court left unresolved two related and equally contentious questions: first, whether international commercial arbitration agreements must be signed to be valid and enforceable in the United States, and second, how the equitable estoppel doctrine is to be formulated in this context and whether state or federal law governs its application.
VOLUME 10 • ISSUE 1 • PRINT
THE UNTENABLE CASE FOR KEEPING INVESTORS IN THE DARK
Lucian A. Bebchuk, Robert J. Jackson Jr., James D. Nelson & Roberto Tallarita
This Article seeks to contribute to the heated debate on the disclosure of political spending by public companies. A rulemaking petition urging SEC rules requiring such disclosure has attracted over 1.2 million comments since its sub- mission almost nine years ago, but the SEC has not yet made a decision on the petition. The petition has sparked a debate among academics, members of the investor and issuer communities, current and former SEC commissioners, and members of Congress. In the course of this debate, opponents of mandatory dis- closure have put forward a wide range of objections to such SEC mandates. This Article provides a comprehensive and detailed analysis of these objections, and it shows that they fail to support an opposition to transparency in this area.
VOLUME 10 • ISSUE 1 • PRINT
BOUNTIES FOR ERRORS: MARKET TESTING CONTRACTS
Robert K. Rasmussen & Michael Simkovic
Many scholars and courts have championed a plain meaning approach to interpreting commercial contracts between sophisticated parties. These parties are assumed to carefully draft contracts to make their rights and obligations clear and knowable if the language is enforced as written. However, recent events in the commercial lending arena have raised questions about the efficacy of this approach. Aggressive parties have combed through reams of complex documents looking for ways around seemingly clear contractual barriers. For example, Hovnanian promised to intentionally default on a debt payment to one of its wholly-owned subsidiaries in exchange for favorable financing from a hedge fund whose substantial CDS short position would have otherwise become worthless. In another case, J. Crew, faced with financial distress, found a way to divert the crown jewels from the collateral package pledged to its lenders, and instead use this value to prevent a default on unsecured notes that were coming due. Both of these transactions upended the expectations of those who put the original deals together. They raise the question: how can systems that depend on clear rules evolve, correct problems and reduce unintended consequences with- out resorting to a subjective standard? One approach is to crowdsource error- checking to market-participants by paying bounties to those who detect and pub- licize flaws in rules-based systems so that problems can be diagnosed and cor- rected (or, at least, their consequences mitigated) by subsequently revising the rules. This article considers such an iterative approach in the context of the Credit Default Swaps Market and the syndicated loan market.
VOLUME 9 • ISSUE 2 • PRINT
A KNOWLEDGE THEORY OF TACIT AGREEMENT
Wentong Zheng
A persistent puzzle in antitrust law is whether and when an unlawful agreement could arise from conduct or verbalized communications that fall short of an explicit agreement. While courts have found such tacit agreements to exist in idiosyncratic scenarios, they have failed to articulate a clear and consistent logic for such findings. This Article attempts to fill this gap by proposing a unified theory of tacit agreement. It defines a tacit agreement as an agreement formed by non-explicit communications that enable the alleged coconspirators to have constructive knowledge of one another’s conspiratory intent. This approach to tacit agreement is more faithful to the conceptual integrity and the statutory meaning of the agreement requirement under the Sherman Act. More importantly, it provides a flexible yet consistent formula for determining tacit agreements. This formula could be applied to any factual scenarios, including conscious parallelism, parallel conduct preceded by suggestive communications, hub-and-spoke conspiracy, and facilitating practices.
VOLUME 6 • ONLINE
MEMORANDUM TO THE COMPLIANCE COUNSEL, UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE
Jonathan J. Rusch
Since 1977, with the enactment of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the United States Department of Justice has played a leading role in applying the Act’s anti-bribery, books and records, and internal controls provisions in enforcement proceedings against numerous companies and individuals worldwide. In November 2015, the Department of Justice took the unprecedented step of hiring a Compliance Counsel to guide its prosecutors in decision-making in corporate prosecutions and in benchmarking corporate compliance. This Memorandum is composed as an open letter to the Compliance Counsel, focusing on how she and the Department of Justice should go about that critical benchmarking function.
VOLUME 5 • ONLINE
INEVITABLE: SPORTS GAMBLING, STATE REGULATION, AND THE PURSUIT OF REVENUE
Anastasios Kaburakis, Ryan M. Rodenberg, & John T. Holden
Balancing the protection of private business interests against governmental regulation is one of the most significant legal frictions of the modern era. Over the course of the past twenty-eight months, this conflict has manifested itself through a federal sports gambling lawsuit involving New Jersey. However, the ongoing lawsuit between a plaintiff quintet of the most powerful sports entities in the United States—the National Collegiate Athletic Association (“NCAA”), the National Basketball Association (“NBA”), the National Football League (“NFL”), the National Hockey League (“NHL”), and the Office of the Commissioner of Major League Baseball (“MLB”) (collectively “sports leagues”)—and the Governor of New Jersey over the possibility of regulated sports wagering in the state is not about gambling. It is about control: control of events, control of data, control of marketing opportunities, and control of current and future revenue streams.
VOLUME 3 • ONLINE
THE LESSONS FROM LIBOR FOR DETECTION AND DETERRENCE OF CARTEL WRONGDOING
Rosa M. Abrantes-Metz and D. Daniel Sokol
This essay explores the use of econometric screens, either by enforcement authorities or firms themselves, as a tool to both improve detection of potential price fixing cartel behavior and police illegal firm behavior.
VOLUME 1 • ONLINE
THE AT&T ARBITRATION CLAUSE AS A REPLACEMENT FOR CLASS ACTION
Michael Springer
Recently, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the suit between AT&T and Vincent and Liza Concepcion on whether the Federal Arbitration Act preempts California contract law. This case raises a policy issue that will not necessarily be answered by the Supreme Court: the efficacy of the class action lawsuit. While the class action definitely serves a significant purpose, there are other methods of solving the problem it seeks to address. In fact, the very arbitration clause the Supreme Court of California struck down as unconscionable can both serve the same function as a class action suit and do so in a manner that is arguably better for the consumer. Class action suits serve two main functions. The class action allows plaintiffs to pursue a legal claim that they otherwise would not, and the class action provides incentives for companies to behave in socially desirable ways. The first of these functions, while ostensibly served, hardly carries weight in the world today.
VOLUME 1 • ONLINE
INJURY OR DETERRENCE: THE END OF CLASS-ACTION LITIGATION AND ITS BENEFIT TO CONSUMERS
Jason Sherman
On November 8, The Wall Street Journal asked, “Is D-Day Approaching For Class-Actions Lawsuits?” The next day, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments for AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion. The lower courts held AT&T Mobility’s (“ATTM”) adhesion contract’s arbitration clause unconscionable because it prevented class actions through either litigation or arbitration. However, the Federal Arbitration Act, as argued by ATTM, may preempt the finding by the lower courts, ultimately allowing corporations to use “no class action” clauses to shield themselves from class action litigation or arbitration. The media has mostly predicted that the case will be resolved in favor of ATTM, and as Professor Brian Fitzpatrick said, “it could end class-action litigation in American as we know it.” Many believe this lack of access to class action will “have harmful public policy consequences” that “would cut off the only meaningful method to redress widespread discrimination, fraud, or other violations of the law.”
VOLUME 1 • ONLINE
CONCERTED REFUSALS TO LICENSE INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS
Christina Bohannan and Herbert Hovenkamp
The Federal Circuit recently issued a patent misuse decision that has implications for both innovation policy and antitrust law. Unilateral refusals to license intellectual property rights are virtually never antitrust violations, as is true of most unilateral refusals to deal. The Patent Act provides that a unilateral refusal to license cannot constitute patent “misuse,” which is a defense to an infringement suit based on the patentee’s anticompetitive acts, restraints on innovation, or improper sequestering of the public domain. Concerted refusals to deal are treated much more harshly under the antitrust laws because they can facilitate collusion or, in the case of technology, keep superior products or processes off the market.