Conglomerate Blog: Business, Law, Economics & Society

January 29, 2015

The Intracorporate Conspiracy Doctrine and D&O Litigation Incentives

Posted by Josephine Sandler Nelson

My previous blogposts (one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and eight) discussed the dangers of granting intracorporate conspiracy immunity to agents who commit coordinated wrongdoing within an organization. The last two blogposts (here and here) highlighted the harm that public and judicial frustration with this immunity inflicts on alternative doctrines.

In addition to exacerbating blind CEO turnover, substituting alternative doctrines for prosecuting intracorporate conspiracy affects an executive’s incentives under Director’s and Officer’s (D&O) liability insurance. This post builds on arguments that I have made about D&O insurance in articles here and here.

In traditional conspiracy prosecutions, the Model Penal Code (MPC) provides an affirmative defense for renunciation. The MPC’s standard protects the actor, who “after conspiring to commit a crime, thwarted the success of the conspiracy, under circumstances manifesting a complete and voluntary renunciation of his criminal purpose.” This means that the executive who renounces an intracorporate conspiracy faces no charges.

In contrast with conspiracy prosecutions, responsible corporate officer doctrine and its correlates fail to reward the executive who changes course to mitigate damages or to abandon further destructive behavior. Although the size of the damages may be smaller with lesser harm if the executive renounces an organization’s course of conduct, the executive’s personal career and reputation may still be destroyed by entry of a judgment. Modest whistle-blower protections are ineffectual.

Specifically, because of the way that indemnification and D&O insurance function, the entry of judgment has become an all-or-nothing standard: an employee’s right to indemnification hinges on whether the employee is found guilty of a crime or not. To receive indemnification under Delaware law, for example, an individual must have been “successful on the merits or otherwise in defense of any action, suit or proceeding.” Indemnification is repayment to the employee from the company; D&O insurance is a method that companies use to pass on the cost of indemnification and may contain different terms than indemnification itself.

Indemnification and D&O insurance are not a minor issues for executives. In fact, under many circumstances, employees have a right to indemnification from an organization even when the alleged conduct is criminal. Courts have acknowleged that “[i]ndemnification encourages corporate service by capable individuals by protecting their personal financial resources from depletion by the expenses they incur during an investigation or litigation that results by reason of that service.” And when hiring for an executive board, “Quality directors will not serve without D&O coverage.” Because of this pressure from executives, as many as ninety-nine percent of public U.S. companies carry D&O insurance.

So what does this standard mean for executives prosecuted under responsible corporate officer doctrine instead of for traditional conspiracy? Executives are incentivized either not to get caught, or to perpetrate a crime large enough that the monetary value of the wrongdoing outweighs the potential damage to the executive’s career. Because an executive’s right to indemnification hinges on whether he is found guilty of a crime or not, he has an enormous incentive to fight charges to the end instead of pleading to a lesser count. Thus, unless the executive has an affirmative defense to charges, like renunciation in traditional conspiracy law, there is no safety valve. Litigating responsible corporate officer doctrine cases creates a new volatile high-wire strategy. Moreover, as discussed in my last blogpost, responsible corporate officer doctrine imposes actual blind “respondeat superior” liability. Regardless of the merits, the executive may be penalized. So you can see the take-home message for executives: go ahead and help yourself to the largest possible slice pie on your way out the door.

I argue that in sending this message, and in many other ways, our current law on corporate crime is badly broken. My last blogpost for the Glom will introduce the book that Lynn Stout and I propose writing to give better direction to business people in search of ethical outcomes.

January 28, 2015

The Intracorporate Conspiracy Doctrine and CEO Turnover

Posted by Josephine Sandler Nelson

My previous blogposts (one, two, three, four, five, six, and seven) discussed why conspiracy prosecutions were the best method to penalize coordinated wrongdoing by agents within an organization. Using alternative doctrines to impose liability on behavior that would otherwise be recognized as an intracorporate conspiracy results in flawed incentives and disproportionate awards.

The fundamental problem with substituting responsible corporate officer doctrine and control person liability for reforming the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine is that these alternative doctrines represent exactly what Professor Martin objects to: actual imposition of blind “respondeat superior” liability. For example, under these doctrines, “in most federal courts, it is not necessary to show that the corporate official being charged had a culpable state of mind.” Instead, the issue before the court is merely whether the officer had control and responsibility for the alleged actions. Accordingly, it is not a defense to control person liability that the officer did not “knowingly participate in or independently commit a violation of the Act.”

But simply penalizing the officer who is in the wrong place at the wrong time does little to define and encourage best practices. Moreover, with these and other explosive hazards for corporate service, it should be no surprise that top executives are demanding and receiving ever-increasing compensation for often short-term positions. Since 2009, the year that the NSP case establishing “control person” liability was settled, the discrepancy in pay between top management and the average worker has been growing dramatically. In 2013, the CEO of J.C. Penny Co., for example, was exposed for making 1,795 times what the average U.S. department store employee made. From 2009 to 2013, as measured across Standard & Poor’s 500 Index (S&P 500) of companies, “the average multiple of CEO compensation to that of rank-and-file workers” has risen to 204, an increase of twenty percent.

It is true that the financial crisis did reduce executive compensation packages before 2009, and that there has been a historical trend towards the growth of executives’ salaries as a multiple of average workers’ salaries. For example, “[es]timates by academics and trade-union groups put the number at 20-to-1 in the 1950s, rising to 42-to-1 in 1980 and 120-to-1 by 2000.” But the jump in executives’ salaries from 2009 has been extraordinary. The new emphasis on vicarious liability for individuals under the responsible corporate officer doctrine since that date must be considered part of executives’ demands for such high compensation in exchange for their risky positions.

The average duration of a CEO’s time in office has diminished as well. In 2000, the average tenure of a departing S&P 500 CEO in the U.S. was ten years. By 2010, it was down to eight years. In 2011, merely a year later, the average tenure of a Fortune 500 CEO was barely 4.6 years. In 2013, that former CEO of J.C. Penny Co. served for only eighteen months.

With an eighteen-month tenure, how much can the chief executive of a large company discover about the wrongdoing that his or her new company is committing? Furthermore, how much can that person design and institute good preventative measures to guide his or her subordinates to avoid that harm? A blindly revolving door for CEOs does not help those interested in effectively reducing the wrongdoing of agents within the corporation. Incentives without intracorporate conspiracy immunity would be different because they would reward the agent who abandons a conspiracy. (More about this argument here, here, here, and here.)

My next blogpost will examine how substituting alternative doctrines for prosecuting intracorporate conspiracy affects incentives under Director’s and Officer’s (D&O) liability insurance.

January 27, 2015

Frustration with the Intracorporate Conspiracy Doctrine Distorts Other Areas of Law

Posted by Josephine Sandler Nelson

My previous blogposts (one, two, three, four, five, and six) discussed why conspiracy prosecutions should be used to reach coordinated wrongdoing by agents within an organization. The intracorporate conspiracy doctrine has distorted agency law and inappropriately handicaps the ability of tort and criminal law to regulate the behavior of organizations and their agents.

My Intracorporate Conspiracy Trap article argues that the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine is not properly based in agency law, and that it should most certainly not be applied throughout tort law and criminal law. As a result of the immunity granted by the doctrine, harmful behavior is ordered and performed without consequences, and the victims of the behavior suffer without appropriate remedy. My Corporate Conspiracy Vacuum article argues that public and judicial frustration with the lack of accountability for corporate conspiracy has now warped the doctrines around it.

Courts have used a wide variety of doctrines to hold agents of enterprises responsible for their actions that should have prosecuted as intracorporate conspiracy. Some of these doctrines include:

• piercing the corporate veil,

• responsible corporate officer doctrine, and related control person liability,

• denying the retroactive imposition of the corporate veil, and

• reverse piercing of the corporate veil.

But the new applications of these alternative doctrines are producing distortions that make the doctrines less stable, less predictable, and less able to signal proper incentives to individuals within organizations.

An example of how piercing the corporate veil has been used to defeat intracorporate conspiracy immunity can be seen in the Morelia case. A previous blogpost discussed how the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine has defanged RICO prosecutions of agents and business entities. In Morelia, which was a civil RICO case, the federal district court, obviously outraged by defendants’ behavior in the case, explicitly permitted plaintiffs to pierce the corporate veil to avoid application of the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine. In a creative twist invented from whole cloth to link the two doctrines, the Morelia court overruled its magistrate judge’s recommendation to announce:

"Since the court has determined that plaintiffs have properly alleged that the corporate veil should be pierced, the individual defendants may be liable for corporate actions and any distinction created by the intra-corporate doctrine does not exist."

Regarding its test for piercing the corporate veil, the Morelia court further overruled its magistrate’s recommendation by focusing on plaintiffs’ arguments regarding undercapitalization, and its decision included only a single footnote about the disregard of corporate formalities.

The Morelia court is not alone in its frustration with the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine and in its attempt to link analysis under the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine with the stronger equitable tenets of piercing the corporate veil. More subtly, courts across the country have started to entangle the two doctrines’ requirements as intracorporate conspiracy immunity has become stronger and courts have increasingly had to rely on piercing the corporate veil as an ill-fitting alternative to permit conspiracy claims to proceed. Even large public companies should take note. No public company has ever been pierced, but a bankruptcy court recently reverse-pierced corporate veils of the Roman Catholic Church, which is far from a single-person “sham” corporation. My Corporate Conspiracy Vacuum article discusses additional examples and repercussions for incentives under each of these alternative doctrines.

My next blogpost will examine how frustration with intracorporate conspiracy immunity has led to volatility in responsible corporate officer doctrine and related control person liability. Ironically, executive immunity from conspiracy charges fuels counterproductive CEO turnover.

January 26, 2015

The Silenced Connecticut Sex-Abuse Case

Posted by Josephine Sandler Nelson

My previous blogposts (one, two, three, four, and five) introduced why conspiracy prosecutions should be used to reach wrongdoing by agents within an organization. The 2012 prosecution of Monsignor Lynn for twelve years of transferring predator priests from parish to parish at the command and for the benefit of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia was defeated by the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine. Moreover, this was not the first time that the Roman Catholic Church had used the doctrine to help its bureaucrats escape liability for suppressing sex abuse cases.

In 1997, employees of the Roman Catholic Church in Connecticut were alleged—very much like Lynn—to have covered up the sexual misconduct of a priest, enabling him to continue to abuse children entrusted to the Church’s care by virtue of his office. When sued for civil conspiracy by the victims, the employees’ defense was that they were acting in the best interest of the corporation.

The Connecticut court found that the test for whether an agent is acting within the scope of his duties “is not the wrongful nature of the conspirators’ action but whether the wrongful conduct was performed within the scope of the conspirators’ official duties.” If the wrongful conduct was performed within the scope of the conspirators’ official duties, the effect of applying the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine is to find that there was no conspiracy. Because covering up the priest’s sex abuse was in the best interest of the corporate organization, the court found that the employees were all acting on behalf of the corporation. The court never reached the issue of whether the employees’ actions rose to the level of a civil conspiracy. Under the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine, it was a tautology that no conspiracy could be possible.

This case is interesting not only because it documents the way that the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine protects enterprises from inquiry into conspiracies, but also because of the subsequent history of its allegations. The full extent of the Bridgeport Diocese’s wrongdoings—if current public knowledge is indeed complete—only came to light in December 2009, twelve years after the 1997 case. It took twelve years, the combined resources of four major newspapers, an act displaying public condemnation of the Roman Catholic Church by members of the state legislature, and finally a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to release the documents that could have become the basis of the intracorporate conspiracy claim in 1997. There is still no conspiracy suit or any criminal charge against the Diocese. Additional details about the case are available in my article The Intracorporate Conspiracy Trap. The article will be published soon in the Cardozo Law Review, and it is available in draft form here.

Astonishingly, none of the extensive news coverage about the sexual abuse cases in Bridgeport over those additional twelve years has connected these facts to the original 1997 case defeated by application of the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine. If the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine had not provided immunity, the case might have revealed the Diocese’s pattern of wrongdoing long beforehand and in a much more efficient way.

My next blogpost reveals additional dangers from the spread of the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine: frustration with the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine has started to distort other areas of law.

January 23, 2015

How We Should Have Tried Monsignor Lynn

Posted by Josephine Sandler Nelson

My previous blogposts (one, two, three, and four) introduced why conspiracy prosecutions should be used to reach wrongdoing by agents within a business organization. The same legal analysis applies to religious organizations.

We should have been able to charge Monsignor Lynn and the Archdiocese of Philadelphia that directed his actions to hide the sexual abuse by priests with criminal conspiracy. Instead, Pennsylvania charged Lynn with two things: child endangerment and conspiracy with the priests.

As international news outlets later reported, Lynn could not be guilty of child endangerment because the state’s statute could not apply to an administrative church official who did not directly supervise children.

Lynn could not be guilty of conspiracy with the priests because he did not share their “particular criminal intent.” As the jury understood, Lynn was not trying to help a predator priest get from parish to parish so that “he can continue to enjoy what he likes to do.” Lynn was trying to protect the reputation of his employer, the Archdiocese—if the priests benefitted, that was a side issue.

So why didn’t the prosecution charge Lynn and the Archdiocese with conspiracy? It was the Archdiocese that directly coordinated and profited from Lynn’s actions. The intracorporate conspiracy doctrine, as discussed before, would bar that prosecution. In Pennsylvania, it is “well-settled that a corporation cannot conspire with its subsidiary, its agents, or its employees.”

Finally, considering other options, Lynn could not have been charged with possible crimes such as obstruction of justice. Lynn was too good: Lynn and the Archdiocese were so successful at covering up the sexual abuse and silencing victims, there was no ongoing investigation to obstruct. “Aiding and abetting” the Archdiocese’s cover-up of the sex abuse would have been difficult to pursue (see more here) and is not allowed under RICO in the Third Circuit.

My next blogpost will demonstrate that the Monsignor Lynn case was also part of a pattern by the Roman Catholic Church in America to use the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine to hide the coordinated wrongdoing of its agents to cover-up sexual abuse by priests. Fifteen years before prosecutors attempted to try Monsignor Lynn, the silenced Connecticut sex-abuse case showed the Church how effective this defense could be.

January 22, 2015

Sex Abuse, Priests, and Corporate Conspiracy

Posted by Josephine Sandler Nelson

My previous blogposts (one, two, and three) introduced the topic of how the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine prevents the prosecution of coordinated wrongdoing by individuals within organizations. This post illustrates the doctrine’s effect in the context of a specific organization—here a religious one: the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia and the systematic transfer of predator priests. This post is based on my article The Intracorporate Conspiracy Trap to be published soon in the Cardozo Law Review. The article is available in draft form here.

For twelve years, from 1992 to 2004, as Secretary for Clergy, Monsignor William Lynn’s job within the Philadelphia Archdiocese was to supervise priests, including the investigation of sex-abuse claims. In 1994, Monsignor Lynn compiled a list of thirty-five “predator” priests within the archdiocese. He compiled the list from secret church files containing hundreds of child sex-abuse complaints. On the stand, Lynn testified that he hoped that the list would help his superiors to address the growing sex-abuse crisis within the Archdiocese. But for twelve years Lynn merely re-assigned suspected priests, and he hid the abuse within the church. His superiors never acted on the list that Lynn gave them—in fact, they ordered all copies of the list destroyed—and Lynn never contacted outside authorities. As late as 2012, one of the “predator” priests on Lynn’s list was still serving in a parish.

All parties agree that Lynn’s actions in transferring priests who molested children allowed those priests to continue to abuse children, sheltered the priests from potential prosecution, and directly protected the Philadelphia Archdiocese’s reputation.

In fact, Lynn’s actions had been ordered by the archbishop on behalf of the Archdiocese. Lynn reported what he was doing to his superiors, who rewarded Lynn with twelve years of employment and a prominent position within the Archdiocese for doing his job as they saw it. Moreover, the archbishop himself inadvertently revealed the existence of the number thirty-five “predator” priests to the media, and he was the one who ordered all copies of the list to be shredded to keep it from being discovered in legal proceedings.

The instinct here is that this behavior—the transferring of predator priests to cover-up the sexual abuse of children—should have been illegal for Monsignor Lynn to pursue. But the Commonwealth could not prosecute Monsignor Lynn and the Archdiocese for conspiracy. Furthermore, immunity for Lynn’s behavior is now the rule in most state and federal jurisdictions around the country. As described in an earlier blogpost, the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine provides immunity to an enterprise and its agents from conspiracy prosecution, based on the legal fiction that an enterprise and its agents are a single actor incapable of the meeting of two minds to form a conspiracy.

My next blogpost will further investigate why this behavior was not illegal under our current system, and how we should have tried Monsignor Lynn.

January 21, 2015

Where are the Prosecutions for Corporate Conspiracy?

Posted by Josephine Sandler Nelson

My first and second blogposts introduced why conspiracy prosecutions are particularly important for reaching the coordinated actions of individuals when the elements of wrong-doing may be delegated among members of the group.

So where are the prosecutions for corporate conspiracy??? The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act of 1970 (“RICO”, 18 U.S.C.A. §§ 1961 et seq.), no longer applies to most business organizations and their employees. In fact, business organizations working together with outside agents can form new protected “enterprises.”

What’s going on here? In this area and many other parts of the law, we are witnessing the power of the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine. This doctrine provides immunity to an enterprise and its agents from conspiracy prosecution, based on the legal fiction that an enterprise and its agents are a single actor incapable of the meeting of two minds to form a conspiracy. According to the most recent American Law Reports survey, the doctrine “applies to corporations generally, including religious corporations and municipal corporations and other governmental bodies. The doctrine applies to all levels of corporate employees, including a corporation’s officers and directors and owners who are individuals.” Moreover, it now extends from antitrust throughout tort and criminal law.

What is the practical effect of this doctrine? The intracorporate conspiracy doctrine has distorted agency law and inappropriately handicaps the ability of tort and criminal law to regulate the behavior of organizations and their agents. Obedience to a principal (up to a point) should be rewarded in agency law. But the law should not immunize an agent who acts in the best interest of her employer to commit wrongdoing. Not only does the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine immunize such wrongdoing, but the more closely that an employer orders and supervises the employee’s illegal acts, the more the employer is protected from prosecution as well.

My next blogpost illustrates how the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine operates to defeat prosecutions for coordinated wrongdoing by agents within an organization. Let’s examine the case of Monsignor Lynn.

January 20, 2015

Corporate Conspiracy Charges for the Financial Crisis

Posted by Josephine Sandler Nelson

In my previous blogpost, I granted the merit of defense counsel’s argument that the actions of discrete individual defendants—when the law is not permitted to consider the coordination of those actions—may not satisfy the elements of a prosecutable crime.

But what is the coordination of individuals for a wrongful common purpose? That’s a conspiracy. And, for exactly the reasons that defense counsel articulates, these types of crimes cannot be reached by other forms of prosecution. The U.S. Supreme Court has recognized that conspiracy is its own animal. “[C]ollective criminal agreement—partnership in crime—presents a greater potential threat to the public than individual delicts.” When we consider the degree of coordination necessary to create the financial crisis, we are not talking about a single-defendant mugging in a back alley—we are talking about at least the multi-defendant sophistication of a bank robbery.

Conspiracy prosecutions for the financial crisis have some other important features. First, the statute of limitations would run from the last action of a member of the group, not the first action as would be typical of other prosecutions. This means that many crimes from the financial crisis could still be prosecuted (answering Judge Rakoff’s concern). Second, until whistle-blower protections are improved to the point that employees with conscientious objections to processes can be heard, traditional conspiracy law provides an affirmative defense to individuals who renounce the group conspiracy. By contrast, the lesson Wall Street seems to have learned from the J.P. Morgan case is not to allow employees to put objections into writing. Third, counter to objections that conspiracy prosecutions may be too similar to vicarious liability, prosecutors would have to prove that each member of the conspiracy did share the same common intent to commit wrongdoing. The employee shaking his head “no” while saying yes would not be a willing participant, but many other bankers were freely motivated by profit at the expense of client interest to cooperate with a bank’s program.

My next blogpost will ask: where are the prosecutions for corporate conspiracy?

J.P. Morgan’s Witness and the Holes in Corporate Criminal Law

Posted by Josephine Sandler Nelson

It is a pleasure to be guest-blogging here at The Glom for the next two weeks. My name is Josephine Nelson, and I am an advisor for the Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at Stanford’s business school. Coming from a business school, I focus on practical applications at the intersection of corporate law and criminal law. I am interested in how legal rules affect ethical decisions within business organizations. Many thanks to Dave Zaring, Gordon Smith, and the other members of The Glom for allowing me to share some work that I have been doing. For easy reading, my posts will deliberately be short and cumulative.

In this blogpost, I raise the question of what is broken in our system of rules and enforcement that allows employees within business organizations to escape prosecution for ethical misconduct.

Public frustration with the ability of white-collar criminals to escape prosecution has been boiling over. Judge Rakoff of the S.D.N.Y. penned an unusual public op-ed in which he objected that “not a single high-level executive has been successfully prosecuted in connection with the recent financial crisis.” Professor Garett’s new book documents that, between 2001 and 2012, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) failed to charge any individuals at all for crimes in sixty-five percent of the 255 cases it prosecuted.

Meanwhile, the typical debate over why white-collar criminals are treated so differently than other criminal suspects misses an important dimension to this problem. Yes, the law should provide more support for whistle-blowers. Yes, we should put more resources towards regulation. But also, white-collar defense counsel makes an excellent point that there were no convictions of bankers in the financial crisis for good reason: Prosecutors have been under public pressure to bring cases against executives, but those executives must have individually committed crimes that rise to the level of a triable case.

And why don’t the actions of executives at Bank of America, Citigroup, and J.P. Morgan meet the definition of triable crimes? Let’s look at Alayne Fleischmann’s experience at J.P. Morgan. Fleischmann is the so-called “$9 Billion Witness,” the woman whose testimony was so incriminating that J.P. Morgan paid one of the largest fines in U.S. history to keep her from talking. Fleischmann, a former quality-control officer, describes a process of intimidation to approve poor-quality loans within the bank that included an “edict against e-mails, the sabotaging of the diligence process,… bullying, [and] written warnings that were ignored.” At one point, the pressure from superiors became so ridiculous that a diligence officer caved to a sales executive to approve a batch of loans while shaking his head “no” even while saying yes.

None of those actions in the workplace sounds good, but are they triable crimes??? The selling of mislabeled securities is a crime, but notice how many steps a single person would have to take to reach that standard. Could a prosecutor prove that a single manager had mislabeled those securities, bundled them together, and resold them? Management at the bank delegated onto other people elements of what would have to be proven for a crime to have taken place. So, although cumulatively a crime took place, it may be true that no single executive at the bank committed a triable crime.

How should the incentives have been different? My next blogpost will suggest the return of a traditional solution to penalizing coordinated crimes: conspiracy prosecutions for the financial crisis.

June 07, 2014

Empowering Others Through Loyalty

Posted by Gordon Smith

I just started reading Eric Felton's Loyalty: The Vexing Virtue, and I found this idea in Chapter 1:

Loyalty is about being reliable. Sometimes that helps a group effort, but it can also empower individuals. Sure, we can do more when working together. But I can also accomplish more all by myself if I know I've got someone watching my back.

We usually think of the value of an agency relationship -- with the concomitant duty of loyalty on the agent -- as extending the reach of the principal. In other words, the value of the relationship is to be found in the work done by the agent.

Felton's idea suggests the possibility that the agency relationship also makes the principal more effective. Not just because the agent does things that the principal would otherwise being doing, but because the principal is emboldened in her own work by the support of a loyal agent.

Does that resonate with any of you folks who do fiduciary law?

March 03, 2014

Call for Paper: AALS Section on Agency, Partnerships LLCs, and Unincorporated Associations

Posted by Gordon Smith

Bringing Numbers into Basic and Advanced Business Associations Courses:

How and Why to Teach Accounting, Finance, and Tax

Business planners and transactional lawyers know just how much the “number-crunching” disciplines overlap with business law. Even when the law does not require unincorporated business associations and closely held corporations to adopt generally accepted accounting principles, lawyers frequently deal with tax implications in choice of entity, the allocation of ownership interests, and the myriad other planning and dispute resolution circumstances in which accounting comes into play. In practice, unincorporated business association law (as contrasted with corporate law) has tended to be the domain of lawyers with tax and accounting orientation. Yet many law professors still struggle with the reality that their students (and sometimes the professors themselves) are not “numerate” enough to make these important connections. While recognizing the importance of numeracy, the basic course cannot in itself be devoted wholly to primers in accounting, tax, and finance.

The Executive Committee will devote the 2015 annual Section meeting in Washington to the critically important, but much-neglected, topic of effectively incorporating accounting, tax, and finance into courses in the law of business associations. In addition to featuring several invited speakers, we seek speakers (and papers) to address this subject. Within the broad topic, we seek papers dealing with any aspect of incorporating accounting, tax, and finance into the pedagogy of basic or advanced business law courses.

Any full-time faculty member of an AALS member school who has written an unpublished paper, is working on a paper, or who is interested in writing a paper in this area is invited to submit a 1 or 2-page proposal by May 1, 2014 (preferably by April 15, 2014). The Executive Committee will review all submissions and select two papers by May 15, 2014. A very polished draft must be submitted by November 1, 2014. The Executive Committee is exploring publication possibilities, but no commitment on that has been made. All submissions and inquiries should be directed to Jeffrey M. Lipshaw, Associate Professor, Suffolk University Law School [email protected] (617-305-1657).

February 16, 2012

The Scholarship of Professor Larry Ribstein

Posted by Gordon Smith

CALL FOR PAPERS

AALS Section on Agency, Partnerships, LLCs, and Unincorporated Associations

The Scholarship of Professor Larry Ribstein

2013 AALS Annual Meeting

New Orleans, LA

Larry Ribstein was a friend to many and a colleague to all of us in the academy. With his untimely passing, he leaves behind a pioneering and influential body of work across a vast range of subjects, including partnerships and limited liability companies, corporate and securities law, choice of law, financial regulation, white-collar crime, legal ethics, and the legal profession.

The AALS Section on Agency, Partnership, LLCs, and Unincorporated Associations seeks to honor Larry’s legacy by focusing on his work at the 2013 AALS Annual Meeting in New Orleans. We are soliciting papers on a broad range of issues dealing with Larry’s partnership, LLC, and/or “uncorporation” scholarship. Among the topics that might be addressed are:

• An evaluation of the impact of Larry’s scholarship in a particular area;

• A discussion of issues or positions that Larry changed his mind on over time, and how;

• An examination of how Larry’s work in other areas informed his work in the unincorporated sphere, and vice-versa;

• “Larry as blogger” and the influence of his web postings

Submission procedure: A draft paper or proposal may be submitted via email to Professor Douglas Moll at [email protected].

Deadline date for submission: April 1, 2012

Form and length of paper; submission eligibility: There is no requirement as to the form or length of proposals. Faculty members of AALS member and fee-paid law schools are eligible to submit papers.

Registration fee and expenses: Program participants will be responsible for paying their annual meeting registration fee and expenses.

How will papers be reviewed?: Papers and proposals will be selected after review by the Section’s Executive Committee.

Will the program be published?: The section plans to contact the law reviews at schools where Professor Ribstein taught in the hopes of publishing the papers submitted for the meeting as a symposium. At this time, however, no guarantees of publication can be made.

Contact for submission and inquiries: Professor Douglas Moll, University of Houston Law Center. 713-743-2172 or [email protected]

December 14, 2011

Does a Corporation Have a Conscience and Can It Tempt Ethical People to Do Bad Things?

Posted by Marcia Narine

Time Magazine’s “person of the year” is the “protestor.” Occupy Wall Street’s participants have generated discussion unprecedented in recent years about the role of corporations and their executives in society. The movement has influenced workers and unemployed alike around the world and has clearly shaped the political debate.

But how does a corporation really act? Doesn’t it act through its people? And do those people behave like the members of the homo economicus species acting rationally, selfishly for their greatest material advantage and without consideration about morality, ethics or other people? If so, can a corporation really have a conscience?

In her book Cultivating Conscience: How Good Laws Make Good People, Lynn Stout, a corporate and securities professor at UCLA School of Law argues that the homo economicus model does a poor job of predicting behavior within corporations. Stout takes aim at Oliver Wendell Holmes’ theory of the “bad man” (which forms the basis of homo economicus), Hobbes’ approach in Leviathan, John Stuart Mill’s theory of political economy, and those judges, law professors, regulators and policymakers who focus solely on the law and economics theory that material incentives are the only things that matter.

Citing hundreds of sociological studies that have been replicated around the world over the past fifty years, evolutionary biology, and experimental gaming theory, she concludes that people do not generally behave like the “rational maximizers” that ecomonic theory would predict. In fact other than the 1-3% of the population who are psychopaths, people are “prosocial, ” meaning that they sacrifice to follow ethical rules, or to help or avoid harming others (although interestingly in student studies, economics majors tended to be less prosocial than others).

She recommends a three-factor model for judges, regulators and legislators who want to shape human behavior:

“Unselfish prosocial behavior toward strangers, including unselfish compliance with legal and ethical rules, is triggered by social context, including especially:

(1) instructions from authority

(2) beliefs about others’ prosocial behavior; and

(3) the magnitude of the benefits to others.

Prosocial behavior declines, however, as the personal cost of acting prosocially increases.”

While she focuses on tort, contract and criminal law, her model and criticisms of the homo economicus model may be particularly helpful in the context of understanding corporate behavior. Corporations clearly influence how their people act. Professor Pamela Bucy, for example, argues that government should only be able to convict a corporation if it proves that the corporate ethos encouraged agents of the corporation to commit the criminal act. That corporate ethos results from individuals working together toward corporate goals.

Stout observes that an entire generation of business and political leaders has been taught that people only respond to material incentives, which leads to poor planning that can have devastating results by steering naturally prosocial people to toward unethical or illegal behavior. She warns against “rais[ing] the cost of conscience,” stating that “if we want people to be good, we must not tempt them to be bad.”

In her forthcoming article “Killing Conscience: The Unintended Behavioral Consequences of ‘Pay for Performance,’” she applies behavioral science to incentive based-pay. She points to the savings and loans crisis of the 80's, the recent teacher cheating scandals on standardized tests, Enron, Worldcom, the 2008 credit crisis, which stemmed in part from performance-based bonuses that tempted brokers to approve risky loans, and Bear Sterns and AIG executives who bet on risky derivatives. She disagrees with those who say that that those incentive plans were poorly designed, arguing instead that excessive reliance on even well designed ex-ante incentive plans can “snuff out” or suppress conscience and create “psycopathogenic” environments, and has done so as evidenced by “a disturbing outbreak of executive-driven corporate frauds, scandals and failures.” She further notes that the pay for performance movement has produced less than stellar improvement in the performance and profitability of most US companies.

She advocates instead for trust-based” compensation arrangements, which take into account the parties’ capacity for prosocial behavior rather than leading employees to believe that the employer rewards selfish behavior. This is especially true if that reward tempts employees to engage in fraudulent or opportunistic behavior if that is the only way to realistically achieve the performance metric.

Applying her three factor model looks like this: Does the company’s messaging tell employees that it doesn’t care about ethics? Is it rewarding other people to act in the same way? And is it signaling that there is nothing wrong with unethical behavior or that there are no victims? This theory fits in nicely with the Bucy corporate ethos paradigm described above.

Stout proposes modest, nonmaterial rewards such as greater job responsibilities, public recognition, and more reasonable cash awards based upon subjective, ex post evaluations on the employee’s performance, and cites studies indicating that most employees thrive and are more creative in environments that don’t focus on ex ante monetary incentives. She yearns for the pre 162(m) days when the tax code didn’t require corporations to tie executive pay over one million dollars to performance metrics.

Stout’s application of these behavioral science theories provide guidance that lawmakers and others may want to consider as they look at legislation to prevent or at least mitigate the next corporate scandal. She also provides food for thought for those in corporate America who want to change the dynamics and trust factors within their organizations, and by extension their employee base, shareholders and the general population.

May 16, 2011

My First ALI Annual Meeting

Posted by Gordon Smith

I arrived in San Francisco this morning for my first Annual Meeting of the American Law Institute. I have been a member of ALI for five years, but this is the first time I have attended the Annual Meeting. Most of the participants are practicing lawyers, so it's not my usual law conference crowd, but that's actually kind of refreshing. Unfortunately, none of the current ALI projects is in my wheelhouse -- the projects on tap for this year are Model Penal Code: Sentencing; Principles of the Law of Nonprofit Organizations; Restatement of the Law Third, Employment Law; Restatement of the Law Third, Torts: Liability for Physical and Emotional Harm; and Restatement of the Law Third, Trusts -- but the discussion this morning on election law has been interesting and broadening.

The last time ALI touched a topic that was of special interest to me (law of agency), the results were actually quite nice, thanks in large part to Glom Master Deborah Demott (who is sitting nearby), and the Third Restatement is now widely cited by courts. On the other hand, the ALI Principles of Corporate Governance, while interesting as an academic matter, have not had a real-world impact commensurate with the controversy that surrounded their adoption. Obviously, corporate governance has changed dramatically since 1994, when the Principles were adopted, and that change has largely been driven (on the legal side) by actions of Congress, the SEC, and Delaware none of which is particularly susceptible to influence by the ALI.

So where, if anywhere, could ALI be most helpful in the development of business law? Sam Buell from Duke Law just told me that a project on corporate crime may be on the horizon. Good idea?

UPDATE: One member commenting on the Principles of Election Law Project just suggested that the project team look at the experience of corporations with proxy voting over the internet.

May 04, 2010

Let us now praise agency and partnership law

Posted by Erik Gerding

Now that I’ve taught my last class for the semester, I thought I’d jot a few posts with reflections on teaching from the semester before I turn attention to grading and then writing.

Watching the SEC’s Goldman suit, the Senate hearings, and the financial reform legislation unfold has left me convinced that we business association teachers should consider teaching agency and partnership in the basic course (if we don’t already do so). Why? It is not just that many actual business entities are the “uncorporations” that Larry Ribstein writes about and not the “inc.s” in many law school class rooms. Consider the following two problems identified in the Goldman hearings or with respect to the financial crisis:

• Conflicts of interest (by Wall Street firms, rating agencies, mortgage brokers, mortgage originators etc.); and

• Lack of disclosure (to mortgage borrowers, investors in asset-backed securities etc.).

Of course there are lots of other potential areas of concern – like financial institution “safety and soundness,” but the two problems above are essentially about agency costs. As are two of the proposed remedies being discussed:

• Fiduciary duties (for mortgage brokers, or registered broker-dealers); and

• Greater disclosure.

We can have a discussion about whether these are the most important problems and the most pressing reforms in the wake of the crisis, but they are front–and-center in the current debate. To frame the basic tradeoffs involved, there are two analytical approaches and two approaches to teaching students. The first is to start deep in the weeds of specialized areas of securities and financial regulation. The second is to start with basic building blocks.

The place to go for those building blocks is agency and partnership law. It is funny how much of the public debate on the Goldman suit resembles debates in those chestnut fiduciary duty cases from a Business Associations case book. Could “sophisticated investors” protect themselves against conflicts of interest with greater diligence or harder negotiations on price? Or do they need (or would it be more efficient to give them) the protection afforded by fiduciary duties? And when we talk about fiduciary duties, even the basic Business Associations course should help students see that those duties could vary quite a bit from one context or form of business entity or state to another.

Perhaps it is just my own learning style, but if I had to take a Business Association class again, I’d prefer to start learning the basic concepts that Corporations borrows from Agency and Partnership rather than being parachuted into the world of staggered boards and poison pills. Don’t kids learn basketball by practicing lay-ups before moving to dunks?

We’ll see how I feel in the fall when I teach my first purely Corporations class.