Print Archive

Uber has been described by its most extreme critics as “the root of all evil” for its lawbreaking business tactics, among other things, in pursuit of becoming “too big to ban.”

Federal tax law treats separate nonprofit corporations as distinct legal entities for almost all purposes, in common with most other areas of law. With respect to political activity, this means that one nonprofit corporation’s lobbying or election-related actions are generally not attributed to another nonprofit corporation.

In the spring of 2023, the FTC released a policy statement addressing biometric information and technologies using or purporting to use such information. The policy statement contains a remarkably broad definition of “biometric information” and describes a variety of business practices that could violate § 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act by being either “deceptive” or “unfair.” In spite of the policy statement’s comprehensiveness, however, it has two substantial inadequacies.

The corporatization of health care in the United States has forced us to confront society’s moral expectations of the industry, which serves uniquely vulnerable consumers. Health care has become increasingly more lucrative, attracting private equity (“PE”) investment, specifically in private physicians’ practices.

Based in First Amendment principles, the Noerr-Pennington doctrine immunizes parties petitioning the government from antitrust liability, even when such petitioning may be considered anticompetitive. Within the doctrine exists a narrower “sham exception” which eliminates Noerr-Pennington antitrust immunity when petitions are merely shams meant to interfere with a competitor’s business.

Generative artificial intelligence is being rapidly deployed for corporate tasks including pricing. Suppose one of these machines communicates with the pricing manager of a competing firm, proposes to collude, receives assent, and raises price. Is this a crime under U.S. antitrust laws, and, if so, who is liable?

Major competition regulators, and substantial portions of the scholarly community, have rapidly adopted the view that “killer acquisitions” and “kill zones” constitute significant sources of competitive risk arising from incumbent acquisitions of emerging firms in digital markets. Based on this view, policymakers in the United States, European Union, and other jurisdictions have advocated for, and in some cases have taken, substantial changes to merger review policies that would erect significant obstacles to incumbent/startup acquisitions.

Company insiders will typically be in possession of material non-public information (MNPI) about their companies. In order to allow insiders the opportunity to trade, the SEC adopted Rule 10b5-1, which provides an affirmative defense to insider trading liability if the trades are made pursuant to a written plan or trading instruction entered into when the trader was not aware of MNPI.

Because prudent corporate governance often requires managers to take risks based on statistically expected outcomes, corporate failures that have a small but finite chance of occurring cannot always be prevented. This Article makes three related claims about risk-taking in corporate governance.

On the heels of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, the “major questions” doctrine quickly came to be perceived as a significant impediment to the finalization of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s proposed rule on climate-related disclosures.

The rise of large digital platforms, accompanied by claims of increasing industrial concentration, has prompted calls for antitrust policy reform. Yet, the observed market trends are consistent with improvements in welfare, as economies of scale often decentralize effective choices and disintermediate previously dominant structures, unleashing entrepreneurship.

This article examines the Delaware courts’ 1980s shift from managerialism to a theory I label proceduralism. I argue that managerialism, which justified corporate law’s deference to directors in the preceding fifty years, was corporate law’s response to social, political, and cultural concerns outside corporations.