We use the Business Roundtable's challenge to the SEC's 2010 proxy access rule as a natural experiment to measure the value of shareholder proxy access. We find that firms that would have been most vulnerable to proxy access, as measured by institutional ownership and activist institutional...

Delaware’s antitakeover statute, codified at Section 203 of the Delaware corporate code, is by far the most important antitakeover statute in the United States. When it was enacted in 1988, three bidders challenged its constitutionality under the Commerce Clause and the Supremacy Clause of the...

Commentators have long debated whether competition among states for corporate charters represents a race to the top or a race to the bottom. Race-to-the-top advocates have recently gained ground in this debate on the basis of the general migration to Delaware in the 1990s and empirical evidence...

This Commentary is part of a dealmaking symposium on the Oracle-PeopleSoft contest from 2003-2004. The facts of the case are described in Millstone & Subramanian (2005). This Commentary examines Oracle's alternatives and PeopleSoft's potential responses in the fall of 2004. I demonstrate that...

This case describes Oracle's hostile takeover bid to acquire PeopleSoft, which began with an unsolicited cash tender offer at $16.00 per share in June 2003 and ended with a negotiated deal at $26.50 per share in December 2004. Novel questions of corporate law are raised by the prolonged use of a...

Freeze-out transactions, in which a controlling shareholder buys out the minority shareholders, have occurred more frequently since the stock market downturn of 2000 and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. While freeze-outs were historically executed as statutory mergers, recent Delaware case law...