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...

At approximately the same time that the Sarbanes-Oxley Act increased the costs associated with being a public company, important Delaware case law created a difference in the standard of judicial review for the two basic methods of freezing out minority shareholders. While a freeze-out executed...

This piece provides our amicus curiae brief in the case of American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees Pension Plan v. American International Group, which is now under consideration by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. In this case, a shareholder submitted a proposal to amend...

Easterbrook and Fischel’s The Economic Structure of Corporate Law advances their now famous passivity thesis, which posits that managers should remain passive in the face of an unsolicited tender offer for the company’s shares. Consistent with the broader Chicago-school economic belief,...

Drawing from practitioner interviews and Gilson & Kraakman's "mechanisms" of market efficiency, I present the argument that the Delaware Supreme Court's decision in Revlon v. MacAndrews & Forbes, Inc. would reduce incentives to search and therefore would reduce overall efficiency in the market...

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...

In 2007, the Dow Chemical Company and the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation announced plans to launch a multibillion-dollar joint venture. Later known as K-Dow Petrochemicals, it would be one of the largest manufacturers of chemicals and plastics in the world. Analysts widely hailed the planned joint...