The Fortis Bank takeover court case demonstrates how shareholders' claims can make a merger and takeover case less speedy and, indeed, more costly. The case also raises a number of legal issues relating to corporate governance in a takeover situation such as the role of minority shareholders,...

In this memorandum prepared for the Annual ABA National Institute on Class Actions, Professors Coffee and Lahav review and assess developments in class certification over recent years, and track trends in approaches to certification. Special attention is given to securities litigation, the use...

Українську версію цієї статті можна знайти тут: 'http://ssrn.com/abstract=3012191' http://ssrn.com/abstract=3012191Russian Abstract: Рассмотрено возникновение и развитие производного (косвенного)...

Federal law mandates that audit and compensation committees of public companies be comprised entirely of independent directors. The assumption underlying these legal requirements is that independent directors are more likely to act as monitors of the company's top management. In this paper, we...

The stockholder litigation reform agenda is currently shaped by the felt necessity of the time to eliminate forms of stockholder actions that typically had been settled for nominal relief soon after filing. The empirical rationale for this agenda gives insufficient attention to recent cases in...

Entrepreneurial litigation is litigation in which the plaintiff's attorney functions as a risk-taking entrepreneur, financing, organizing, managing, and settling the litigation on behalf of numerous clients (who generally hold “negative value” claims), but with only modest oversight from the...

An important set of contract terms manages potential disputes. In a detailed, hand-coded sample of mergers and acquisition (M&A) contracts from 2007 and 2008, dispute management provisions correlate strongly with target ownership, state of incorporation, and industry, and with the experience of...

The efficiency of the corporate bond market is not well understood. Although many of the factors used to analyze stock market efficiency translate with some adjustments to corporate bond markets, the cause-effect factor is not intuitive and can be a source of significant confusion. In this...

Good faith produces good procedures and good procedures produce good outcomes. These statements are descriptive of much of Delaware's corporate law as well as the Delaware courts' approach to fiduciary duties. In re Caremark International Inc., Derivative Litigation exemplifies this approach...

This study introduces a new measure of ex ante litigation risk using scrutiny of SEC filings by the source of securities litigation—plaintiffs' lawyers—to reduce measurement error, relative to existing measures. We show that plaintiff-lawyer views proxy for the largely unobservable factors...