ALEA 18th Annual Meeting  - For Member Response

Host School -  Columbia University School of Law

2008 Meeting

• Register for Annual Meeting
• General Conference Information
• Program for the 2008 Annual Meeting
• View papers from ALEA's 2008 Conference online in the bepress Legal Repository:
  1. Papers to be presented at the Eighteenth Annual Meeting

Cross Border Securities Market Mergers
Trends, Effects and Development of Appropriate Regulatory Policies

This one day conference is sponsored by the Center for Law and Economic Studies, at the Columbia Law School, and the Program for the Law and Economics of Capital Markets, a joint project of the Columbia Law School and Columbia Business School.  It will explore the forces driving cross border securities market merger activity, its implications for the U.S. and world economies, and the challenges it poses for capital market regulation. 

Attendance by invitation only.

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75th Anniversary  Berle-Means Revisited:  A 21st Century Reconsideration of The Modern Corporation and Private Property

December 7, 2007

The Columbia Law School marks the 75th Anniversary of the influential Berle-Means Book The Modern Corporation and Private Property by Adolph A. Berle (the late Columbia Law School Professor) and Gardiner Means, (an economist), in a conference being hosted by Columbia Law School's Center for Corporate Governance and the Center for Law and Economic Studies.

This groundbreaking book on business law is probably the most influential book published in corporate law.  This conference will bring together some of the top authorities in corporate law. These proceedings are by invitation only.

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The Transactional Studies Program at Columbia Law School will host its fourth Deals Roundtable, entitled "Hedge Funds, Creditor Control, and Restructuring," on Friday, October 27, 2006, from 12:00 p.m. to 5:45 p.m., including lunch, to be held at Columbia Law School, 435 West 116th Street (116th Street and Amsterdam Avenue). A reception for all speakers, panelists, and attendees will immediately follow. The Round­­table is designed to bring together prominent academics, practitioners, and policymakers for intensive discussions of important contemporary issues.

The past 15 years have seen dramatic changes in the restructuring process. The players have changed: distressed debt funds now play a central role in all large bankruptcies. The dynamics have changed: debtor-control was the byword of the 1980s; today, creditors dominate the restructuring process through pre-petition credit facilities, debtor-in-possession financing, and other devices. And the outcomes have changed as well: firms in bankruptcy today are more highly leveraged and more likely to be sold off than reorganized.

This Roundtable will focus on these recent developments in the restructuring process, in particular the impact of changes in players and processes on distressed and bankrupt firms. Harvey Miller, a Vice-Chairman at Greenhill & Co., will provide the luncheon address. The Roundtable will include paper presentations by Edward Morrison, Columbia Law School, and Edward Altman, New York University Stern School of Business, and a panel discussion on hedge funds and the reorganization process

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This conference on Tort Law and the Modern State will bring together many of the world's most prominent tort scholars representing a range of perspectives and methodologies including comparative, economic, empirical, historical, institutional, and philosophical analysis. Conference by invitation only.

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Click here to watch the live webcast of the conference. (Webcast will only be broadcasted live during the times of the panel discussions).

A Conference on the Law and Economics of Contracts, was held on Friday, April 7, and Saturday morning, April 8 at Columbia University. The conference was a joint initiative supported by Columbia's School of Law (through the Center for Law and Economic Studies), Graduate School of Business, School of International and Public Affairs, and the Department of Economics.

The general theme of the conference was "the economics of contacts meets the law and economics of contracts" on the view that analysis of the different starting points and focal questions of the two related inquiries can stimulate further research. Core issues examined included the role of breach and the remedies for breach in shaping contract design, judicial practices of interpretation and the judicial supply of default terms, the role of the adversarial litigation system in shaping contracts, and the bargaining process.

This Roundtable focused on China's emerging financial industry, in particular the impact of inbound investment into China and the role of China's legal and institutional infrastructure.

Business scandals have provoked a sense of crisis in Corporate America. Increasing shareholder power is a common response - in both the media and new regulation - reflecting the view that corporations are better managed if shareholders play a greater role in controlling corporate excess. But does that answer raise its own set of problems?

This symposium  focused on the growing role of shareholders in managing public corporations, bringing together prominent academics, policymakers, shareholder representatives, executives, corporate lawyers, business leaders, and reporters to explore in depth the idea of "shareholder democracy" and its costs and benefits.

Traditionally, legal scholarship on corporate governance has focused on how corporations deal with the problems of agency costs in public firms. Increasing shareholder power may be an effective way to reduce those costs. That focus has led to the acceptance of a "shareholder primacy" paradigm that presumes that corporations are run most efficiently when they are run in accordance with shareholder desires.

Nevertheless, academics have begun to explore alternatives to the traditional principal-agent approach. Those alternatives reveal how the principal-agent model fails to address other important economic problems in corporations, including important problems that may be worsened by enhancing shareholder power.

The principal-agent model, for example, presumes that shareholders in public firms have a single common interest. Shareholders in public corporations, however, are a diverse group whose interests often conflict depending on whether they are short-term or long-term investors, whether they are diversified, whether they play other roles in the firm (e.g., as employees or creditors), whether they have "social" preferences or purely economic preferences, and whether they have hedged their economic interest through derivatives contracts. Increasing shareholder power heightens the resulting potential for intra-shareholder conflict. A second failing of the principal-agent model is that it overlooks the importance of firm-specific investments made by stakeholder groups like employees and customers, who can become residual claimants in corporations with interests and vulnerabilities that are economically similar to shareholders. Third, the principal-agent model ignores the problems of negative spillover effects from corporate activities on broader society, assuming instead that they can be controlled through contract and government regulation. If not true, then greater shareholder power can lead to more "socially irresponsible" corporate behavior.

The question of whether greater shareholder power benefits or harms public corporations is far more complex and nuance than the current tone of debate suggests.  Participants took a new look at the role of shareholder democracy in the modern corporation.

This Roundtable focused on issues related to tax compliance, enforcement, and substantive innovations aimed at improving tax administration.

The roundtable focused on the roles and responsibilities of capital markets gatekeepers in light of changing regulations and practices.

See a summary of the event in attached link.  Publication is forthcoming.