In the Media

By Katharina Pistor
The Business Roundtable, an association of CEOs in the US, announced this month that the era of primacy is over for shareholders' interests. Remarkably, this is less because of the content but because it reveals the mindset of corporate leaders. Apparently, the American CEOs believe that they can freely decide who they serve. But they are agents - not clients. Ergo, this decision is not theirs.


By Katharina Pistor
The fact that American CEOs think they can choose their own masters attests not just to their own sense of entitlement, but also to the state of corporate America, where power over globe-spanning business empires is concentrated in the hands of just a few men (and far fewer women). . . . By capturing the process to which they owe their own positions, American CEOs have made a mockery of shareholder control.

By Clara Long and Elora Mukherjee
Over the course of this summer, the American people -- across party lines -- have shown that they reject the hate and dehumanization of immigrants that appears to have motivated last weekend's mass shooting in El Paso. . . . But the test is whether legislators will use the power of the purse to make a real difference for children by keeping families together and shifting the focus away from detention. With senators and representatives home for the August recess, the American people have a pivotal opportunity to demand change now.

By Jamal Greene
We often see Justice Stevens described as the leader of the “liberal” wing of the Supreme Court in his last years on the bench, but nothing defined him so much as his independence. . . . As the world around him became increasingly divided, he continued to believe he could persuade his colleagues through the sheer power of his good sense.

To understand more about this crisis, I called Elora Mukherjee, a professor at Columbia Law School and the director of the school’s Immigrants’ Rights Clinic. She has been working on the Flores settlement, an agreement that outlines how the U.S. government must care for unaccompanied migrant children, since 2007. Mukherjee has represented and interviewed multiple children and families. She was at the Clint detention facility in Texas last week, along with a group of lawyers and doctors, to interview the children held there.

By Tim Wu
This week, nine states and the District of Columbia, led by New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, filed suit in federal court in New York to block the merger. With this move, the states have jumped the gun on the federal government, which has yet to fully approve or reject the deal. And if the states win in court, as they seem likely to, the merger is dead. Inadvertently, this corporate blunder has created a new role for the states in merger review: acting as a backstop in cases of gross dereliction of duty by the federal government.

By Ronald Mann
Yesterday’s decision in Return Mail Inc. v. U.S. Postal Service offers the justices’ answer to yet another of the drafting weaknesses of the 2011 patent-reform statute commonly known as the AIA (officially christened the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act).

By Tim Wu and Stuart A. Thompson
“Big tech” companies like Google and Facebook are, in reality, the products of hundreds of mergers. Each root below represents a company acquired by a tech giant at a particular moment in its history. A vast majority of these acquisitions, funded by public markets, have received minimal media coverage and limited regulatory scrutiny. But that is changing, given new concerns about consolidation in the tech industries.

By Ronald Mann
Yesterday’s decision in Taggart v. Lorenzen will not go down as one of the major decisions of the term, but it should provide some useful guidance in an area as to which the Supreme Court has not previously spoken: the standards for punishing creditors that violate the discharge that bankruptcy provides to debtors.

By David Pozen, Eric Talley, and Julian Nyarko
Elected officials from both parties appeal routinely to the nation’s foundational document. But, far from serving as a symbol of “unity and common purpose,” the Constitution has come to enable, or even exacerbate, partisan strife. In political debates such as the Trump tax tussle, it often feels as if the United States has two legal charters, one for Republicans and another for Democrats.