Stop SOPA? Hey, It's Already The Law!

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), H.R. 3261, has been attracting a lot of attention lately.  However, here in California, we've been living under the SOPA for better than half a century.

The California SOPA is the Securities Owners Protection Act (or Law) which can be found at Corporations Code Section 27000 et seq.  The law is generally intended to protect security owners from fraud committed by individuals who solicit funds for the purposes of protecting, enforcing or representing the rights of those owners.  The law includes both civil and criminal penalties.

Formerly, California's SOPA required that individuals soliciting funds for these purposes to obtain a license from the Department of Corporations.  During my time as Commissioner of Corporations, we took a look at whether the licensing requirement was really necessary.  We found that in the last 25 years only 82 license applications were submitted.  Consequently, the Department successfully sponsored legislation, AB 2500 (Kuykendall), that eliminated the licensing requirement.   The anti-fraud and penalty provisions were maintained.

A Brief Note On "Majority"

 Recently, I've come to the realization that there seems to be a great deal of confusion about whether "majority" is a singular or plural noun.  One might think that it is singular because there is a plural form - "majorities".  For example, in Westbrook v. Mihaly, 2 Cal. 3d 765 (1970), the California Supreme Court wrote:

Respondents imply that the two-thirds vote requirement is all that stands between the state and either immediate financial catastrophe or ultimate collapse of its political subdivisions under crushing burdens of debt foolishly incurred by reckless or malevolent popular majorities.

Id. at 788 (footnote omitted).

Nonetheless, I often see majority used with a plural, rather than a singular, verb.  For example, in Dennis J. Block, Stephen A. Radin & James P. Rosenzweig, The Role of the Business Judgment Rule in Shareholder Litigation at the Turn of the Decade, 45 Bus. Law. 469, 478-79 (1990), we find the statement: "it is settled that, under Delaware law, demand will not be excused merely because a majority of directors are named as defendants . . . ".

Fowler's Modern English Usage (2nd ed.) opines that when "majority" is used to mean most of a set of persons, or the greater part numerically, then the "verb is almost necessarily plural".  On the other hand, Fowler states that when "majority" is used to mean the one of two or more sets that has a plurity, or the most numerous body, then the verb can be either singular or plural "according as the body is, or its members are, chiefly in the speaker's thoughts."  For example, the majority of the board was, or were, determined to oppose the merger.  Got it?