California Corporate & Securities Law

No California appellate court has yet addressed the validity of forum selection bylaws in a published decision. When the question comes before a California appellate court, the outcome may turn on the meaning of "may" in California Corporations Code...

Following yesterday's post concerning the status of Revlon duties in California, I received a note from Suzanne Weakley, an attorney at the California Continuing Education of the BAR (aka the CEB).  For those readers not familiar with the CEB, it is...

There are certain seminal Delaware corporate law cases that are so well known that corporate lawyers are wont to assume that they have been adopted and followed everywhere.  One such case is Revlon, Inc. v. MacAndrews & Forbes Holdings, Inc., 506...

In December 2014, Stanford Law School Professor Joseph A. Grundfest and Daniel M. Gallagher incited an academic titanomachy when they released a draft of an academic paper provocatively entitled "Did Harvard Violate Federal Securities Law? The...

California Civil Code Section 1671(b) provides that "a provision in a contract liquidating the damages for the breach of the contract is valid unless the party seeking to invalidate the provision establishes that the provision was unreasonable under...

Decisions by U.S. District Court judges typically begin with an identification of the parties, an explanation of the procedural posture of the case, or a description of the dispute.  Chief Judge Lawrence J. O'Neill, however, chose to begin a recent...

Some persons may be deemed to violate the Corporate Securities Law of 1968 even though they did not directly violate the law. Corporations Code Section 25403(a) provides that a person who with knowledge directly or indirectly controls and induces...

The basic premise underlying most disclosure requirements seems to be that issuers won't disclose to investors unless legally required to do so. Yet, there is ample evidence of issuers making disclosures in the absence of legal compulsion. Below are...

Last August, the Securities and Exchange Commission adopted amendments to Form ADV, the form used by investment advisers to register with the SEC and with the states. Included in these amendments were changes to allow multiple private fund adviser...