California Corporate & Securities Law

California's gender quota law has attracted a lot of attention, including from at least one member of the Securities and Exchange Commission.  At last month's annual conference of the Society for Corporate Governance, Commissioner Hester M. Peirce...

In 2018, California became the first state to require publicly held corporations with their principal executive offices in the state to have a minimum number of female directors.  Following this groundbreaking, and perhaps unconstitutional, law,...

Last month the New York Stock Exchange issued its annual corporate governance memorandum.  The memorandum provides useful updates and reminders for companies with securities listed on the exchange, including the following:

"Section 302 of the...

California's female director quota law has received a great deal of attention in this blog and elsewhere.  Beginning this year, the law requires certain publicly traded companies with their principal executive offices in California to have at least...

Earlier this week, the Securities and Exchange Commission staff added two new Compliance and Disclosure Interpretations dealing with disclosures of self-identified diversity characteristics under Items 401(e) and 407(c)(2)(vi).  Both C&DIs pose the...

As a general matter, a parent company will not be liable on a contract signed by its subsidiary simply because it is a wholly-owned subsidiary.  Sometimes, however, it is possible to establish some other basis for binding a parent to its...

Old and In the Way?

A recent study by four professors finds quite a few faults with older directors:

"Specifically, older independent directors are more likely to miss board meetings and less likely to be a member or chair of important board...

In yesterday's Mentor Blog, Liz Dunshee asked whether mandatory retirement policies are a thing of the past.  This led me to question whether age discrimination of this sort is even legal in California.  Asking about, I learned that California...

Tuesday's post took note of a recent study authored by Sunwoo Hwang and Professors Anil Shivdasani and Elena Simintzi at the University of North Carolina's Kenan-Flagler Business School.  They found that California's enactment of SB 826 imposing...