California Corporate & Securities Law

Over the years, I have devoted several posts to the question of whether corporate directors are employees:

The plaintiffs in Chan v. ArcSOFT, Inc., 2023 WL 2788585, believed that they had been misled in a buyout of their shares and so they sued the company and its Chief Executive officer. One of the plaintiffs, Marc Chan, did not own shares in ArcSOFT...

Michael Jackson died in 2009. After his death, two plaintiffs filed complaints against two corporations of which Michael Jackson was the sole shareholder. The trial court sustained the plaintiffs' demurrer setting up appeals to the California Court...

Section 309 of the California Corporations Code specifies the standard of performance applicable to directors in performing their duties as directors of corporations organized under the California General Corporation Law. The Nonprofit Corporation...

A neophyte to corporate law might ask where is it written in the California General Corporation Law that directors and officers are fiduciaries. The answer is nowhere. In fact, the phrase "fiduciary duty" appears only once in the GCL - in Section...

One popular theory of the corporation is that it is a nexus of contracts.  As Frank Easterbrook and Daniel Fischel pithily pronounced "Corporations are enduring (relational) contracts."F. Easterbrook and D. Fischel, The Economic Structure of...

UCLA Law Professor Stephen Bainbridge recently answered the question of whether shareholders may remove a corporation's chief executive officer and chairman of the board from a Delaware perspective. Like Delaware, California provides a statutory...

Section 204(a)(10) of the California Corporations Code permits the articles of incorporation to include provisions eliminating or limiting the personal liability of a director for monetary damages in an action brought by or in the right of the...

In a recent post, UCLA Professor Stephen Bainbridge concludes: "And the law is that suits claiming woke directors breached their fiduciary duties by their decisions about how the corporation behaves in the political arena are non-starters". While I...