Business/Corporate Law

“Everyone talks about leadership as influence,” writes Angeli Patel, executive director, Berkeley Center for Law and Business. “I think it’s more like stewardship: of attention, energy, and discernment. And in this AI-driven, globally-unstable moment, the real leaders are the ones who can say no to speed and create solutions with calm.”

“He has the upside, in a sense, in terms of influence, if it all succeeds,” said Ofer Eldar, a corporate governance professor at the UC Berkeley School of Law. “He’s taking all this commitment knowing that he’s not going to actually face any consequences because he doesn’t have a financial stake.”

Alex Cheng and Emily Miles, 2Ls at Berkeley Law, founded the Berkeley NIL Initiative, or BNILI, which will be supervised by executive director of the Berkeley Center For Law & Technology Wayne Stacy.

“Philz appears loaded up on debt and preferred shares. So, for whatever price they’re being potentially sold to the private equity holder — and that could be either through a kind of merger and acquisition transaction or it could be through asset sale,” Professor Prasad Krishnamurthy said. “Either way, after the debt holders get paid off and after the preferred shareholders get paid up, there doesn’t seem to be any money left over for the common shareholders.”

New research by Professor Ofer Eldar and Mark Ørberg unpacks the economic rationales behind nonprofit business ownership, challenge the idea that it’s all about purpose, & highlight the overlooked risks of nonprofit control.

UC Berkeley School of Law professor Ofer Eldar joins the Activist Investing Today podcast to discuss the evolution of poison pills. 

“How Texas deals with this question is going to be very critical on how people see Texas, moving forward, and how people see Delaware, moving forward, and ultimately how they see corporations,” said Professor Stavros Gadinis. “I don’t think that Texas courts would necessarily be willing to be aligned with Delaware.”

Berkeley Law receives an A+ in the areas of Criminal Law, Racial Justice an Business Law in the Fall issue of preLaw Magazine.

Professor Adam Badawi co-writes a new paper that finds that 63% of the S&P 500 include ESG components in their calculation of executive compensation and that such goals are almost always met.

“I think that the wild card is if Elon turns Delaware into some kind of cause célèbre for a large set of retail shareholders, given his platform,” said assistant law professor Andrew Baker. “That could happen and become a reason people choose not to incorporate in Delaware,” he said. “But who knows?”