Business/Corporate Law

UC Berkeley law professor Robert Bartlett said Musk’s way of disseminating corporate news is so far out of the norm that it’s hard to see his tweets as not being very intentional.

“Some students have come to do their LL.M. here because their country is in an earlier phase of developing their technology-related laws and find it helpful to see how the U.S. has approached similar issues,” says Wayne Stacy, executive director at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law and Technology in California. “Other students come from countries where the body of technology law has gone in a different direction than the U.S. and they appreciate learning about the contrast.”

Berkeley Law professor Kenneth Ayotte discusses the way controversial out-of-court deals are influencing Chapter 11 transactions.

“The number one thing they’re going to worry about is the ability to pay back the loans,” said Berkeley Law professor Adam Badawi “Twitter misses a debt payment, that trips a covenant, and the loanholders can come in and say the debt is due right now.”

“I’ve looked at some of the language in the executive agreements. It’s totally baseless for [Musk] to seek termination with cause,” said Adam Badawi, a professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley. “To get terminated with cause, the circumstances have to be extreme, they have to kind of be malfeasance or someone did something illegal. 

“I can understand why smaller players wouldn’t want to be grouped with Meta,” said Andrew Bradt, professor of law at UC Berkeley School of Law. “Meta is the 800-pound gorilla, and the fear of guilt by association is understandable. On the other hand, I didn’t find their argument [about] the individualized nature of the applications persuasive at all. There are obvious efficiencies to be gained through centralized pretrial proceedings here, and I think the panel did the right thing.” 

Lecturer Shanin Specter and attorney Robert A. Clifford write in their OpEd, “Now, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has imposed $201 million in fines against Boeing and its CEO for misleading investors about the safety of the planes involved. However, there is still a need for criminal investigations into Boeing CEOs Dennis Muilenburg and David Calhoun.”

“California state law might be more amenable to facts that suggest a business who put products on Amazon felt that they couldn’t offer their products on rival platforms,” said UC Berkeley School of Law professor Prasad Krishnamurthy.

Fractional trading brokerages like Robinhood, meanwhile, are “a fly in the ointment,” to Buffett, says Professor Robert Bartlett, who co-authored a new study finding volumes of the most expensive stock in the U.S. have been artificially inflated by the way brokers like Robinhood report fractional trading. “Buffett wants to keep the price of his Class A shares high to attract long-term value investors. Those aren’t the people buying these fractional shares, and so they are undermining his main vision for the stock.”

The best efforts standard is vague and can be difficult to gauge, Professor Adam Badawi says, and establishing that someone has breached a best efforts obligation requires pretty extreme conduct. “You can’t hook someone up to a machine and figure out how much they’re trying,” he says.