Most securities fraud class actions under SEC Rule 10b-5 involve revelation of negative information about the defendant company that should have been disclosed earlier – bad news that (allegedly) has been covered up by company agents. The...Read more
In US derivative cases, plaintiffs? lawyer fees and monetary awards have a distorting
effect on shareholder value. We evaluate the benefits of corporate litigation without
these externalities using a dataset for the Netherlands...Read more
Corporate legal scholarship largely focuses on addressing managerial agency costs. As part of this paradigm, legal scholars examine how effectively representative litigation, whether class actions or derivative suits, control managerial agency...Read more
Event studies have become increasingly important in securities fraud litigation after the Supreme Court?s decision in Halliburton II. Litigants have used event study methodology, which empirically analyzes the relationship between the disclosure...Read more
Shareholder litigation has been a prominent topic in the comparative corporate governance literature for decades. However, scholars trained in a particular jurisdiction often tend to look for types of lawsuits familiar from their home turf. In...Read more
In 2015, Delaware made several important changes to its laws concerning merger litigation. These changes, which were made in response to a perception that levels of merger litigation were too high and that a substantial proportion of merger cases...Read more
Low-quality securities class action lawsuits disproportionally target firms with valuable innovation output and lead to substantial shareholder-value losses. We establish this fact using data on class action lawsuits between 1996 and 2011 and the...Read more
This paper analyzes the conduct of mutual funds in shareholder litigation. We begin by reviewing the basic forms of shareholder litigation and the benefits such claims might offer mutual fund investors. We then investigate, through an in-depth...Read more
Has corporate law and its bundles of fiduciary obligations become irrelevant? Over the last thirty years, the American public corporation has undergone a profound metamorphosis, transforming itself from a business with dispersed ownership to one...Read more
In 2010, Morrison v. National Australia Bank Ltd. destabilized the world of securities litigation by denying those who purchased their securities outside the U.S. the ability to sue in the U.S. (as they had previously often done). Nature, however...Read more
Much has been written on the subject of abusive shareholder litigation. The last decade has witnessed at first an increase and then a dramatic spike in such suits, primarily suits filed in connection with mergers and acquisitions. Delaware courts...Read more
This chapter explores class action nuisance suits by examining the plaintiffs that bring them. It focuses on merger litigation—claims brought by shareholders in the wake of corporate mergers and acquisitions transactions—and uses as evidence the...Read more