The Case Western Law Review will publish three articles from the Center for Business Law’s Leet Symposium held on Nov. 4, 2022. The law review published the last two Leet Symposia, with the 2020 Leet focusing on the fiduciary and anticompetitive issues raised by the three big index funds. The 2018 Leet addressed fiduciary duty corporate goals, and shareholder activism.
This year’s Leet symposium featured keynote speaker Jill Fisch, whose presentation focused on the fundamental issue of the limits of private ordering in the context of corporate law. An article by Juliet Kostritsky, Jilly Fox and Blake Spiller presented at the Leet addressed another aspect of private ordering by examining the hidden costs of contractual mandates for Environmental Social Governance (ESG). The article asked whether such provisions would violate fiduciary responsibility and impose costs due to the ambiguity in the meaning of ESG.
The third article, authored by G. Mitu Gulati, Robert Scott and Stephen Choi’s, is entitled: “Are Mergers and Acquisitions Lawyers Really Better?” Gulati explains that the paper examines “a comparison of contract drafting and error correction across four different practice areas.”
The abstract asserts that: “Recent research on contract innovation has raised the possibility that M&A lawyers are faster and better at innovation than their colleagues in other areas.” The paper examines whether, based on empirical data, M&A lawyers are more adept at adapting to events by contractual innovation. This article raises another aspect of private ordering by looking at how private ordering proceeds at the level of transactional lawyering and responds to exogenous events.
Gulati, Scott and Choi gave the CWRU Law Review a first option on their paper and agreed to give the law review at CWRU an exclusive right to publication. Kostritsky and her co-authors Jilly Fox (LAW ‘22) and 3L Blake Spiller also agreed to give the law review exclusive rights to publish as part of the Leet symposium issue.
A preeminent corporate law scholar, Robert Thompson of the Georgetown Law School, is submitting an article to the Law Review based on his talk at the Leet symposium. His topic examines contracting out in 21st century corporate law in the context of closely held entities, VC startups and corporations.
Speakers at the Leet not appearing in the Symposium issue include: Gabriel Rauterberg of the University of Michigan and Anat Alon-Beck of CWRU.