Business

The Securities and Exchange Commission recently indicated in an entry in the Office of Management and Budget’s Unified Agenda that it plans to issue by April 2013 a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on requiring public companies to disclose their spending on politics. The adoption of such a rule was urged in a rulemaking petition submitted by a committee of ten law professors co-chaired by Harvard Law School Professor Lucian Bebchuk LL.M. ’80 S.J.D. ’84 and by a record number of supporting comments subsequently filed with the SEC.

On Dec. 11, Harvard Law School’s Program on the Legal Profession (PLP) and the Indian School of Business (ISB) co-hosted a major international conference on the future of corporate business in India and the role of the legal profession. The event was held at the ISB campus in Hyderabad, India.

Roy L. Furman ’63 is vice chairman of Jefferies & Company and chairman of Jefferies Capital Partners. He has also produced five Tony Award-winning plays and musicals on Broadway and currently has five shows running.

In recent debates over reducing the budget deficit, even politicians adamant about not raising taxes have been discussing the elimination of tax loopholes, or “tax expenditures.” We turned to Professor of Practice Stephen Shay, and asked the former deputy assistant secretary in the U.S. Treasury: What are tax expenditures, and should they be repealed as a means to lower tax rates, reduce the deficit or both?

A group of senior corporate managers, finance practitioners, and academics from Europe and the U.S. gathered at HLS on Sept. 14-15 for a conference on the role of corporate governance in encouraging long-term value in public corporations.

The Federal Trade Commission is not just an agency, said its Chairman Jon Leibowitz at a talk on Thursday, Oct.11 at Harvard Law School, but it is an agency of superheroes, working to protect American consumers. “Like Superman, we fight for truth and justice and the American way—but of course we don’t wear capes,” Leibowitz said.

The Morality of the Free Market was the topic of a Sept. 27 address at Harvard Law School by Arthur Brooks, the president of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative research organization in Washington, D.C. The event was sponsored by the Harvard Law Federalist Society.

A Harvard program immerses students in legal and business training.

Barry Volpert J.D./M.B.A. ’85 is chief executive officer of Crestview Partners, a private equity firm he co-founded in 2004 after retiring from Goldman Sachs, where he was head of the Merchant Banking Division in Europe. Based in New York City, Crestview has about $4 billion in assets under management. "We like to focus on complex and difficult situations," he says, "that many other private equity firms tend to avoid."

Entrepreneurs, as management guru Peter Drucker has written, “create something new, something different; they change or transmute values.” That’s not easy to do, as two Harvard Law grads—one just embarking on a new startup, the other working to build a business he developed—can attest. But they also can speak to the excitement of seeing a need and seeking to fill it, and doing it in a way that has never been done before.

The highly connected nature of today’s world has all sorts of benefits—but all sorts of potential costs as well, from loss of control of private data to a world financial system so intertwined that when one part of it falls, it’s hard to keep other parts from toppling along with it. In “Interop: The Promise and Perils of Highly Interconnected Systems,” John Palfrey ’01 and Urs Gasser LL.M. ’03 draw on their work at the HLS Berkman Center for Internet & Society to start developing a “normative theory identifying what we want out of all this connectivity.”

For the first time in the history of U.S. presidential elections, both candidates of the major parties are graduates of Harvard Law School. Alumni remember the two presidential candidates as students.

On Sept. 20, Harvard Law School Professor Stephen Shay testified before the Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The topic of the hearing was “Offshore Profit Shifting and the U.S. Tax Code."

Harvard Law School Professor Lucian Bebchuk LL.M. '80 S.J.D. '84 published an op-ed in the New York Times' DealBook on Aug. 15 entitled, “Don’t Discourage Outside Shareholders.”  The op-ed is in response to a proposed rule being considered by the Securities and Exchange Commission that narrows the timeframe in which shareholders must disclose when they hold five percent or more of a company’s holdings. 

In an Aug. 15 op-ed published in The New York Times Global Edition, Harvard Law School Professor Hal Scott weighs in on the European economic crisis and the need for international action in resolving it.

On Wednesday, Aug. 1, Alvin C. Warren, Ropes & Gray Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance at a hearing entitled, “Tax Reform: Examining the Taxation of Business Entities,” which examined the impact of tax reform on American businesses and corporations.

Professor Lucian Bebchuk has been named as one of the 100 most influential people in finance by Treasury & Risk magazine. The list prepared by the magazine puts together individuals who had significant impact on the world of finance this year.

In 2007, Joseph “Jody” LaNasa ’94 launched Serengeti Asset Management, an opportunistic hedge fund that focuses on value investments in the debt and equity of public and private companies.

Over the past 40 years the role of the general counsel has changed dramatically, according to HLS Professor David Wilkins '80, “so that it has become, in my view, the most important position in the legal profession, particularly in the corporate legal world,” he says. But until recently, that model remained uniquely American.