Financial Regulation

Thanks to Robert Bartlett, Lucian Bebchuk, Richard Epstein, Larry Ribstein, Amanda Rose, and other participants in the Symposium, The Going-private Phenomenon: Causes and Implications at The University of Chicago Law School. Ching-Tang Chen, Joey Hipolito, Alex Jadin, Amad Judeh, Thomas King, I-Jung Lee, and Tal Niv provided extremely valuable research assistance. I am also thankful to Larry Goldstein of Santa Monica Partners for helpful conversations on the challenges faced by investors in firms that have gone dark. Financial support from the Boalt Hall Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

The authors thank participants at the Symposium, The Going-private Phenomenon: The Causes and Implications at The University of Chicago Law School for their helpful comments on an earlier draft.

I want to thank my colleagues Charles Wu, Nina Flax, and Daniel Horwood for their assistance on this Article and Jessica Waller, one of my students, whose paper was a helpful resource. I also want to thank Robert Helman and Frederick Thomas for their comments.

Thanks to the George J. Phocas Fund for research support.

I thank Dan Brodansky, Brian Broughman, Tom Eaton, Jesse Fried, Kent Greenfield, Paul Heald, Todd Henderson, Christine Hurt, Bob Lawless, Jim Linck, Harold Mulherin, Jeff Netter, Chuck O’Kelley, Peter Oh, Victoria Plaut, Annette Poulsen, Jaxk Reeves, Larry Ribstein, Usha Rodrigues, Jim Rogers, Maggie Sachs, Jason Solomon, Eric Talley, and Jide Wintoki. This Article also benefited from comments received from participants in the Symposium The Going-private Phenomenon: Causes and Implications at The University of Chicago Law School; participants at the 2008 Annual Meeting of the American Law and Economics Association and workshop participants at the University of Georgia Department of Banking and Finance, the UC Berkeley School of Law, the Boston College School of Law, Emory Law School, the University of Illinois College of Law, the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, and the 2008 Law and Entrepreneurship Retreat. Additionally, special thanks go to Marc Auerbach of Standard & Poor’s and Eric Tutterow of Fitch Ratings for providing helpful data and discussion, and to Kevin Erwin (Georgia ’09) for research assistance. All errors are my own.

Thanks to Kevin Davis, Paul Kelly, Geoffrey Miller, Cass Sunstein, students in a Harvard Law School reading group on the Theory of the Administrative State, and audiences at the London School of Economics, NYU Law School and Tel Aviv Law School for helpful comments, and to Elisabeth Theodore for excellent research assistance.

In the interests of full disclosure, I advised ProLogis on some of the legal and economic issues connected with its brief. The opinions expressed here are of course my own.

Many thanks to Lee Fennell, Susan Koniak, Adam Levitin, Claire Priest, Julie Roin, and Jacob Sagi.