Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

President Obama apparently decided to support the omnibus budget bill late Thursday morning, December 11th. He supported the bill because Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told him the threat of a government shutdown in the first quarter of 2015 was otherwise a real one, and the President should act quickly to get that off the table. The next few hours appear to have been hectic ones, as alliances formed and shifted both for and against the bill, across party lines. The bill came to be called "cromnibus," apparently for "Continuing Resolution Omnibus." [Personally my first impression was that the "cr" stood from "cram." Alas not.] At 9:37 Thursday evening, the bill passed the House, 219 to 206. Obama and House Speaker Boehner had both kept enough of their troops in line to get the result they both wanted. The Senate passed it on Saturday night, with a vote of 56 to 40. The 40 who voted "no" included both Elizabeth Warren and Te...

In June 2006 the Supreme Court of the State of Delaware handed down a decision on the duties that members of a board of directors owe to the stockholders. Because of the high-profile boardroom fighting behind the decision, and of course the famous name of the company, this decision is better known than are many equally-important corporate and securities law decisions: Yet  In re Walt Disney Co. Derivative Litigation has a good deal of significance even aside from all that. A major New York corporate-law firm, Wachtell Lipton , recently mailed its various corporate clients a "Compensation Committee Guide," explaining how they can determine the salaries, perqs, etc., of their Big Shot executives with minimal litigation blowback. It intrigues me that in a 2013 pamphlet prepared for this purpose, a 7-year-old Disney case, something that happened before the great financial crisis, before Dodd-Frank, before the recent say-on-pay litigation, still has to be given and is giv...