Last June, President Obama's nominee to be the next Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust warned that Google, not Microsoft, is the monopolist of the future. Google contends that this and other concerns are completely misplaced. Join us as a panel of experts discuss whether Google has, in fact, a monoploy. [Listen now!]

Historically, sovereign lending has been dominated by a small group of large banks and financial institutions. The group of investors holding sovereign debt has become more diverse and includes commercial banks of all sizes, investment banks, pension funds, mutual funds, hedge funds, nonfinance companies, and retail investors. In the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, a secondary market developed for distressed sovereign debt because banks sought to remove rescheduled sovereign debt from their books and did so by selling this debt at significantly discounted prices to the secondary market. However, the secondary market for sovereign debt began to attract investors having no intention of making equity investments in the  debtor  countries. These investors, known as “vulture creditors,” specialize  in  strategic purchase of debt on the secondary market and typically purchase sovereign debt that is trading at a deep discount as a result of the sovereign’s financial distress. The objective of the vulture creditors is to seek short-term gains, either through the restructuring process or by holding out of the restricting process until the debtors and majority creditors negotiate an offer of additional payment. In such a situation, the vulture creditor typically “free rides” by holding out for better terms already agreed to by other creditors in a restructuring process. If this is unsuccessful, the vulture creditor will seek to collect the full face value of its claim from the sovereign by means of litigation. The term “holdout litigation” typically characterizes this situation, where a majority of creditors accept debt restructuring but a minority chooses to sue for full repayment...

Do you own mutual fund shares either directly or through your 401(k) plan? If so, you should be interested in the outcome of the case Jones v Harris Associates to be heard early in the 2009-2010 Supreme Court Term. The case involves allegations of “excessive fees” paid to a mutual fund’s investment adviser and is notable because the Court rarely takes cases arising under the Investment Company Act (“ICA”). The Court was likely motivated to grant review by the differing views of Seventh Circuit Chief Judges Frank Easterbrook and Richard Posner...

The Federalist Society's Corporations, Securities, & Antitrust Practice Group hosted this panel discussion on Delaware's New Competition: The Creeping Federalization of American Corporate Law at the 2009 National Lawyers Convention on Saturday, November 14, 2009. Panelists included Prof. Stephen M. Bainbridge of the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law; Mr. Cornish F. Hitchcock of the Hitchcock Law Firm PLLC; Mr. David A. Katz, Partner at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; Prof. Roberta Romano, Director of the Yale Law School Center for the Study of Corporate Law; and Judge Thomas M. Hardiman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit as the moderator.