Jewish Independent Article: "Law faculties exchange ideas"

In a world where the Occupy movement protest that began on Wall Street against disparities in wealth arose in cities across North America, finding a solution to the issue of concentrated wealth and economic control is both topical and of a certain urgency. Hebrew University law professor Assaf Hamdani was in Vancouver the last week of October to share with University of British Columbia students information about Israel's initiatives to reduce the significant concentration of control within Israel public corporations.

Hamdani, a graduate of Hebrew University's law school followed by a doctorate in law from Harvard, is a research associate at the European Corporate Governance Institute and the Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen and Katz Professor of Corporate Law in the HU law faculty, where his research on corporate governance, regulatory competition, securities regulation and gatekeeper liability has been published by leading international academic journals.

Hamdani came to Vancouver specifically to teach a seminar to UBC law students on mergers and acquisitions - introducing second- and third-year law students to the corporate and securities law aspects of corporate deal-making - as part of the law faculty exchange program between UBC and Hebrew University, established to foster study of issues in comparative law.

The program, now in its second year, has proven to be a great success.

"The Vancouver chapter of the Canadian Friends of Hebrew University [CFHU]," noted Randy Milner, general legal counsel at Methanex Corp. and member of the board of the Vancouver chapter of CFHU, "is very active…in creating linkages between institutions here in Canada, as well as with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem." The law faculty exchange program, explained Milner, is "one important connection…and it's for that reason that Prof. Hamdani is here."

While in Vancouver and teaching his UBC law course, Hamdani gave two presentations to members of the legal profession. The first was Reigning in Corporate Empires: Business Pyramids, Competitiveness and Corporate Law Reform, organized by lawyer Noah Sarna at the Vancouver office of Boughton Law Corp. The second was Self-Dealing and Indirect Conflicts, held at the Four Season Hotel, sponsored by CFHU and UBC's National Centre for Business Law.

At his presentation at Boughton Law Corp., Hamdani suggested that, in the Israeli economy, control of companies has tended to concentrate in the hands of a few key families, through the maintenance of controlling interests in holding companies, so corporate control has been considered a greater issue than the concentration of wealth. According to Hamdani, the solution advanced in Israel is the creation of "wedge companies."

For his talk at the Four Seasons Hotel, where he was introduced by Ronald Davies, associate professor at UBC's faculty of law, Hamdani used legal developments from Delaware as examples to illustrate the legal distinction between corporate business decisions and self-dealing or conflicted transactions, offering a new approach that would allow courts to identify self-dealing transactions.

On a personal note, Hamdani mentioned that the reason he chose to participate in the law-professor exchange program was twofold: The first was the significant reputation of the "academic level of Vancouver," and the second was to meet new colleagues and members of the business community.