brian quinn

It’s a Bad Idea, Right? F– It, It’s Fine.

/ BC Law Impact Guest Posts / Leave a comment

This guest post by BC Law Professor Brian Quinn first appeared in the M&A Law Prof Blog.

Hi. Back again. I’ve generally taken a hiatus from blogging, but felt it important to come back and put some things on the record, as it were. If this has not been on your radar, in the past two months or so, Delaware has been on a mad rush to make some significant amendments to its corporate law. This, after having previously signaled it wasn’t going to make any amendments this year. I’ll go into each of the proposed amendments in subsequent posts and the problems I see with the process, but in this post I want to focus on one of the potential reasons for moving so quickly to make changes to the law. 

The amendment themselves are what are being called market practice amendments. Earlier this year the Chancery Court asked itself: “What happens when the seemingly irresistible force of market practice meets the traditionally immovable object of statutory law? A court must uphold the law, so the statute prevails.” Moelis. In all three of these cases, the court effectively dealt a knuckle-wrapping to practitioners.

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Faculty Spotlight: Professor Brian Quinn

/ Thomas R. Blakely / Leave a comment

Recently I sat down with Prof. Brian Quinn as part of the faculty spotlight series.

Prof. Quinn’s class was the first class I ever had at BC Law (at 9 am on August 31st, 2020, my first day of law school no less) and while I have yet to take other classes with him, he’s appeared on our podcast, and has been a mentor and a voice of reason for me. When I was asked to write a profile of a professor for the faculty spotlight series, I figured Prof. Quinn would be a good choice.

Tell me about yourself and your career.

I lived life by accident. If you look at my resume in reverse it begins to make sense, but I did not have much of a plan. I’m from Westfield, New Jersey and received my undergraduate degree from Georgetown University. My mom is from Spain, and I spent my summers there when I was younger. In college, I felt like I had to take up something like Latin American studies, but found it boring. I accepted an opportunity sophomore year to work at a refugee camp in the Philippines for Vietnamese refugees in the late 1980s. 

I saw it as an escape, learned some Vietnamese, and upon returning to Georgetown received an offer to travel to Vietnam as the first undergraduate student from Georgetown to visit there following the Vietnam War.

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