D.C. Court Strikes Down Proxy Access

Stephen Bainbridge pulls together some of the blogosphere reaction here.  I highlight the following from that post:

Mike Scarcella at The BLT:

The appeals court sided with the business groups’ lawyers, who argued that investors with special interests, including unions and state and local governments, would be likely to put the maximization of shareholder value second to other interests. “By ducking serious evaluation of the costs that could be imposed upon companies from use of the rule by shareholders representing special interests, particularly union and government pension funds, we think the Commission acted arbitrarily,” Judge Douglas Ginsburg said in the ruling, joined by Chief Judge David Sentelle and Judge Janice Rogers Brown.

Gordon Smith:

The opinion is a rather limited indictment of the proxy access proposal, relying on the lack of sufficient justification. The SEC is considering its options. While it might challenge the ruling, I suspect that the agency is more likely to produce a newly justified rule in the near future.

Brett McDonnell:

[L]et me briefly lament the D.C. Circuit's vacating of the proxy access rule....  The SEC's documents proposing and finalizing the rule are about extensive as I have ever seen from that agency, and they had voluminous comments from all sides to help guide them.  The D.C. Circuit cherrypicks areas where it asserts the SEC didn't do enough.  It will almost always be possible to do that with any agency rulemaking.  Requiring that level of deliberation could well make the task of rule-writing for Dodd-Frank more daunting still.  This opinion is little more than the judges ignoring the proper judicial rule of deference to an agency involved in notice-and-comment rulemaking and asserting their own naked political preferences.  Talk about judicial activism.

SJP