There should be quite a wide audience for a brief filed last week by law professors John Morley of Yale University and Robert Jackson of New York University, opposing the dismissal of an investor’s lawsuit against the blank-check company GO Acquisition, Reuters reports.
After all, when Morley, Jackson and their co-counsel from Susman Godfrey, Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann and RM Law first sued GO and two other special purpose acquisition companies in Manhattan federal court in August, dozens of law firms united in an extremely unusual joint statement decrying the law professors’ theory that SPACs are subject to regulation under the Investment Company Act of 1940 when they fail to acquire an operating company within a year of offering shares to the public.
The new brief is the profs’ first public rejoinder to the firms, which insisted that SPACs are not investment companies because their primary business is searching for a target business to acquire. Jackson and Morley aren’t backing down an inch.
