I've recently started collecting stock certificates and the like of companies that were involved with sufficiently famous corporate law cases to make it into the casebook that I co-edit with Bill Klein and Mark Ramseyer. Here, for example, is a stock certificate for Glen Alden Coal, the predecessor to the Glen Alden Corporation that featured in Farris v. Glen Alden Corp.

By 1958, although Glen Alden was still "engaged principally in the mining of anthracite coal," it had expanded into the "manufacture of air conditioning units and fire-fighting equipment." In the transaction challenged in the case, Glen Alden combined with "List, a Delaware holding company owning interests in motion picture theaters, textile companies and real estate, and to a lesser extent, in oil and gas operations, warehouses and aluminum piston manufacturing." As a result, the Pennsyvania court explained, "Instead of continuing primarily as a coal mining company, Glen Alden would be transformed ... into a diversified holding company whose interests would range from motion picture theaters to textile companies."
The legal issue in the case is whether the combination of List and Glen Alden--structured as a puchase by Glen Alden of List's assets--was a so-called de facto merger.
I also use the case, however, as an opportunity to talk about the craze in the post-WW II period for conglomerates. I've never understood the logic of combining "motion picture theaters, textile companies and real estate, and ... oil and gas operations, warehouses and aluminum piston manufacturing," not to mention coal mining, under one corporate roof. Ultimately, of course, setting aside GE, the conglomerate mania proved to be a disastrous economic failure. Much of the so-called "merger mania" of the 1980s in fact consisted of bust-up takeovers breaking up these conglomerate dinosaurs.
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