CLAYMONT, Del. (AP) — Lawmakers in Texas, Oklahoma and Nevada have recently approved changes aimed at helping their states dip…
CLAYMONT, Del. (AP) — Lawmakers in Texas, Oklahoma and Nevada have recently approved changes aimed at helping their states dip into the lucrative side of corporate litigation that Delaware, with a specialized court and business-friendly laws, has dominated as the world’s incorporation capital.
Concerned that these changes may lure corporations away from Delaware, thereby causing the small state to lose millions in corporate franchise taxes, Delaware officials have responded with their own changes to solidify their status in the business world.
In Texas, which opened a business court last year, there was bipartisan support for legislation diminishing shareholder powers and giving businesses more legal protections against shareholder lawsuits. Nevada lawmakers approved a corporation-friendly update to its business laws, also with bipartisan support, and separately moved toward asking voters to consider changing the state constitution to create a dedicated business court with appointed judges.
Billionaire Elon Musk had advocated both states as better options for incorporation after a Delaware judge struck down his shareholder-approved $56 billion compensation package from Tesla. Musk’s businesses have also changed where they’re incorporated: Tesla and SpaceX relocated to Texas, while Neuralink moved to Nevada.
Oklahoma also took action to get in the mix, as the Republican-led Legislature sanctioned the creation of business courts in its two most populous counties, a move the governor said would help Oklahoma become the most business-friendly state.
“This is an area in which states, in many ways, are behaving like businesses,” said Robert Ahdieh, dean of the Texas A&M University School of Law. “Delaware is selling something. Texas is selling something that they hold out to be better. So it is very much a comparative exercise.”
Since 2024, several billion-dollar companies including TripAdvisor and DropBox have relocated to Nevada. More than a dozen others, including the AMC theater chain and video game developer Roblox Corporation, have announced plans to incorporate there this year. Latin American e-commerce giant MercadoLibre filed a request for shareholders to approve a Texas relocation in April, citing Delaware’s “less predictable” decision-making process — a common thought among exiting companies.
Amid concerns about more companies reincorporating elsewhere in a so-called “Dexit,” Delaware passed its own legislation to help protect its status as the corporate capital, limiting shareholders’ access to records and increasing protections for leadership. Opposition dubbed it “the Billionaire’s Bill.”
“Ultimately, I think the damage is done because businesses successfully undermined shareholder rights in Delaware,” said Corey Frayer, director of investor protection at Consumer Federation of America, who argues that the Delaware bill was a rash acquiescence to “Dexit” concerns.
However, some business law experts, like Ahdieh, say the average shareholder is focused on increasing their returns and does not care about shareholder power or where the company is incorporated.
Delaware Gov. Matt Meyer has vowed to win back companies that leave, arguing his state’s experience “beats going to Vegas and rolling the dice.”
Companies flock to Delaware for its well-respected Court of Chancery, a sophisticated and separate forum focusing on equity, corporate and business law. This incorporation machine generates $2.2 billion annually, about one-third of the state’s operating budget.
There is comfort in working in the familiarity of Delaware law, said Ahdieh, but that predictability has come into question in the last decade as corporate leaders grew unhappy over losing precedent-setting court decisions governing corporate conflicts of interest.
Widener University Commonwealth law school professor Christian Johnson acknowledged a shift in Delaware but said reincorporating elsewhere might be “a bit of an overreaction.” Although a few big-name companies have moved, there are still more than 2 million legal entities incorporated in Delaware, including two-thirds of the Fortune 500.
Statutes in Texas and Nevada may appear more flexible, but they have not been extensively tested, and their courts are not as experienced working with the larger entities that favor Delaware, Johnson said.
In May, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed legislation providing greater securities for corporate officers and adding restrictions to shareholder records requests. The bill also allows corporations to require an ownership threshold, no more than 3% in outstanding shares, before a shareholder can initiate a derivative lawsuit, typically on behalf of the company and against its own board or directors.
Restrictions on who can initiate such lawsuits are not uncommon, but Texas’ implementation imposes a “far higher barrier than the norm,” Ahdieh said.
Consumer advocates worry the changes endanger shareholder and investor protections by giving owners and directors more protection against lawsuits that could hold them accountable if they violate their fiduciary duty.
For businesses, the changes mean potentially saving millions of dollars in shareholder lawsuit settlements and legal fees by mitigating the likelihood of those costly cases reaching court. For the states, attracting the companies means millions in business activity and revenue from regulatory filing and court case fees and taxes.
Eyeing a piece of that, Oklahoma is on pace to establish its recently approved business courts in 2026.
“I’m trying to take down Delaware,” said Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican. “We want to be the most business-friendly state.”
Nevada wants to compete, too. It has run business dockets in Washoe and Clark counties since 2001, and it’s in the state’s interest to expand operations considering its fast-growing economy and population, said Benjamin Edwards, a University of Nevada, Las Vegas law professor who studies business and securities law.
But he said it could take decades to build up a court comparable to Delaware, which has a valuable reputation for handling cases relatively quickly.
Nevada’s proposed business court wouldn’t take effect until 2028 at the earliest and would require amending the state constitution, which would need approval by the 2027 legislature and voter approval in 2028 to allow for the appointment of judges.
___
Associated Press reporter Marc Levy in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, contributed to this report.
Copyright
© 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, written or redistributed.
Truckee Meadows Fire & Rescue and a number of agencies are fighting a brush fire that is prompting evacuations in Palomino Valley north of Spanish Springs.
Aerial firefighting underway on the fire, which has been dubbed the Ironwood Fire.
People are asked to avoid the area of Pyramid Highway, Iron Springs Road, and Whiskey Springs Road as first responders make their way to the scene.
Evacuation orders are in place for the area below. The evacuation point is the Ironwood Events Center.
LAS VEGAS (KTNV) — Nevada residents won’t be receiving devices that allow semi-automatic rifles to fire at the rate of a fully automatic machine gun, thanks to a settlement worked out by the state’s lawyers.
But hundreds of other people across the country are eligible to receive so-called force reset triggers, under a lawsuit negotiated by the U.S. government and firearms manufacturers.
The move comes after an executive order from President Donald Trump prompted a review of the government’s regulation of firearms in general, and a reversal of the government’s position in two key cases.
Meanwhile, a lawsuit filed by 16 states, including Nevada, seeks to ban forced reset triggers using the reasoning the federal government formerly employed in its own legal actions.
“Especially coming from a state like Nevada, where we’ve experienced a mass shooting, we don’t want these forms of devices, predominantly because it’s against our law”, said Attorney General Aaron Ford. “But secondly, we have personal experience on these, what happens when these types of things are placed into the wrong hands.”
A semi-automatic rifle, such as the Armalite Rifle 15, or AR-15, fires a single round every time the trigger is pressed. The trigger must be released for a new round to be inserted into the chamber.
But a forced reset trigger — sometimes called FRT — allows a weapon to fire rounds as long as the trigger is held down, similar to the operation of a military-style M4 or M16 rifle. In fully automatic mode, the weapon will continue firing until its magazine is empty.
The forced reset trigger is installed internally, and it may not be readily apparent to an observer that the weapon has been modified.
Fully automatic weapons are generally prohibited to civilians, as are devices that allow semi-automatic weapons to fire at fully automatic rates, under the National Firearms Act of 1934, the Gun Control Act of 1968 and the Firearm Owners Protection Act of 1986.
After the deadly 1 October shooting in 2017, the Nevada Legislature banned so-called bump stocks, which are devices affixed externally to a rifle’s stock that use the recoil of the rifle to achieve continuous fire.
The perpetrator of 1 October used rifles equipped with bump stocks to rain gunfire on a crowd at the Route 91 Harvest music festival on the Las Vegas Strip.
Under Nevada law, passed in 2019, it’s illegal to import, sell or possess any device that “…materially increases the rate of fire of the semi-automatic firearm or approximates the action or rate of fire of a machine gun.”
That language applies equally to bump stocks as well as forced reset triggers.
And the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms and Tobacco formerly took the view that forced reset triggers were devices that turned semi-automatic rifles into illegal machine guns. Starting in 1975, the ATF classified devices similar to forced reset triggers as machine gun devices.
As of last summer, the ATF had taken possession of at least 11,884 forced reset trigger devices under its regulations and brought legal actions against their manufacturers.
In August 2023, however, gun rights groups and trigger makers sued the ATF, challenging the rules classifying the triggers as machine gun devices. A Texas federal judge agreed with the plaintiffs and ordered the AFT to stop enforcing its regulations and to return forced reset triggers to their previous owners, even in states where the law prohibited them, such as Nevada.
The government eventually said it would return the devices, but only in places where they were legal, an approach the gun makers objected to, saying the federal government could not be trusted with interpreting state laws.
On February 7, however, President Trump issued an executive order to protect Second Amendment rights, prompting a Justice Department review of all gun regulations. The AFT subsequently withdrew its lawsuits against the trigger makers and agreed to return all triggers previously seized from owners.
But lawyers representing Nevada and other states secured an agreement: no triggers would be returned to states where the law bans them. Ford said the deal would protect the state, at least temporarily, but that loopholes persist.
“We have said that they will not be shipped to Nevada,” said Ford. “But our borders are porous, intrastate borders are porous, to be sure. So a gun that’s delivered to Utah, or an FRT that’s delivered to Utah may very well find its way across the border into Mesquite or something. At the end of the day, these are very real issues that we have to address.”
Ford said he would make enforcement of gun laws — including possession or use of forced reset triggers — a priority for his office.
“It’s one of the highest levels of priority, because I’ve always supported common-sense gun safety measures that are going to keep the public safe, and that’s what this is about.”
That’s why Nevada is continuing as a plaintiff in the case State of New Jersey v. Bondi, which asks a court to find that the ATF’s old viewpoint — that forced reset triggers create machine guns out of regular semi-automatic rifles — is the law, and thus ban them nationwide.
Published
Travis and Jason Kelce were spotted living it up in Lake Tahoe over the weekend — capping off their evening with a high-stakes gambling session at a Casino.
The NFL brothers were photographed leaving Harrah’s Casino on the Nevada side of the city just before 2 AM Sunday looking relaxed and in good spirits after what appeared to be a high rollers’ run at the tables.
The Kelces kept it casual with Travis wearing a t-shirt and Jason rocking a pair of shorts despite the late hour. Travis pulled out his phone and appeared to be checking messages … maybe sending a late night text to Taylor Swift?
Travis, whose every move has been tracked this offseason amid his romance with Swift, looked especially carefree as he exited with his older brother.
TMZSports.com
The duo had enjoyed their late-night fun following an appearance at the American Century Championship, the annual celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe.
Both Kelce brothers teed off in the tournament earlier in the day, drawing crowds and cameras … and, while it didn’t go great golf-wise, the two had fun pounding beers and interacting with fans.
But once the sun set, the action clearly shifted from the green grass to the green felt of a card table, it seems.
No word yet on whether the brothers cashed out big, but one thing’s for sure … when the Kelces roll into town, the chips — and the good times — are bound to stack up.
Try to Match These Snarky Quotations to Their Novels and Stories
Video: Trump Compliments President of Liberia on His ‘Beautiful English’
Do you really save money on Prime Day?
Apple’s latest AirPods are already on sale for $99 before Prime Day
Texas Flooding Map: See How the Floodwaters Rose Along the Guadalupe River
Companies keep slashing jobs. How worried should workers be about AI replacing them?
Video: Clashes After Immigration Raid at California Cannabis Farm
Journalist who refused to duck during Trump assassination attempt reflects on Butler rally in new book
