Digital Commons Network^™

When Is A Dog’S Tail Not A Leg?: A Property-Based Methodology For Distinguishing Sales Of Receivables From Security Interests That Secure An Obligation, Steven L. Harris, Charles W. Mooney Jr.

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There are two principal ways in which a firm that is owed money payable in the future but needs the money now may use its rights to payment (“receivables”) to obtain the needed financing. It might sell its receivables, or it might borrow and use the receivables as collateral to secure the loan. Different legal consequences follow depending on whether the transaction is a true sale or is a security interest that secures an obligation (a “SISO”).

These legal consequences are particularly salient when the firm enters bankruptcy. If the transaction is a sale, then the buyer can collect the …

Harmonizing Choice-Of-Law Rules For International Insolvency Cases: Virtual Territoriality, Virtual Universalism, And The Problem Of Local Interests, Charles W. Mooney Jr.

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This paper explores the potential content and feasibility of a set of harmonized choice of law rules (HICOL Rules) that would apply in insolvency proceedings. It contemplates a main insolvency proceeding opened in a debtor’s center of main interests (“COMI”) and the existence of (or possibility of opening) one or more non-main (or secondary) proceedings. It also contemplates the possibility that an insolvency representative in a main or non-main proceeding may seek and be granted recognition in another state under the UNCITRAL Model Law on Cross-Border Insolvency (codified as Chapter 15 of the Bankruptcy Code in the U.S.) Under HICOL …

The Cape Town Convention’S Improbable-But-Possible Progeny Part One: An International Secured Transactions Registry Of General Application, Charles W. Mooney Jr.

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This essay is Part One of a two-part essay series. It outlines and evaluates two possible future international instruments. Each instrument draws substantial inspiration from the Cape Town Convention and its Aircraft Protocol (together, the “Convention”). The Convention governs the secured financing and leasing of large commercial aircraft, aircraft engines, and helicopters. It entered into force in 2006. It has been adopted by sixty Contracting States (fifty-four of which have adopted the Aircraft Protocol), including the U.S., China, the E.U., India, Ireland, Luxembourg, Russia, and South Africa.

A novel, distinctive, and path-breaking feature of the Convention is the international registry …

The Inalienable Right Of Publicity, Jennifer E. Rothman

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This article challenges the conventional wisdom that the right of publicity is universally and uncontroversially alienable. Courts and scholars have routinely described the right as a freely transferable property right, akin to patents or copyrights. Despite such broad claims of unfettered alienability, courts have limited the transferability of publicity rights in a variety of instances. No one has developed a robust account of why such limits should exist or what their contours should be. This article remedies this omission and concludes that the right of publicity must have significantly limited alienability to protect the rights of individuals to control the …

Law – Made In Germany: Global Standort Or Global Standard?, James Maxeiner

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Earlier this year the Federal Ministry of Justice released the second edition of the brochure, Law - Made in Germany. For those readers who do not know the brochure, it is the product of an umbrella group of German professional organizations known as the Bündnis für das deutsche Recht. A purpose of the Bündnis, as stated at its founding in 2008, and of the brochure, is to improve the position of German law in the ― "international competition of legal systems" (internationalen Wettbewerb der Rechtsordnungen). Catalyst for founding of the Bündnis and for publication of Law - Made in Germany …

Cyber Commodification, Miriam A. Cherry

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When it comes to commodification on the Internet, it is a wild, wild World Wide Web. Researching encyclopedia articles for Wikipedia is an unpaid labor of love, but connecting to your friends on Facebook is a $100 billion enterprise. Newspaper classified advertisements are definitely commercial, but their equivalent on Craigslist was mostly non-commercial – until the Delaware Chancery Court stepped in. Selling your organs is prohibited in the United States, whereas selling hair promises to rescue third-world citizens from poverty. Selling sex is illegal as prostitution, but selling adultery online is a hot new business model. And a small company …

American Legal History Survey: Syllabus, Anders Walker

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This syllabus provides an overview of American Legal History, focusing on the manner in which law has been used to organize American society. Several themes will be traced through the semester, including law’s role in encouraging innovation and regulating social relations, in part through the elaboration of legal disciplines like property, tort, contract, criminal law, tax, business associations, administrative law, environmental law, securities regulation, commercial law, immigration, and health law. Emphasis will also be placed on the origins and evolution of constitutional law, from the founding to the present.

Criminal And Civil Law In The Torah: The Mosaic Law In Christian Perspective, David A. Skeel Jr., Tremper Longman

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When Jesus spoke of fulfilling the law and the prophets, he was referring to the Mosaic law, nearly all of which is in the four books we consider in this Article: Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. In an effort to discern the Mosaic law’s guidance for contemporary secular law, we first place it in covenantal perspective and identify three of its key concerns: God’s nature, as revealed in Scripture; the nature of Israel; and the role of the land. After summarizing the regulation in the four books under consideration and noting a few of its characteristics, we conclude by discussing …

Using First Principles Of Ucc Article 9 To Solve Statutory Puzzles In Receivables Financing, Steven L. Harris, Charles W. Mooney Jr.

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No abstract provided.

Turkey's Accession To The Cisg: The Significance For Turkey And For Sales Transactions With U.S. Contracting Parties, William P. Johnson

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The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG) entered into force for Turkey on August 1, 2011. This article considers the significance of Turkey’s accession to the CISG as part of Turkey’s continuing engagement with systems of international trade, especially as relates to sales transactions with U.S. contracting parties. This article urges the Turkish bar to recognize that the CISG is a viable alternative to various potentially applicable bodies of domestic sales law, and the article offers some guidance regarding proper understanding and application of the CISG. This article also offers comparative analysis of some …

Unequal Promises, Aditi Bagchi

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This essay explores the nature and implications of a type of inequality that is widespread but largely ignored. Promises deliver important ethical value, and commercial promises, because they are our most common experience of promise with strangers, are of special value. But not all commercial promises generate that value equally. This paper makes the following claims: (1) while some retail promises are promises either to deliver a good or service, or to pay some compensation, other retail promises are simple promises to deliver a good or service; (2) retail promises in high-end markets are more likely to have the simple …

Resale Price Maintenance: Consignment Agreements, Copyrighted Or Patented Products And The First Sale Doctrine, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

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The rule of reason adopted for resale price maintenance in the Supreme Court’s Leegin decision, which upset the century old Dr. Miles rule of per se illegality, requires some reconsideration of a number of issues about antitrust treatment of RPM. Under the old per se rule, bona fide “consignment” agreements were not covered by Section 1 of the Sherman Act at all because there was said to be no qualifying “agreement” between the supplier and the dealer. Rather the dealer was simply said to be acting as an agent of the seller. However, insofar as RPM produces competitive dangers, such …

Leegin, The Rule Of Reason, And Vertical Agreement, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

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The Supreme Court’s Leegin decision overturned the longstanding rule of per se illegality for resale price maintenance and applied a rule of reason. One might think that the question whether a vertical “agreement” exists between a manufacturer and a dealer should not be affected by the mode of analysis to be applied after an agreement is found. First one asks whether an agreement exists, and determines whether the per se rule or rule of reason applies only after receiving an affirmative answer. Nevertheless, ever since Colgate the Supreme Court has generally taken a more restrictive approach on the agreement issue …

Moral Judgment And Moral Heuristics In Breach Of Contract, Tess Wilkinson-Ryan

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Most people think that breaking a promise is immoral, and that a breach of contract is a kind of broken promise. However, the law does not explicitly recognize the moral context of breach of contract. Using a series of web-based questionnaires, we asked subjects to read breach of contract cases and answer questions about the legal, financial, and moral implications of each case. Our results suggest that people are quite sensitive to the moral dimensions of a breach of contract, especially the perceived intentions of the breacher. In the first study, we framed the motivation for a contractor's breach as …

The Argentine Financial Crisis: State Liability Under Bits And The Legitimacy Of The Icsid System, William W. Burke-White

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This essay examines the jurisprudence of the International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) arbitral tribunals in a series of cases brought against the Republic of Argentina in the wake of the 2001-2002 Argentine financial collapse. The essay considers the ICSID tribunals' treatment of non-precluded measures provisions in Argentina's bilateral investment treaties (BITs) and the customary law defense of necessity and argues that the ICSID tribunals have sought to radically narrow the opportunities available to states to craft policy responses to emergency situations while strengthening investor protections beyond the intent of the states parties to the BITs under …

Debt And Democracy: Towards A Constitutional Theory Of Bankruptcy, Jonathan C. Lipson

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This article examines the relationship between bankruptcy and constitutional law. Article I, § 8, cl. 4 of the Constitution provides that Congress shall have the power to make “uniform laws on the subject of bankruptcies.” While there are many good social, political and economic theories of bankruptcy, there has been surprisingly little effort to explore what it means to have constitutionalized financial distress. This article is a first step in that direction. Constitutional problems with bankruptcy are not new, but present three under-appreciated puzzles: First, why have we put a bankruptcy power in the Constitution, and what does its “peculiar” …

The Hanging Chads Of Corporate Voting, Marcel Kahan, Edward B. Rock

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Never has voting been more important in corporate law. With greater activism among shareholders and the shift from plurality to majority voting for directors, the number of close votes is rising. But is the basic technology of corporate voting adequate to the task? In this Article, we first examine the incredibly complicated system of US corporate voting, a complexity that is driven by the underlying custodial ownership structure, by dispersed ownership and large trading volumes, and by the rise in short-selling and derivatives. We identify three ways in which things predictably go wrong: pathologies of complexity; pathologies of ownership; and …

Is Open Source Software The New Lex Mercatoria?, Fabrizio Marrella, Christopher S. Yoo

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Early Internet scholars proclaimed that the transnational nature of the Internet rendered it inherently unregulable by conventional governments. Instead, the Internet would be governed by customs and practices established by the end user community in a manner reminiscent of the lex mercatoria, which spontaneously emerged during medieval times to resolve international trade disputes independently and autonomously from national law. Subsequent events have revealed these claims to have been overly optimistic, as national governments have evinced both the inclination and the ability to exert influence, if not outright control, over the physical infrastructure, the domain name system, and the content flowing …

The Expressive Function Of Directors’ Duties To Creditors, Jonathan C. Lipson

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This Article offers an explanation of the “doctrine” of directors’ duties to creditors. Courts frequently say—but rarely hold—that corporate directors owe duties to or for the benefit of corporate creditors when the corporation is in distress. These cases are puzzling for at least two reasons. First, they link fiduciary duty to priority in right of payment, effectively treating creditors as if they were shareholders, at least for certain purposes. But this ignores the fact that priority is a complex and volatile concept. Moreover, contract and other rights at law usually protect creditors, even (especially) when a firm is distressed. It …

The Consumer Compromise In Revised U.C.C. Article 9: The Shame Of It All, Charles W. Mooney Jr.

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No abstract provided.

The Tuna Court: Law And Norms In The World's Premier Fish Market, Eric Feldman

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Legal scholars have long emphasized the corrosive impact of conflict on long-term commercial and interpersonal relationships. To minimize the negative consequences of such conflict, members of close-knit groups who anticipate future interactions create ways of resolving their disputes with reference to internal group norms rather than relying on state-mandated legal rules. From farmers in California’s Shasta County to jewelers in midtown Manhattan and neighbors in Sanders County, the literature describes people who create norms of conflict management that are faster and less expensive than relying on formal law, and lessen the harm that conflict causes to their relationships. This article …

The Best Puffery Article Ever, David A. Hoffman

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This Article provides the first extensive legal treatment of an important defense in the law of fraud and contracts: puffery. Legal authorities commonly say they make decisions about whether defendants should be able to utter exaggerated, optimistic, lies based on assumptions about buyer behavior, concluding that consumers do not rely on such speech. However, as the Article shows, such analyses are proxies for a deeper analytical question: does the speech encourage or discourage a type of consumption activity that the court deems welfare maximizing? The Article presents a novel constitutional analysis of puffery doctrine that focuses on the meaning of …

Public Company Shareholders Acting As Owners: Three Reforms--Introducing The "Oversight Shareholder" (With E. Fogel & D. Addis), Edward C. Harris

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No abstract provided.

Of Predatory Lending And The Democratization Of Credit: Preserving The Social Safety Net Of Informality In Small-Loan Transactions, Regina Austin

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No abstract provided.

Rules For Interpreting Incomplete Contracts: A Cautionary Note, Steven L. Harris

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No abstract provided.

Searching For Commercial Reasonableness Under The Revised Article 9, Michael Korybut

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Under U.C.C. Article 9, a secured party selling repossessed collateral must conduct a commercially reasonable sale. Under the old Article 9, courts and commentators debated the question of whether the foreclosure sale process and its procedural regularity should measure the sale's commercial reasonableness or whether instead the main focus of inquiry should be the reasonableness of the proceeds produced by the sale. This question spawned conflicting and non-uniform judicial approaches, most simply described as the "procedures test" versus "proceeds test."

In 2001 Article 9 was revised. The revisions included changes that addressed, but did not explicitly resolve, the question of …

The Roles Of Individuals In Ucc Reform: Is The Uniform Law Process A Potted Plant? The Case Of Revised Ucc Article 8, Charles W. Mooney Jr.

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No abstract provided.

Modeling The Uniform Law "Process": A Comment On Scott's Rise And Fall Of Article 2, Charles W. Mooney Jr.

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No abstract provided.

Shaming In Corporate Law, David A. Skeel Jr.

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Along with the burgeoning legal literature on norms has come a renewed interest in the use of shaming sanctions as an alternative to standard forms of punishment. Shaming enthusiasts such as Professor Dan Kahan have argued that shaming sanctions can be used either as an independent sanction, or to supplement sanctions such as fines that might not otherwise convey an adequate amount of moral disapproval. Shaming skeptics worry that shaming sanctions will lead to idiosyncratic or unpredictable enforcement. This Article focuses on the role that shaming can or could play in corporate law. Although this Article is not the first …

Filing And Enforcement Under Revised Article 9, (With C. Mooney, Jr.)., Steven L. Harris

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No abstract provided.