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Articles 1 - 30 of 43
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Leveraged Etfs: The Trojan Horse Has Passed The Margin-Rule Gates, William M. Humphries
Leveraged Etfs: The Trojan Horse Has Passed The Margin-Rule Gates, William M. Humphries
Seattle University Law Review
What do the Great Depression, the Great Recession, and the demise of Lehman Brothers and Bear Sterns all have in common? One word: leverage. The misuse of leverage, in all its forms, contributed greatly to all of these events. Yet even today, common investors can purchase a leveraged exchange-traded fund (leveraged ETF), a complex product that uses leverage to increase returns, without triggering applicable laws designed to regulate the use of leverage. This Comment articulates the basics surrounding the functions and operations of leveraged ETFs and margin rules in order to assess the compatibility of the two. The Comment argues …
The Cross-Dressing Case For Bathroom Equality, Jennifer Levi, Daniel Redman
The Cross-Dressing Case For Bathroom Equality, Jennifer Levi, Daniel Redman
Seattle University Law Review
While transgender rights advocates have won many battles in the fight for equality, bathroom discrimination remains a significant obstacle to transgender people’s full participation in society. This Article discusses the reasoning behind the cases that have rejected transgender people’s discrimination claims based on bathroom exclusion. The Article then demonstrates how these arguments mirror the rationales offered by supporters of long-dead, unconstitutional cross-dressing laws. Synthesizing the two bodies of case law, Levi and Redman offer a new way forward for transgender advocates seeking bathroom equality.
Fait Accompli?: Where The Supreme Court And Equal Pay Meet A Narrow Legislative Override Under The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, Megan Coluccio
Fait Accompli?: Where The Supreme Court And Equal Pay Meet A Narrow Legislative Override Under The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, Megan Coluccio
Seattle University Law Review
This Comment argues the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act’s consequences will be minimally felt, so long as the Act is narrowly construed. The Comment suggests congressional action was appropriate after the Supreme Court’s Ledbetter decision and discusses the political and legislative debate leading to the Act. In addition, the Comment analyzes the Act in application, exploring its meaning, implications, and function. The Comment argues that the concerns and consequences arising from the enactment of the Act can be alleviated and avoided by a narrow interpretation of its amendment to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Finally, the Comment recommends …
The Challenges For Directors In Piloting Through State And Federal Standards In The Maelstrom Of Risk Management, Chief Justice E. Norman Veasey
The Challenges For Directors In Piloting Through State And Federal Standards In The Maelstrom Of Risk Management, Chief Justice E. Norman Veasey
Seattle University Law Review
In the 2010 Berle Center Directors’ Academy Keynote Address, Chief Justice Veasey addresses “the federal and state contexts relating to the corporate-governance focus on business risk and the expectations laid at the doorstep of directors and officers of U.S. public companies.” Specifically, Chief Justice Veasey looks “at the governance landscape through both a federal regulatory lens and a state judicial lens as it relates to risk assessment and risk management.”
Physical-Strength Rationales For De Jure Exclusion Of Women From Military Combat Positions, Maia Goodell
Physical-Strength Rationales For De Jure Exclusion Of Women From Military Combat Positions, Maia Goodell
Seattle University Law Review
Women have been serving in the military in steadily increasing numbers for decades. Nevertheless, the military remains one of the few areas in which the U.S. government decides what roles are open to women based on de jure exclusions. This Article examines the law governing de jure classification, noting that a mere normative belief about women’s proper place in society is an insufficient basis to justify a sex-based exclusion. It then probes the most common rationale advanced in support of the continued de jure exclusion of women: physical strength. The Article examines four problems with the physical strength rationale: (1) …
Law Clerks Gone Wild, Parker B. Potter, Jr.
Law Clerks Gone Wild, Parker B. Potter, Jr.
Seattle University Law Review
This Article grows out of my delight in seeing fellow law clerks break through the paper curtain and onto the pages of the Federal Reporter, the Federal Supplement, or some other compendium of judicial opinions. While my fascination with law clerks as the subjects rather than the instruments of judicial writing is probably not universal, I have selected the opinions I discuss in this Article with an eye toward entertaining—and maybe even instructing, if only slightly—the clerkigentsia and the judiciary. So, with that audience in mind, I set off in search of law clerks who had gone wild …
Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review
Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review
Seattle University Law Review
No abstract provided.
True North: Navigating For The Transfer Of Learning In Legal Education, Tonya Kowalski
True North: Navigating For The Transfer Of Learning In Legal Education, Tonya Kowalski
Seattle University Law Review
As lifelong learners, we all know the feelings of discomfort and bewilderment that can come from being asked to apply existing skills in a completely new situation. As legal educators, we have also experienced the frustration that comes from watching our students struggle to identify and transfer skills from one learning environment to another. For example, a first-semester law student who learns to analogize case law to a fact pattern in a legal writing problem typically will not see the deeper applications for those skills in a law school essay exam several weeks later. Similarly, when law students learn how …
Obesity And Unhealthy Consumption: The Public-Policy Case For Placing A Federal Sin Tax On Sugary Beverages, Jonathan Cummings
Obesity And Unhealthy Consumption: The Public-Policy Case For Placing A Federal Sin Tax On Sugary Beverages, Jonathan Cummings
Seattle University Law Review
A growing body of research has established an empirical link between consumption of sugary beverages and numerous health problems. Yet, while few people disagree that reduced consumption of sugary beverages is a desirable goal for American society, many people disagree about how to reduce it. This Comment argues that a proposed sin tax on sugary beverages is sound policy, and Congress should implement the tax in order to combat and address the obesity epidemic because (1) consumers are subject to cognitive and informational defects that affect consumers’ abilities to make the best welfare-generating decisions, and (2) sugary-beverage consumption causes healthcare-related …
Selecting Oregon’S Judges, Hans A. Linde
Selecting Oregon’S Judges, Hans A. Linde
Seattle University Law Review
The cause of reform in the name of “judicial independence” found its Paul Revere in the retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who has rung the tocsin from Washington’s Georgetown University in the East to Washington’s Seattle University in the Pacific Northwest, where she gave the keynote address at a conference on state judicial independence. I participated in the Seattle conference, as well as another conference soon thereafter in Salem, Oregon, in celebration of the Oregon Supreme Court’s 150th anniversary. These were lively discussions before public audiences rather than presentations of scholarly papers (of which there have been many in recent …
Foreword: In Berle’S Footsteps, Charles R.T. O'Kelley
Foreword: In Berle’S Footsteps, Charles R.T. O'Kelley
Seattle University Law Review
On the weekend of November 6–8, 2009, scholars from around the world gathered in Seattle for a symposium—In Berle’s Footsteps—celebrating the launch of the Adolf A. Berle, Jr. Center on Corporations, Law and Society. As founding director of the Berle Center, I described our undertaking: “It is with a profound sense of obligation to the legacy that has been entrusted to my care, that I announce the launching of the Adolf A. Berle, Jr. Center on Corporations, Law and Society. It is a privilege to follow in Berle’s footsteps.”
Transcript: Session 1: One Symptom Of A Serious Problem: Caperton V. Massey, Bert Brandenburg, Andrew Siegel, Richard Hasen, Kathleen Sullivan, David M. Skover
Transcript: Session 1: One Symptom Of A Serious Problem: Caperton V. Massey, Bert Brandenburg, Andrew Siegel, Richard Hasen, Kathleen Sullivan, David M. Skover
Seattle University Law Review
Consider this extraordinary narrative: A resident of a small town brings a tort action against a big corporation and wins a multi-million-dollar jury trial award. While the judgment is pending on appeal to the state supreme court, one of the liberal justices known to often side with tort plaintiffs is up for judicial re-election. To ensure the election of a new justice more sympathetic to corporate defendants, the corporation’s CEO pumps in an extraordinary amount of campaign money, both as candidate contributions and as independent political action committee advertising expenditures. Predictably, the newly elected justice casts the tie-breaking vote in …
Securities Intermediaries And The Separation Of Ownership From Control, Jill E. Fisch
Securities Intermediaries And The Separation Of Ownership From Control, Jill E. Fisch
Seattle University Law Review
The Modern Corporation & Private Property is a paradigm-shifting analysis of the modern corporation. The book is perhaps best known for the insights of Berle and Means about the separation of ownership from control and the consequences of that separation for the allocation of power within the corporation. The Berle and Means story focuses on the shareholder as the owner of the corporation. Berle and Means saw the mechanism of centralized management—in which the shareholder retains the economic interest but not the control rights associated with ownership—as threatening the conception of shareholder interests in terms of property rights. In particular, …
Berle And The Entrepreneur, Charles R.T. O'Kelley
Berle And The Entrepreneur, Charles R.T. O'Kelley
Seattle University Law Review
In the first and last four chapters (“the Five Chapters”) of The Modern Corporation and Private Property, Adolf Berle, Jr. describes in sweeping terms a fundamental transformation of the American economy. . . . Writing more than ten years before Berle, another seminal scholar, Frank Knight . . . developed a theory of the entrepreneur as part of his larger effort to more carefully explain the theoretical underpinnings of a free-market economy. . . . Given Knight’s prominence and the fact that Knight apparently reached dramatically different conclusions than did Berle concerning the consequences flowing from separation of ownership …
Monitoring To Reduce Agency Costs: Examining The Behavior Of Independent And Non-Independent Boards, Anita Anand, Frank Milne, Lynnette Purda
Monitoring To Reduce Agency Costs: Examining The Behavior Of Independent And Non-Independent Boards, Anita Anand, Frank Milne, Lynnette Purda
Seattle University Law Review
Berle and Means’s analysis of the corporation—in particular, their view that those in control are not the owners of the corporation—raises questions about actions that corporations take to counter concerns regarding management’s influence. What mechanisms, if any, do corporations implement to balance the distribution of power in the corporation? To address this question, we analyze boards of directors’ propensity to voluntarily adopt recommended corporate governance practices. Because board independence is one way to enhance shareholders’ ability to monitor management, we probe whether firms with independent boards of directors (which we define as boards with either an independent chair or a …
The New Financial Assets: Separating Ownership From Control, Tamar Frankel
The New Financial Assets: Separating Ownership From Control, Tamar Frankel
Seattle University Law Review
In The Modern Corporation and Private Property, Adolf A. Berle and Gardiner Means wrote about the separation of ownership from control in corporations. They noted that the interests of the controlling directors and managers can diverge from those of the shareholder owners of the firm. . . . There are those who consider such a decoupling beneficial. Others express the same concern that Berle and Means have expressed. And depending on what one focuses on in viewing the pluses and minuses of these separations, one could reach different conclusions. I reach a number of conclusions. First, the separation of …
Berle’S Vision Beyond Shareholder Interests: Why Investment Bankers Should Have (Some) Personal Liability, Claire Hill, Richard Painter
Berle’S Vision Beyond Shareholder Interests: Why Investment Bankers Should Have (Some) Personal Liability, Claire Hill, Richard Painter
Seattle University Law Review
This essay, published in a symposium on the work of Adolf Berle, approaches the Berle-Dodd debate from the perspective that corporate managers have responsibilities beyond pursuing the interests of shareholders. Stock based executive compensation, designed to align managers’ interests with those of shareholders, has, in the investment banking industry in particular, failed to avert, and may have caused, managers (in this case, bankers) to take excessive risks that in the present financial crisis inflicted great damage on creditors and on society as a whole. We describe here the broad outlines of a proposal that we will discuss in future publications …
The Birth Of Corporate Governance, Harwell Wells
The Birth Of Corporate Governance, Harwell Wells
Seattle University Law Review
Part I of this Article briefly examines the concept of “corporate governance” and argues for dating the concept’s origins to the debates of the 1920s. Part II then moves on to examine early scholarly and popular discussions of the separation of ownership and control. After surveying the historical developments that produced the recognizably modern corporate economy around the turn of the century, it examines early scholarly and popular discussions of the separation of ownership and control, focusing on three major thinkers, Louis D. Brandeis, Walter Lippmann, and Thorstein Veblen. It argues that, while each of these authors examined the separation …
Keynote Address, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor
Keynote Address, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor
Seattle University Law Review
The following address contains the remarks of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, delivered at the Judicial Independence Conference at Seattle University on September 14, 2009.
Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review
Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review
Seattle University Law Review
No abstract provided.
Tracking Berle’S Footsteps: The Trail Of The Modern Corporation’S Last Chapter, William W. Bratton, Michael L. Wachter
Tracking Berle’S Footsteps: The Trail Of The Modern Corporation’S Last Chapter, William W. Bratton, Michael L. Wachter
Seattle University Law Review
Readers game enough to work through all three hundred pages of The Modern Corporation and Private Property looking for insights on corporate law today encounter two, apparently contradictory, lines of thought. One line, set out in Books II and III, resonates comfortably with today’s shareholder-centered corporate legal theory. Here the book teaches that even as ownership and control have separated, managers should function as trustees for the shareholders and so should exercise their wide-ranging powers for the shareholders’ benefit. The other line of thought emerges in Books I and IV, where The Modern Corporation encases this shareholder trust model in …
See No Evil? Revisiting Early Visions Of The Social Responsibility Of Business: Adolf A. Berle’S Contribution To Contemporary Conversations, Erika George
Seattle University Law Review
Much corporate legal scholarship considers such fact patterns as beyond the scope of the discipline’s core concerns. Yet, increasingly, questions are asked concerning the scale and scope of modern corporate power. This Article will challenge the conventional understanding of what the core discipline of corporate law should encompass and argues that the failure to focus on precisely these sorts of factual scenarios involving allegations of corporate complicity in human rights violations and environmental degradation is misguided and short-sighted.
Then And Now: Professor Berle And The Unpredictable Shareholder, Jennifer G. Hill
Then And Now: Professor Berle And The Unpredictable Shareholder, Jennifer G. Hill
Seattle University Law Review
Shareholders, and the relationship between shareholders and management, lay at the heart of Professor Berle’s scholarship. The goal of this Article is to compare the image of shareholders emerging from The Modern Corporation and Private Property and the Berle/Dodd debate with a range of contemporary visions of the shareholder that underpin some international regulatory responses to recent financial debacles, from Enron to the current global financial crisis. As the Article dis- cusses, these recent developments in the era of financial crises have prompted a reevaluation of the traditional image of the shareholder—and the role of the shareholder in the modern …
The Liberal University And Its Perpetuation Of Evangelical Anti-Intellectualism, Gretchen Ruecker Hoog
The Liberal University And Its Perpetuation Of Evangelical Anti-Intellectualism, Gretchen Ruecker Hoog
Seattle University Law Review
There is a battle in our country. One side’s ammunition consists of words like elitist, immoral, and secular; the other’s: simple-minded, extreme, and illogical. This battle forced Barack Obama’s campaign to downplay his professorship at a prestigious law school. It drives conservative Christians away from public universities, pits academics against Evangelicals, and sets liberal college professors against Southern pastors. This Comment discusses the battle between the anti-intellectual religious right and the anti-evangelical academic left. While this Comment attempts to explain this dichotomy in some detail, it focuses on how the dichotomy affects the goals of the liberal left and impedes …
Clarke V. Tri-Cities Animal Care & Control Shelter: How Did Private Businesses Become Government “Agencies” Under The Washington Public Records Act?, Jeffrey A. Ware
Clarke V. Tri-Cities Animal Care & Control Shelter: How Did Private Businesses Become Government “Agencies” Under The Washington Public Records Act?, Jeffrey A. Ware
Seattle University Law Review
This Note analyzes the facts and reasoning behind <em>Clarke v. Tri-Cities Animal Care & Control Shelter</em>'s agency holding, explains how the court was wrong to use and then misapply the <em>Telford</em> functional-equivalency test, discusses the consequences of subjecting government contractors to the PRA, and offers solutions to remedy the mistakes in <em>Clarke</em>. To begin, Part II reviews the facts of <em>Clarke</em> and the requirements of Washington’s Public Records Act. Part III then examines the evolution of Washington’s <em>Telford</em> functional-equivalency test as applied up to, and through, <em>Clarke</em>. Part IV explains the several reasons why <em>Clarke</em> was wrongly decided and how …
Neo-Brandeisianism And The New Deal: Adolf A. Berle, Jr., William O. Douglas, And The Problem Of Corporate Finance In The 1930s, Jessica Wang
Seattle University Law Review
This essay revisits Adolf A. Berle, Jr. and The Modern Corporation and Private Property by focusing on the triangle of Berle, Louis D. Brandeis, and William O. Douglas in order to examine some of the underlying assumptions about law, economics, and the nature of modern society behind securities regulation and corporate finance in the 1930s. I explore Douglas and Berle’s academic and political relationship, the conceptual underpinnings of Brandeis, Berle, and Douglas’s critiques of modern finance, and the ways in which the two younger men—Berle and Douglas—ultimately departed from their role model, Brandeis.
Enumerating Old Themes? Berle’S Concept Of Ownership And The Historical Development Of English Company Law In Context, Lorraine E. Talbot
Enumerating Old Themes? Berle’S Concept Of Ownership And The Historical Development Of English Company Law In Context, Lorraine E. Talbot
Seattle University Law Review
This paper offers some tentative suggestions as to why Berle’s work has been read and interpreted so selectively in the United Kingdom. I suggest that this must be partly attributable to the historical developments in English company law that entrenched the notion of shareholder ownership claims. Specifically, unincorporated associations’ normative values—that members are owners and there is no distinction between small organizations with no share dispersal and large organizations with wide share dispersal—have a continuing influence on this entrenched notion of shareholder ownership claims. First, I provide an overview of the origins of English company law. Next, I address how …
Transcript: Session 2: The Problem Of State Judicial Campaign “Arms Races”—What Can Be Done In The State Legislatures And State Courts?, Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson, Justice Hans Linde, Jamie Pedersen, Judge David Schuman, Charles Wiggins, Ronald Collins
Transcript: Session 2: The Problem Of State Judicial Campaign “Arms Races”—What Can Be Done In The State Legislatures And State Courts?, Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson, Justice Hans Linde, Jamie Pedersen, Judge David Schuman, Charles Wiggins, Ronald Collins
Seattle University Law Review
Many years ago, when my hair was still thick, this justice spoke at a conference on state court judicial elections. I was not there, but the story goes that when it came to an audience question, an idealistic young man asked this West Virginia supreme court justice: How do you go about becoming a state supreme court justice? Do you have to go to a good law school? Do you have to become involved in the state bar association? Do you have to become involved in civic organizations? Do you have to become a trial judge, then an appellate judge, …
Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review
Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review
Seattle University Law Review
No abstract provided.
Nothing Natural About It: Still Searching For A Solution To The Chapter 11 Stamp Tax Exemption, Lindsay K. Taft
Nothing Natural About It: Still Searching For A Solution To The Chapter 11 Stamp Tax Exemption, Lindsay K. Taft
Seattle University Law Review
In June of 2008, in Florida Department of Revenue v. Piccadilly Cafeterias, Inc., the Supreme Court settled a circuit split and issued a bright line rule stating that asset transfers made prior to the confirmation of a Chapter 11 plan of reorganization no longer benefit from certain tax exemptions. As a result, the cost of selling assets in a bankruptcy case outside of a plan will increase. The provision at issue in the case, which exempts asset transfers and sales from certain state taxes, contains language ambiguous enough that four federal circuit courts have contemplated which types of asset …