Business Law, Public Responsibility, and Ethics Commons^™

The Unique Benefits Of Treating Personal Goodwill As Property In Corporate Acquisitions, Darian M. Ibrahim

Darian M. Ibrahim

Corporate acquisition talks may not get far if buyer and seller disagree over transaction structure, which can have significant after-tax effects. But the parties may have overlooked an item that, due to its potential tax treatment, could be the key to facilitating the acquisition. That item is the selling shareholder's "personal goodwill."

Personal goodwill exists when the shareholder's reputation, expertise, or contacts gives the corporation its intrinsic value. It is most likely to be found in closely held businesses, especially those that are technical, specialized, orprofessional in nature or have few customers and suppliers. If personal goodwill is treated as …

A Return To Descartes: Property, Profit, And The Corporate Ownership Of Animals, Darian M. Ibrahim

Darian M. Ibrahim

No abstract provided.

The New Global Financial Regulatory Order: Can Macroprudential Regulation Prevent Another Global Financial Disaster?, Behzad Gohari, Karen E. Woody

Karen Woody

This Article posits that the success of macroprudential regulation will depend on four factors. First, the economic philosophy of the central banker in charge of the domestic institution with jurisdiction over macroprudential regulation will prove crucial in the implementation of adopted regulation. If, like Chairman Greenspan, the banker is averse to the exercise of the Central Bank's regulatory oversight authority, then no amount or volume of policy or regulation will prevent or mitigate systemic risks and the accompanying shocks. Second, a sufficiently deep level of international cooperation is required to mitigate regulatory arbitrage, without being so broad that the ensuing …

The Stewardship Of Trust In The Global Value Chain, Kishanthi Parella

Kish Parella

Global governance has not yet caught up with the globalization of business. As a result, our headlines provide daily accounts of the extent and consequences of these "governance gaps." The ability of corporations to evade state control also contributes to an unusual, even frightening, phenomenon: corporations are governing like states. Some governance functions traditionally delivered by state actors are now increasingly undertaken by transnational corporations. One area that is experiencing this substitution is dispute resolution of human rights. Corporations and other business enterprises, individually or collectively, are creating a variety of grievance mechanisms to address human rights and other conflicts …

Reforming The Global Value Chain Through Transnational Private Regulation, Kishanthi Parella

Kish Parella

In many industries, corporations have changed the organization of their production from a vertically integrated model to a model that is often characterized by outsourcing-shifting business activities to external parties -and offshoring, where production occurs at sites overseas. The global value chain (GVC) for an American corporation often involves several tiers of suppliers. One end of the GVC is often occupied by a multinational buyer (MNB), such as a large brand name corporation. At the opposite end of the value chain are the factories, farms, and other production sites that supply multinational corporations with their goods. This organization of production …

Taxing Under The Influence? : Corruption And U.S. State Beer Taxes, Per G. Fredriksson, Stephan Gohmann, Khawaja Mamun

Per Fredriksson

This article examines the effect of state level corruption on state beer taxes in the United States. Our lobby group model predicts that corruption reduces the beer tax, but this effect is conditional on the level of alcohol-related vehicle deaths. Using a panel of state level data from 1982 to 2001, we find that increased corruption is associated with lower state beer tax rates. The magnitude of the effect, however, declines with increases in alcohol-related traffic deaths. Our findings suggest that future empirical work estimating the effect of alcohol taxes on alcohol-related traffic fatalities should treat alcohol taxes as endogenous.

Playing With Real Property Inside Augmented Reality: Pokemon Go, Trespass, And Law's Limitations, Donald J. Kochan

Donald J. Kochan

Is Say On Pay All About Pay? The Impact Of Firm Performance, Jill E. Fisch, Darius Palia, Steven Davidoff Solomon

Steven M. Davidoff Solomon

The Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 mandated a number of regulatory reforms including a requirement that large U.S. public companies provide their shareholders with the opportunity to cast a non-binding vote on executive compensation. The “say on pay” vote was designed to rein in excessive levels of executive compensation and to encourage boards to adopt compensation structures that tie executive pay more closely to performance. Although the literature is mixed, many studies question whether the statute has had the desired effect. Shareholders at most companies overwhelmingly approve the compensation packages, and pay levels continue to be high. Although a lack of …

Replantar Un Campo: Derecho Internacional Del Trabajo Para El Siglo Xxi, Lance A. Compa

Lance A Compa

No abstract provided.

Re-Planting A Field: International Labour Law For The Twenty-First Century, Lance A. Compa

Lance A Compa

[Excerpt] In this talk I want to trace the development of the field and how international labour law has taken root in five areas: 1) trade legislation (namely, the US and EU Generalized System of Preferences), 2) trade agreements, 3) international organizations, 4) corporate social responsibility, and 5) lawsuits in national courts. In each, I try to give one or two examples of how international labour law works in practice. But first, some background on the international labour law field and my involvement with it.

In Pursuit Of Good & Gold: Data Observations Of Employee Ownership & Impact Investment, Christopher Geczy, Jessica S. Jeffers, David K. Musto, Anne M. Tucker

Anne Tucker

A startup's path to self-sustaining profitability is risky and hard, and most do not make it. Venture capital (VC) investors try to improve these odds with contractual terms that focus and sharpen employees' incentives to pursue gold. If the employees and investors expect the startup to balance the goal of profitability with another goal - the goal of good - the risks are likely to both grow and multiply. They grow to the extent that profits are threatened, and they multiply to the extent that balancing competing goals adds a dimension to the incentive problem. In this Article, we explore …

“Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds”: Airline Liability For Checked-In Jewelry, Eloisa Rodriguez-Dod

Eloisa C Rodríguez-Dod

It is expected that when you arrive at an airport you most likely will have to check in a bag or two. What is not expected, however, is that someone would rummage through your baggage and take your belongings. Unfortunately, this happens frequently. A passenger packs her jewelry in her luggage, checks that luggage in, boards her flight, and never sees that jewelry again. Once she discovers the missing jewelry, her options for recovering the loss are quite limited. This article examines the history and current state of the law regarding airline liability for passengers’ lost belongings on domestic as …

Bankruptcy On The Side, Kenneth Ayotte, Anthony J. Casey, David A. Skeel Jr.

Kenneth Ayotte

This article provides a framework for analyzing side agreements in corporate bankruptcy, such as intercreditor and “bad boy” agreements. These agreements are controversial because they commonly include a promise by one party to remain silent – to waive some procedural right they would otherwise have under the Bankruptcy Code – at potentially crucial points in the reorganization process. Using simplified examples, we show that side agreements create benefits in some instances, but parties to a side agreement may have incentive to contract for specific performance or excessive stipulated damages that impose negative externalities on non-parties to the agreement. A promise …

Myth: Hard Work And Credentials Determine Employment Opportunities

Alev Dudek

Legal History Meets The Honors Program, Robert Bennett

Robert B. Bennett

In this article, the author discusses the "Law and Culture" course that he developed to teach in the Butler University Honors Program. The course looks at some landmark periods or events in legal history and explores how those events were the product of their culture, and how they affected their culture. Among the events or periods that the author has looked at in iterations of this course were the survival instinct on display in "Regina v. Dudley and Stephens," the Nuremberg trials, the Scopes Monkey Trial, the modern American litigation explosion, and the events surrounding the U.S. Supreme Court decision …

Locked In: The Competitive Disadvantage Of Citizen Shareholders, Anne M. Tucker

Anne Tucker

In this Essay, I challenge the conventional corporate law wisdom that unhappy mutual fund investors paying high fees don’t need litigation or regulation to protect their interests because they should simply exit a fund and reinvest elsewhere. The exit solution, advanced by Professors John Morley and Quinn Curtis in Taking Exit Rights Seriously provided an elegantly simply solution to the problem of unhappy indirect investors (e.g., mutual fund investors) given that they are often low-dollar, low-incentive, rationally-apathetic investors facing enormous information asymmetries and collective action problems. According to their view, competition produced by exit, or the threat of exit, is …

External Administration In Corporate Insolvency And Reorganisation: The Insider Alternative, Larelle Chapple, James Routledge

James Routledge

This article considers the merits of alternative policy approaches to management of companies in insolvency administration, in particular from an identity economics theoretical perspective. The use of this perspective provides a novel assessment of the policy alternatives for insolvency administration, which can be characterised as either following the more flexible United States Chapter 11-style debtor-in-possession arrangement, or relying on the appointment of an external administrator or trustee to manage the insolvent company, who automatically displaces incumbent management. This analysis indicates that stigma and reputational damage from automatic removal of managers in voluntary administration leads to “identity loss” and that an …

The First Year: Integrating Transactional Skills, Lynnise E. Pantin

Lynnise E. Pantin

No abstract provided.

Is Google & People?, Sajjad Khaksari

SAJJAD KHAKSARI

"Google Advertisement Strategy" strictly dominated the "Searching Ranks Results". On the other hand, 70% of the United State population and 90% of European use to used Google as their "Favorite Search Engine".
People use Google but the Google thanks to its "Famous Google Algorithm" offers them the arrangement of links that is consciously favored before by "Google Ad. Engine". In addition, unfortunately Google has many traps to bind, copy and save almost all the information from the users.

Institutional Investing When Shareholders Are Not Supreme, Christopher Geczy, Jessica Jeffers, David Musto, Anne Tucker

Anne Tucker

Institutional investors, with trillions in assets under management, hold increasingly important stakes in public companies and fund individual retirement for many Americans, making institutional investors’ behaviors and preferences paramount determinants of capital allocations and the economy. In this paper, we examine high fiduciary duty institutions' (HFDIs') response to decreased profit maximization pressure as measured by the effect of constituency statutes on HFDI investment. We ask this question, in part, to anticipate HFDIs’ response to alternative purpose firms, like benefit corporations. Only with access to institutional investors’ capital can alternative purpose firms gain economic significance to rival the purely for-profit corporation. …

Shareholder As Ulysses: Some Empirical Evidence On Why Investors In Public Corporations Tolerate Board Governance, Lynn A. Stout

Lynn A. Stout

This Article evaluates two possible explanations for why shareholders of public corporations tolerate board control of corporate assets and outputs: the widely accepted monitoring hypothesis, which posits that shareholders rely on boards primarily to control the "agency costs" associated with turning day-to-day control over the firm over to self-interested corporate executives, and the mediating hypothesis, which posits that shareholders also seek to "tie their own hands" by ceding control to directors as a means of attracting the extracontractual, firm-specific investments of such stakeholder groups as executives, creditors, and rank-and- file employees. Part I reviews each hypothesis and concludes that each …

En Torno A La Relevancia Jurídica De Una Estrategia Empresarial Consolidada Y Subyacente: La Obsolescencia Programada (About The Juridical Relevance Of An Underlying And Consolidated Business Strategy: The Planned Obsolescence), Jesús A. Soto

Jesús Alfonso Soto Pineda

El artículo presenta la obsolescencia programada, como estrategia empresarial, basada en el diseño, planificación, proyección y control de la vida útil de los productos, con el objetivo de dinamizar la demanda y estimular el consumo; impulsando a los particulares a adquirir tras la pérdida de funcionalidad de sus bienes o su caducidad. Exponiendo igualmente los casos de mayor trascendencia que han llevado tal estrategia hasta nuestros días, haciendo hincapié en el sector tecnológico y en uno de sus exponentes de más notoriedad, la empresa multinacional norteamericana Apple. Deslindando a su vez, los caracteres que le otorgan relevancia ética a la …

Law Vs. Science: Should Law As A Core Subject Be Eliminated At The U.S. Armed Services Academies In Favor Of More Relevant Stem Courses?, Gregory M. Huckabee

gregory m huckabee

Law vs. Science: Should law as a core subject be eliminated at the U.S. Armed Services Academies in favor of more relevant STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) courses? As recent cyberterror events have unfolded, more STEM knowledge is needed in the armed forces. STEM courses are on the march for inclusion in greater numbers in academy core curriculums. In order for new STEM courses to join the academic heart of academy learning, predecessor courses must be reviewed for relevancy, significance, and materiality. One core course in common at all three military academies is law. Yet few core curriculums can absorb …

Legal And Ethical Issues Associated With Employee Use Of Social Networks, Gundars Kaupins, Susan Park

Susan Park

Social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter can help employees enhance a company’s marketing, recruiting, security, and safety. However, employee’s use of social networking sites and employers’ access of those sites can result in illegal and unethical behavior, such as discrimination and privacy invasions. Companies must gauge whether and how to rely upon employees’ use of personal social networking sites and how much freedom employees should have in using networks inside and outside of the companies. This research summarizes the latest legal and ethical issues regarding employee use of social networks and provides recommended corporate policies.

Practice Lean! Implementing Technology-Driven Lean Six Sigma In A Law Firm, Frank A. Urbanic

frank a urbanic

No abstract provided.

Regulation Of Over-The-Counter Derivatives: A Comparative Study Of Proposals In Singapore And Hong Kong, Chao-Hung Christopher Chen

Christopher Chao-hung CHEN

This chapter identifies some of the potential legal and policy issues involved in the future regulation of over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives. First, regulators must be cautious in the regulation and solvency of some mammoth clearing- houses. Second, Singapore and Hong Kong both face challenges in the areas of global regulatory cooperation and extra-territorial regulatory effects. Third, the exact scope of a clearing obligation determines whether there is any regulatory competition or room for regulatory arbitrage in the future. Fourth, there are legal definition problems with the term ‘derivative’ and its sub-categories that must be addressed. Fifth, there are potential privacy and …

Deal Deconstructions, Case Studies, And Case Simulations: Toward Practice Readiness With New Pedagogies In Teaching Business And Transactional Law, Michelle M. Harner, Robert J. Rhee

Robert Rhee

In this short commentary, we explore the use of two interrelated pedagogical methods for teaching transactional and business law. The first method is deal deconstruction, which analyzes the set of final deal documents and outcomes. This method is backward-looking, conducting a post-mortem on business transactions and analyzing the parties’ choices memorialized in the agreement against the legal and financial alternatives. The second method involves case studies and simulations, which are commonly seen in business schools. This method is forward-looking, exposing students to the uncertainties and situational contexts of doing deals and deal-related litigation. Together, these complementary methods help students understand …

Deal Deconstructions, Case Studies, And Case Simulations: Toward Practice Readiness With New Pedagogies In Teaching Business And Transactional Law, Michelle M. Harner, Robert J. Rhee

Michelle M. Harner

In this short commentary, we explore the use of two interrelated pedagogical methods for teaching transactional and business law. The first method is deal deconstruction, which analyzes the set of final deal documents and outcomes. This method is backward-looking, conducting a post-mortem on business transactions and analyzing the parties’ choices memorialized in the agreement against the legal and financial alternatives. The second method involves case studies and simulations, which are commonly seen in business schools. This method is forward-looking, exposing students to the uncertainties and situational contexts of doing deals and deal-related litigation. Together, these complementary methods help students understand …

Ethical Frameworks, Corey A. Ciocchetti

Corey A Ciocchetti

This article discusses the three prominent business ethics theories of Utilitarianism, Deontology and Virtue Ethics. This is a short primer on these theories.

The Technological And Business Evolution Of Machine Based Gambling In America, Darren Prum, Carlin Mccrory

Darren A. Prum

Machine Based Gambling has become a major source of revenue to many states across the country that need the money but face obstacles to raising taxes within their jurisdiction. The figures are startling with the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s cut at over $1.456 Billion in 2011, which exceed the next closest state by $500 million. In addition, there are more than twice as many slot machines available to the public than ATMs. The benefits of machine based gaming has allowed many governments to revitalized tourism locations, make some Native Americans economically self-sufficient, and save horse and dog race tracks from closing …