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Articles 1 - 9 of 9

Full-Text Articles in Law

Common Law Restitution In The Mississippi Tobacco Settlement: Did The Smoke Get In Their Eyes?, Doug Rendleman Jan 1999

Common Law Restitution In The Mississippi Tobacco Settlement: Did The Smoke Get In Their Eyes?, Doug Rendleman

Scholarly Articles

No abstract provided.


Revaluing Restitution: From The Talmud To Postsocialism, Michael A. Heller, Christopher Serkin Jan 1999

Revaluing Restitution: From The Talmud To Postsocialism, Michael A. Heller, Christopher Serkin

Reviews

Whatever happened to the study of restitution? Once a core private law subject along with property, torts, and contracts, restitution has receded from American legal scholarship. Few law professors teach the material, fewer still write in the area, and no one even agrees what the field comprises anymore. Hanoch Dagan's Unjust Enrichment: A Study of Private Law and Public Values threatens to reverse the tide and make restitution interesting again. The book takes commonplace words such as "value" and "gain" and shows how they embody a society's underlying normative principles. Variations across cultures in the law of unjust enrichment reflect …


The Case For Punitive Damages In Contracts, William S. Dodge Jan 1999

The Case For Punitive Damages In Contracts, William S. Dodge

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.


The Predictability Of Punitive Damages Awards In Published Opinions, The Impact Of Bmw V. Gore On Punitive Damages Awards, And Forecasting Which Punitive Awards Will Be Reduced, Theodore Eisenberg, Martin T. Wells Jan 1999

The Predictability Of Punitive Damages Awards In Published Opinions, The Impact Of Bmw V. Gore On Punitive Damages Awards, And Forecasting Which Punitive Awards Will Be Reduced, Theodore Eisenberg, Martin T. Wells

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

This article assesses the relation between compensatory damages and punitive damages in cases leading to published opinions and BMW v. Gore's impact on the patterns of punitive damages awards in these opinions. We find that punitive damages awards are considerably higher in cases leading to published opinions than in trial level cases. But the correlation between compensatory and punitive awards found in trial level data persists in published opinions and is all but indistinguishable from the correlation in trial level data. We find no significant difference in the pattern of awards before and after BMW and no significant difference …


Discrimination As Accident, Amy L. Wax Jan 1999

Discrimination As Accident, Amy L. Wax

All Faculty Scholarship

This Article seeks to examine how the law should respond to unconscious or automatic forms of cognitive bias that are thought to produce less favorable treatment of employees in the workplace because of race or sex ("unconscious disparate treatment"). Assuming that inadvertent bias is a form of workplace "accident," and using familiar principles of accident law and economic analysis, the Article concludes that extending the framework created by existing anti-discrimination laws to cover disparate treatment that stems from unconscious group-based biases is not a good idea because it is unlikely to serve the principal goals of a liability scheme (deterrence, …


Shareholder Derivative Litigation And Corporate Governance, Mark J. Loewenstein Jan 1999

Shareholder Derivative Litigation And Corporate Governance, Mark J. Loewenstein

Publications

In approving settlements of derivative actions that include fees for plaintiff's attorney, courts typically announce that attorney's fees are approved if a substantial benefit is obtained. In fact, courts, particularly Delaware courts, approve settlements in shareholder derivative actions that included substantial fees for plaintiff's attorney, despite the absence of a corresponding benefit to the corporation. Frequently, the "benefit" obtained is a reform in corporate governance, which is of dubious value to the corporation. To deter frivolous litigation, courts should resist the temptation to approve these settlements just to dispose of the litigation. The paper concludes that fees should not be …


Limiting Secret Settlements By Law, David Luban Jan 1999

Limiting Secret Settlements By Law, David Luban

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

I'm in the most embarrassing, impossible situation for a commentator- namely, agreeing fundamentally with what the principal speaker said. In fact, I wrote an article against secret settlements in the GEORGETOWN LAW JOURNAL in 1995. If Monroe Freedman were here, he would explain to us that progress in ideas comes from contention and the testing of hypotheses by marshalling the strongest arguments against them. Since he's not, I will nevertheless take that as my charge. Despite the fact that I agree with Richard on the ethical drawbacks of secret settlements, I'd like to begin by talking about what I think …


The Constitutionality Of Taxing Compensatory Damages For Mental Distress When There Was No Accompanying Physical Injury, Douglas A. Kahn Jan 1999

The Constitutionality Of Taxing Compensatory Damages For Mental Distress When There Was No Accompanying Physical Injury, Douglas A. Kahn

Articles

Since 1919, statutory tax law has excluded from gross income compensatory damages received on account of a personal injury or sickness.1 The current version of that exclusion is set forth in section 104 (a) (2) of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986.2 The construction of that exclusion, both by the courts and by the Commissioner, underwent significant alterations over the 80-year period that the provision has existed.3 The statute itself was amended several times, most recently in 1996.4 It is the 1996 amendment that has raised a constitutional issue concerning the validity of a portion of the statute.5


Markets As Monitors: A Proposal To Replace Class Actions With Exchanges As Securities Fraud Enforcers, Adam C. Pritchard Jan 1999

Markets As Monitors: A Proposal To Replace Class Actions With Exchanges As Securities Fraud Enforcers, Adam C. Pritchard

Articles

Fraud in the securities markets has been a focus of legislative reform in recent years. Corporations-especially those in the high-technology industry-have complained that they are being unfairly targeted by plaintiffs' lawyers in class action securities fraud lawsuits. The corporations' complaints led to the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 ("Reform Act"). The Reform Act attempted to reduce meritless litigation against corporate issuers by erecting a series of procedural barriers to the filing of securities class actions. Plaintiffs' attorneys warned that the Reform Act and the resulting decrease in securities class actions would leave corporate fraud unchecked and deprive defrauded …