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Full-Text Articles in Law
The Separation Of Voting And Control: The Role Of Contract In Corporate Governance, Gabriel V. Rauterberg
The Separation Of Voting And Control: The Role Of Contract In Corporate Governance, Gabriel V. Rauterberg
Articles
The default rules of corporate law make shareholders’ control rights a function of their voting power. Whether a director is elected or a merger is approved depends on how shareholders vote. Yet, in private corporations shareholders routinely alter their rights by contract. This phenomenon of shareholder agreements—contracts among the owners of a firm— has received far less attention than it deserves, mainly because detailed data about the actual contents of shareholder agreements has been lacking. Private companies disclose little, and shareholder agreements are thought to play a trivial or nonexistent role in public companies. I show that this is false—fifteen …
Moral Diversity And Efficient Breach, Matthew A. Seligman
Moral Diversity And Efficient Breach, Matthew A. Seligman
Michigan Law Review
Most people think it is morally wrong to breach a contract. But sophisticated commercial parties, like large corporations, have no objection to breaching contracts and paying the price in damages when doing so is in their self-interest. The literature has ignored the profound legal, economic, and normative implications of that asymmetry between individuals’ and firms’ approaches to breach. To individuals, a contract is a promise that cannot be broken regardless of the financial stakes. For example, millions of homeowners refused to breach their mortgage contracts in the aftermath of the housing crisis even though doing so could have saved them …
Contracting Out Of The Fiduciary Duty Of Loyalty: An Empirical Analysis Of Corporate Opportunity Waivers, Gabriel Rauterberg, Eric Talley
Contracting Out Of The Fiduciary Duty Of Loyalty: An Empirical Analysis Of Corporate Opportunity Waivers, Gabriel Rauterberg, Eric Talley
Articles
For centuries, the duty of loyalty has been the hallowed centerpiece of fiduciary obligation, widely considered one of the few “mandatory” rules of corporate law. That view, however, is no longer true. Beginning in 2000, Delaware dramatically departed from tradition by granting incorporated entities a statutory right to waive a crucial part of the duty of loyalty: the corporate opportunities doctrine. Other states have since followed Delaware’s lead, similarly permitting firms to execute “corporate opportunity waivers.” Surprisingly, more than fifteen years into this reform experiment, no study has attempted to either systematically measure the corporate response to these reforms or …
Consumer Preferences For Performance Defaults, Franklin G. Snyder, Ann M. Mirabito
Consumer Preferences For Performance Defaults, Franklin G. Snyder, Ann M. Mirabito
Michigan Business & Entrepreneurial Law Review
Commercial law in the United States is designed to facilitate private transactions, and thus to enforce the presumed intent of the parties, who generally are free to negotiate the terms they choose. But these contracts inevitably have gaps, both because the parties cannot anticipate every situation that might arise from their relationship, and because negotiation is not costless. When courts are faced with these gaps in a litigation context, they supply default terms to fill them. These defaults usually are set to reflect what courts believe similar parties would have agreed to if they had addressed the issue. These “majoritarian” …
Understanding Noncompetition Agreements: The 2014 Noncompete Survey Project, J. J. Prescott, Norman D. Bishara, Evan Starr
Understanding Noncompetition Agreements: The 2014 Noncompete Survey Project, J. J. Prescott, Norman D. Bishara, Evan Starr
Articles
In recent years, scholars and policymakers have devoted considerable attention to the potential consequences of employment noncompetition agreements and to whether legislatures ought to reform the laws that govern the enforcement of these controversial contractual provisions. Unfortunately, much of this interest—and the content of proposed reforms—derives from anecdotal tales of burdensome noncompetes among low-wage workers and from scholarship that is either limited to slivers of the population (across all studies, less than 1%) or relies on strong assumptions about the incidence of noncompetition agreements. Better understanding of the use of noncompetes and effective noncompetition law reform requires a more complete …
Legal Entities As Transferable Bundles Of Contracts, Kenneth Ayotte, Henry Hansmann
Legal Entities As Transferable Bundles Of Contracts, Kenneth Ayotte, Henry Hansmann
Michigan Law Review
The large, modern business corporation is frequently organized as a complex cluster of hundreds of corporate subsidiaries under the common control of a single corporate parent. Our Article provides new theory and supportive evidence to help explain this structure. We focus, in particular on the advantages of subsidiary entities in providing the option to transfer some or all of the firm's contractual rights and obligations in the future. The theory not only sheds light on corporate subsidiaries but also illuminates a basic function of all types of legal entities, from partnerships to nonprofit corporations. We show that when, as is …
Arbitration Costs And Forum Accessibility: Empirical Evidence, Christopher R. Drahozal
Arbitration Costs And Forum Accessibility: Empirical Evidence, Christopher R. Drahozal
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform
In this Article, written for this symposium issue on "Empirical Studies of Mandatory Arbitration," I examine the available empirical evidence on these two questions. I take "mandatory arbitration" to refer to pre-dispute arbitration clauses in consumer and employment (and maybe franchise) contracts. Accordingly, I limit my consideration of the empirical evidence to those types of contracts. I do not discuss empirical studies of international arbitrations, which almost always arise out of agreements between commercial entities. Nor do I discuss empirical studies of court-annexed arbitrations, which may not derive from party agreement and do not ordinarily proceed to a binding award.
Contract Law In Modern Commercial Transactions, An Artifact Of Twentieth Century Business Life?, James J. White
Contract Law In Modern Commercial Transactions, An Artifact Of Twentieth Century Business Life?, James J. White
Articles
Diligent first year law students study contract law with a passion previously reserved for romantic objects and religious idols. Their professors lead them in extensive and difficult intellectual explorations of the wilds of contract law. There are careful analyses of why damage recovery X will stimulate performance Y, why recovery A is appropriate to encourage the aggrieved party to return to the market, and so on and so forth. Lurking behind this year long analysis are several inarticulate hypotheses: that they make rational evaluations of the threat of legal sanctions; that they respond in other varied and subtle ways to …
Residential Tenants And Their Leases: An Empirical Study, Warren Mueller
Residential Tenants And Their Leases: An Empirical Study, Warren Mueller
Michigan Law Review
Of particular interest is the application of this theory to residential leases, a classic example of the standard long-form contract. An abundance of traditional legal research and commentary has been devoted to the problem of disparity of bargaining power between the parties to a standard-form residential lease. The commentators have consistently called for reform measures to combat this problem. In order to adopt sensible and effective reform measures, however, it is first necessary to obtain factual data with which to test and clarify the reformers' underlying assumptions. Such data is virtually nonexistent, since, prior to the study described in this …