Law Commons^™

Handbook For Promoting Foreign Direct Investment In Medium-Size, Low-Budget Cities In Emerging Markets, Vale Columbia Center On Sustainable International Investment, Millennium Cities Initiative

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Books

In November 2009, the Vale Columbia Center on Sustainable International Investment and the Millennium Cities Initiative (MCI) released the Handbook for Promoting Foreign Direct Investment in Medium-size, Low-Budget Cities in Emerging Markets. With foreign direct investment (FDI) flows declining worldwide by an estimated 40-50% this year (following a decline of over 10% in 2008), investment promotion has become more important than ever: in a highly competitive world FDI market, promotion can make all the difference.

Investment promotion is particularly important for cities other than capital cities, as investors in manufacturing and services often locate primarily in a country’s capital …

Bilateral Investment Treaties And Fdi Flows, Lisa E. Sachs

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

Given that one of the principal purposes of bilateral investment treaties (BITs) is to help countries attract investment flows (by protecting investments), it is only natural that the question has been raised whether they do, in fact, lead to higher investment flows. The main studies on this topic from the past decade are collected in The Effect of Treaties on Foreign Direct Investment: Bilateral Investment Treaties, Double Taxation Treaties, and Investment Flows (Oxford University Press, 2009), a volume I edited with Karl P. Sauvant.

Bargaining Around Bankruptcy: Small Business Workouts And State Law, Edward R. Morrison

Faculty Scholarship

Federal bankruptcy law is rarely used by distressed small businesses. For every 100 that suspend operations, at most 20 file for bankruptcy. The rest use state law procedures to liquidate or reorganize. This paper documents the importance of these procedures and the conditions under which they are chosen using firm-level data on Chicago-area small businesses. I show that business owners bargain with senior lenders over the resolution of financial distress. Federal bankruptcy law is invoked only when bargaining fails. This tends to occur when there is more than one senior lender or when the debtor has defaulted on senior debt …

Responsibility And The Negligence Standard, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

The paper has dual aim: to analyse the structure of negligence, and to use it to offer an explanation of responsibility (for actions, omissions, consequences) in terms of the relations which must exist between the action (omission, etc.) and the agents powers of rational agency if the agent is responsible for the action. The discussion involves reflections on the relations between the law and the morality of negligence, the difference between negligence and strict liability, the role of excuses and the grounds of duties to pay damages.

Debunking Blackstonian Copyright, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

Faculty Scholarship

More than two decades ago, in attempting to make sense of the structural dissonance between copyright and free expression, the U.S. Supreme Court famously declared that copyright was intended to be “the engine of free expression.” Ironically, this characterization was at the time intended as little more than a rhetorical device. In that very case, the Court proceeded immediately thereafter to analyze copyright as a “marketable” property right and conclude that absent a showing of market failure, neither fair use nor the First Amendment would preclude a finding of infringement. Instead of injecting a new set of values into copyright …