Law Commons^™

On Being A Muslim Corporate Lawyer, Azizah Y. Al-Hibri

Law Faculty Publications

It appears to me that religion subconsciously informs our individual professional practice and that a non-humanitarian form of secularism has quietly shaped our corporate laws. The attendant dissonance causes severe dissatisfaction, and at times even disfunction, in our society. The claim that our present corporate laws are imbued with a non-humanist secularist perspective deserves closer examination from a religious vantage point. Given our constitutional guarantees, our present legal structure appears to place undue burdens on persons of faith in this country. A more just balance between religious and various forms of secular perspectives is, I submit, a worthy goal for …

A Reliance Damages Approach To Corporate Lockups, David A. Skeel Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Fired Employees And/Or Frozen-Out Shareholders (An Essay), Deborah A. Schmedemann

Faculty Scholarship

The thesis of this essay can be stated as follows: Shareholder-employees should be able to recover for loss of employment, within the cause of action provided by corporate law, where the termination violates public law, breaches the agreement among the shareholders, or is unsupported by legitimate business purposes. In Part II, this essay presents the employment model, including the paradigm of employment that the law builds on, the starting premise of employment law, the roles of private and public law, and the remedies afforded for violations of an employee's rights. In Part III, this essay develops the corporate model, discussing …

Getting Out Of Business: Tax Costs And Opportunities In Exiting A Closely Held Business, Denise D. J. Roy

Faculty Scholarship

The primary purpose of this article is to encourage closely held business owners and their lawyers to consider exit costs, opportunities and strategies when making the initial choice-of-entity decision. A secondary purpose is to provide information about tax consequences and exit strategies useful to owners of businesses that are already up and running, whether in drafting a buy-sell agreement or planning for a specific transaction. Therefore, the article begins by comparing the major tax consequences of exiting the alternative entity types available to closely held businesses for tax purposes--C corporations, S corporations and partnerships. Part II of this article provides …

Venture Capital And The Structure Of Capital Markets: Banks Versus Stock Markets, Ronald J. Gilson, Bernard S. Black

Faculty Scholarship

The United States has many banks that are small relative to large corporations and play a limited role in corporate governance, and a well developed stock market with an associated market for corporate control. In contrast, Japanese and German banks are fewer in number but larger in relative size and are said to play a central governance role. Neither country has an active market for corporate control. We extend the debate on the relative efficiency of bank- and stock market-centered capital markets by developing a further systematic difference between the two systems: the greater vitality of venture capital in stock …

Corporate Governance And Economic Efficiency: When Do Institutions Matter?, Ronald J. Gilson

Faculty Scholarship

Until the 1980s, corporate governance was largely the province of lawyers. It was a world of specific rules – more or less precise statutory requirements governing shareholder meetings, the election of directors, notice requirements and the like – that were essentially unrelated to what corporations actually do. From this perspective, the corporation's productive activity was simply a black box onto which standard governance structures were superimposed with little effect on what took place within. Corporate law was "trivial" or, as Bayless Manning so evocatively portrayed it, simply "great empty corporation statutes – towering skyscrapers of rusted girders internally welded together …

Corporate Initiatives: A Second Human Rights Revolution?, Douglass Cassel

Journal Articles

This Essay examines the role of multinational corporations in protecting human rights around the globe. Part I analyzes the conduct of corporations, describes examples of corporations' involvement in human rights violations, and discusses the merits of greater responsibility of corporations. Part II suggests that the level of responsibility for a multinational corporation depends on the proximity of the corporation's operations to human rights violations, in combination with the seriousness of the violations, and proposes five gradations of responsibility. This Essay concludes that the evolving nature of the global economy is producing a shift in responsibilities from government to the private …

Antitrust Balancing In A (Near) Coasean World: The Case Of Franchise Tying Contracts, Alan J. Meese

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Positivism And The Separation Of Law And Economics, Avery W. Katz

Faculty Scholarship

The modem field of law and economics – that is, the application of economic analysis to legal subjects other than trade and business regulation – is now over thirty years old, but it remains controversial in the legal academy and, to a lesser extent, in the profession at large. Since its beginnings in the early 1960s, the economic approach has provoked substantial opposition and antagonism. The sources of this resistance, however, are a matter of dispute. Many economists and economically influenced lawyers attribute it to more traditional lawyers' reluctance to learn a new and unfamiliar set of concepts and techniques. …

When Should An Offer Stick? The Economics Of Promissory Estoppel In Preliminary Negotiations, Avery W. Katz

Faculty Scholarship

The purpose of this Article is to examine the doctrine of promissory estoppel, as it applies in the context of preliminary negotiations, from the viewpoint of the economic theory of rational choice. This is part of a larger project that attempts to understand better the regulatory role of contract formation law generally. From a regulatory vantage point, estoppel and related legal doctrines operate as economic regulations; they shape the bargaining process by influencing the negotiators' incentives to make and to rely on preliminary communications. As with all economic regulations, however, some rules do better than others at promoting efficient exchange, …

Public Research And Private Development: Patents And Technology Transfer In Government-Sponsored Research, Rebecca S. Eisenberg

Articles

This article revisits the logical and empirical basis for current government patent policy in order to shed light on the competing interests at stake and to begin to assess how the system is operating in practice. Such an inquiry is justified in part by the significance of federally-sponsored research and development to the overall U.S. research effort. Although the share of national expenditures for research and development borne by the federal government has declined since 1980, federal funding in 1995 still accounted for approximately thirty-six percent of total national outlays for research and development' and nearly fifty-eight percent of outlays …

(Dis)Assembling Rights Of Women Workers Along The Global Assembly Line: Human Rights And The Garment Industry Symposium: Political Lawyering: Conversations On Progressive Social Change, Laura Ho, Catherine Powell, Leti Volpp

Faculty Scholarship

Some observers would like to explain away sweatshops as immigrants exploiting other immigrants, as "cultural, or as the importation of a form of exploitation that normally does not happen here but occurs elsewhere, in the "Third World." While the public was shocked by the discovery at El Monte, garment workers and garment worker advocates have for years been describing abuses in the garment industry and have ascribed responsibility for such abuses to manufacturers and retailers who control the industry. Sweatshops, like the one in El Monte, are a home-grown problem with peculiarly American roots. Since the inception of the garment …

The Role Of Convertible Securities In Corporate Finance, George W. Dent

Faculty Publications

This Article examines theories supporting the use of convertible secyrutues and finds them insufficient even for public companies, to which they are supposed to apply. They fare worse yet for private firms which use convertibles even more frequently. Indeed, no one theory explains all uses of convertibles. Convertibles can reduce agency costs by reconciling differences in risk aversion and diminishing managers' exploitation of investors, but they can also promote managers' interests at the expense of shareholders. The mix of factors varies from case to case. Thus, the role of convertibles proves complex and diverse. After describing convertible securities (part II) …

The New Community Reinvestment Act Regulations: An Attempt To Implement Performance-Based Standards, Richard D. Marsico

Articles & Chapters

On May 4, 1995, the federal banking regulatory agencies published new Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) regulations.' This culminated a process that began nearly two years earlier, in July 1993, when President Clinton called on the agencies to reform the CRA enforcement regime. The goal was to institute a regulatory scheme that emphasized lending performance over process, that was more objective and less subject to arbitrary interpretation, and that reduced unnecessary paperwork.2 With this presidential mandate, the agencies commenced a 21-month odyssey that included seven hearings around the country with more than 250 witnesses, two sets of proposed revisions to the …

America's Shifting Fascination With Comparative Corporate Governance, Edward B. Rock

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Proprietary Norms In Corporate Law: An Essay On Reading Gambotto In The United States, Deborah A. Demott

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Ali Principles Of Corporate Governance Compared With Georgia Law - Continued, The Special Contribution, Marjorie F. Knowles, Colin Flannery

Faculty Publications By Year

No abstract provided.

Intellectual Property At The Public-Private Divide: The Case Of Large-Scale Cdna Sequencing, Rebecca S. Eisenberg

Articles

The Human Genome Project provides fertile ground for studying the role of intellectual property at the wavering boundary between public and private research science. It involves a major commitment of both public and private research funds in an area that is of significant interest both to research scientists working in university and government laboratories and to commercial firms. It thus provides a wealth of new scientific discoveries that are simultaneously potential candidates for commercial development and inputs into further research. Its obvious implications for human health raise the stakes of getting the balance between private property and public access right, …

Representing The Unrepresented In Class Action Settlements, Brian Wolfman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Class actions are important and useful both to deter wrongful conduct and to provide compensation for injured plaintiffs. In complex cases, however, the existing class action structure falters. In this article, Messrs. Wolfman and Morrison argue that in "settlement class actions" the current class action rules do not adequately protect class members whose interests do not coincide with those of the class representatives and the class attorneys. Through a survey of recent, prominent settlement class actions, the authors show that the current system does not fairly treat subgroups in a class with respect to matters as diverse as future injury, …

F. Hodge O'Neal Corporate And Securities Law Symposium: Path Dependence And Comparative Corporate Governance, Ronald J. Mann, Curtis J. Milhaupt

Faculty Scholarship

The study of institutions, and particularly the study of institutions that societies use to govern business enterprises, is at a point of transition. In the last two or three decades, scholars focusing on economic principles to define appropriate legal rules and corporate institutions rose up to challenge the traditional orthodoxy of corporate governance found in the Berle and Means corporation.

One of the most exciting trends in the literature rests upon the "increasing marginal returns" school of economics associated with Brian Arthur and the Santa Fe Institute. The traditional neoclassical economic theory of production, familiar from decades of undergraduate and …

Breakfast With Yasser Arafat: Personal Reflections On The Peace Process, David Fidler

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Choice Of Entity - Tax Issues, Lisa M. Landry

William & Mary Annual Tax Conference

No abstract provided.

Choice Of Entity - General Considerations, L. Michael Gracik Jr.

William & Mary Annual Tax Conference

No abstract provided.

Case Studies: Small Professional Services Organization And Large Professional Services Organization, L. Michael Gracik Jr.

William & Mary Annual Tax Conference

No abstract provided.

Choice Of Entity - Flexibility, Exit Strategy, Thomas R. Frantz

William & Mary Annual Tax Conference

No abstract provided.

Allocation Of Nonrecourse Liabilities: Irs Takes Two Steps Forward, One Back, J. D. Dell, Michael G. Frankel, Leslie H. Loffman, Sanford C. Presant, Blake D. Rubin

William & Mary Annual Tax Conference

No abstract provided.

Planning Opportunities Remain Under The Final Partnership Allocation Rules For Contributed Property, Michael G. Frankel, Leslie H. Loffman, Sanford C. Presant

William & Mary Annual Tax Conference

No abstract provided.

Tax Considerations In The Formation And Operation Of Limited Liability Companies, Blake D. Rubin, Howard T. Widra

William & Mary Annual Tax Conference

No abstract provided.

Meeting With Irs Regarding Partnership Issues In Developing Section 1017 Regulations, Blake D. Rubin

William & Mary Annual Tax Conference

No abstract provided.

Partnership Workouts: Problems And Solutions Under Final Section 704(B) And 752 Regulations, Michael G. Frankel, Charles H. Coffin

William & Mary Annual Tax Conference

No abstract provided.