Law Commons^™

Conflicts In The Regulation Of Hostile Business Takeovers In The United State And The European Union, Barbara Ann White

All Faculty Scholarship

This essay focuses on hostile business takeovers to illustrate the significance that cultural differences among nations can play in developing a harmonized European Union law. After 12 years of development, the EU Directive regulating hostile takeovers, to everyone’s surprise, was voted down in the EU Parliament in 2001. The EU Parliament consists of the member nations and the movement to defeat the Directive was led by Germany, which had just suffered a brutal hostile takeover of its largest company by British raiders.

The “harmonization” efforts within the EU (i.e., establishing uniform laws among the member nations) mirrors the federalism movement …

Dashing Consumer Hopes: Strict Products Liability And The Demise Of The Consumer Expectations Test, Rebecca Korzec

All Faculty Scholarship

The threshold issue in American products liability litigation is whether the product was defective at the time it left the manufacturer's control. Traditionally, courts and scholars define “defect” in three functional categories: manufacturing defects, design defects and marketing defects. American products liability doctrine employs two major tests to determine whether a "defect” exists: the seller-oriented risk-utility test and the buyer-oriented consumer expectations test. The Draft of the Restatement Third of Torts: Products Liability, like some American jurisdictions, rejects the “consumer expectations” test as an independent standard in defective warning and design cases. Ironically, this limitation of the use of the …