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Section 7: Business, Commerce, And Property, Institute Of Bill Of Rights Law, William & Mary Law School

Supreme Court Preview

No abstract provided.

Product Liability And Legal Leverage: The Perverse Effect Of Stiff Penalties, Michael S. Knoll

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

State User Fees And The Dormant Commerce Clause, Dan T. Coenen

Scholarly Works

This Article considers the interplay of two central tenets of the U.S. Supreme Court's dormant commerce clause jurisprudence. The first of these principles exempts from the general proscription on discrimination against interstate commerce a state's actions as a "market participant," rather than as a "market regulator." The second principle, in contrast, renders the nondiscrimination rule fully applicable to the imposition of state "user fees."

Part II of this Article shows why these doctrinal pronouncements stand in an uneasy tension. It also explains how this tension revealed itself in Oregon Waste Systems, Inc., v. Department of Environmental Quality of Oregon, when …

Taxing Electronic Commerce: Preliminary Thoughts On Model Uniform Legislation, Walter Hellerstein

Scholarly Works

This report on Taxing Electronic Commerce was presented at the symposium on multi-jurisdictional taxation of electronic commerce at Harvard University on April 5, 1997. This report describes the normative principles shared by most serious analyses of the problems raised by state taxation of electronic commerce. It then attempts to translate these principles into legal rules that could provide a model for uniform legislation in this area. Finally it addresses constitutional questions that will likely be encountered in any effort to implement such legislation.

State Taxation Of Electronic Commerce, Walter Hellerstein

Scholarly Works

The coming of the information age has profound implications for state taxation as it does for just about everything else. The exponential growth and increasing commercialization of the Internet, along with the sweeping technological and regulatory changes that have reconfigured the telecommunications industry, pose a daunting challenge to the states’ traditional approaches to taxing business activity and the telecommunications system that facilitates it. State tax administrators and policymakers, alarmed at the prospect that their tax bases will disappear into cyberspace, are seeking means to accommodate their taxing regimes to the new technological environment. The business community, on the other hand, …

Commenting On "Purpose" In The Uniform Commercial Code, David Frisch

Law Faculty Publications

This Article describes the congruities and incongruities of applying a purposive interpretation to Code provisions. We intend nothing provocative; indeed, it would be provocative to suggest that a living organism such as the UCC should be applied in a manner inconsiderate of its "purpose." Our object is to come to terms with the sources of purpose. What is it that counsel, courts, and transactors, for that matter, need in order to discern the law's reason that will determine their bargain, their rights when the bargain fails? In Part II of this Article, we focus on section 1-102 of the Code, …

Derivative Securities: Governmental Entities As End Users, Bankrupts And Other Big Losers, Robert C. Downs, Lenora J. Fowler

Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

The Uses And Abuses Of Risk Management: How Men Learnt To Bet Against The Gods, Kenneth Anderson

Book Reviews

This 1997 review in the Times Literary Supplement (London) conjoins two books - the first, by investment banker turned finance historian Peter L. Berstein, is a history of the idea of risk, as it developed from Renaissance times through contemporary finance. The second, by the former editor of the derivatives journal Risk, Lillian Chew, is an account of contemporary financial derivatives and their uses and abuses. The point of linking these two books in a single review is to point out that the basic ideas behind today's financial derivatives - forms of forwards, options, swaps, and so on - are …

West Virginia Corporate Law: Is It "Broke"?, Debra R. Cohen

Journal Articles

We are all familiar with the cliche "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." The sentiment is as applicable to law as it is to the rest of life. When a law does what it is intended to do, legislators and courts should leave it alone. However, when a law no longer serves its intended purpose, it is "broke," and should be revised. The question is whether West Virginia's corporate law is "broke." In 1974, the West Virginia Legislature adopted the West Virginia Corporation Act (the "Act").' The Act brought then modem standards of corporate law to West Virginia. Since …

Oppression Of Minority Shareholders In Close Corporations: The Dissolution And Buy Out Remedies, Alexis Wochenmarkt

LLM Theses and Essays

To understand the potentially dramatic consequences of oppression in a close corporation it is in the first instance necessary, to outline the specific characteristics of these corporations. This thesis concentrates on the peculiarities of close corporations. Most states enacted "oppression" as a generic ground for remedial action. This study evaluates the different standards emphasizing reasonable expectations. Reasonable expectations if properly limited appears to be an efficient tool to measure oppression. In other jurisdictions, mainly where oppression is not available as a ground for dissolution, courts encountered the needs of close corporations by enhancing the owed fiduciary duties. Thus, in some …

Developing A "Transnational" Law For International Sales: The Vienna Convention's Treatment Of Trade Usages, Ainhoa Veiga-Torregrosa

LLM Theses and Essays

The 1980 United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG or Vienna Convention), conceived for worldwide acceptance, sets forth a uniform set of rules aimed at regulating some of the issues that, in an international sales contract, are likely to arise between the parties to such international transaction. The extent to which the substantive solutions that the Vienna Convention provides with the aim of filling in gaps within international sales contracts, are to achieve the standing of a predictable, global, and uniform legal background for these contracts, is the question to be treated in this paper …

Double Taxation - Treatment Of Corporate Earnings Under American And German Law, Roland Schmidt

LLM Theses and Essays

This thesis is going to describe the different ways the United States and Germany deal with the problem of double taxation in the legal context of corporate distributions to its shareholders in the form of dividends. Tax law is particularly one of the areas of laws that are subject to frequent and often substantial changes. This is true for the German as well as for the U.S. tax laws. Since some of the issues being discussed in the United States today in connection with the corporate tax law are similar if not identical to the issues discussed in Germany before …

Enforcement Of International Arbitral Awards, Davd Levon Shahzadeyan

LLM Theses and Essays

The primary objective of this thesis is to show the proposals that have been made in order to amend the New York Convention. This study tries to analyze the problems that the proposed modifications seek to eliminate. In general these proposals were aimed at amending the Convention in order to widen the scope of application of the Convention and to eliminate the difficulties with the enforcement of arbitral awards in national courts Chapter two of this study gives a historical overview of the multilateral enforcement conventions prior to the New York Convention and a brief drafting history of the New …

Three Roles For The Private Equity Market In Foreign Investments: Comment On Mailander's "Seraching For Liquidity", Kenneth Anderson

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Christopher J. Mailander's discussion of the private equity market identifies what is, by most measures, the central concern of equity investors in foreign enterprises-how to get out of a foreign investment after getting in it.' His strategy for resolving this problem is to make available the liquidity necessary for an investor to exit a foreign investment by tapping the United States capital markets. This can be accomplished, according to Mailander, through the use of American Depositary Receipts (ADRs) on the private equity markets and through the private equity markets themselves. It seems evident that the capital markets have adopted this …

"And The Truth Shall Make You Free": Truth As A First Amendment Defense In Tortious Interference With Contract Cases, Robert L. Tucker

Akron Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Legal Architecture Of Virtual Stores: World Wide Web Sites And The Uniform Commercial Code, Walter Effross

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

Putting The Cards Before The Purse: Distinctions, Differences, And Dilemmas In The Regulation Of Stored Value Card Systems, Walter Effross

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

Ucc Proposals Concerning Consumer Transactions, James J. White

Other Publications

Professor Grant Gilmore once suggested that farmers would like a two section law. Section one would state "It shall be against the law to refuse to lend money to a farmer." Section two would state "It shall be against the law to collect a debt from a farmer." In a similar vein one might state the iron rule of consumer law, namely "No right that has ever been granted to a consumer, however ill considered and unjustified, may thereafter be withdrawn." Believing that some of the proposals for consumer protection that have been added in Revised Article 9 are not …

Comment On 'Profits Derived From Breach Of Contract Or Restitution', Howard Hunter

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

There is little with which to disagree in Professor Waddams' paper on the categorisation of damage recoveries in the cases posited, viz, those involving a breach which results in benefit to the breaching party but no loss of any consequence to the nonbreaching party. If the goal of contract remedies is to compensate the plaintiff for loss, then, presumably, there should be no recovery at all in such cases. At most there might be nominal damages to compensate for some transaction costs or perhaps as a ’declaration of rights’. In some of the cases considered by Waddams, breach might be …

Article 5 - Recent Developments, James J. White

Other Publications

I. Mitigation in Letter of Credit Transactions Assume a Buyer has procured a letter of credit to pay for contracted goods but no longer wants the goods. The Buyer and the Issuer would like to force the Beneficiary to mitigate. Assume that both the Issuer and Applicant repudiate their obligation or that the Applicant has failed and the Issuer repudiates its obligation to pay under the letter of credit. At the moment of repudiation the price for a gallon of the underlying oil that is the subject of the letter of credit is $.75 and that the letter of credit …

International Commercial Transactions: 1996, Peter Winship

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

The year 1996 was a quiet one in the world of international commercial law. The principal accomplishment was the adoption of a Model Law on Electronic Commerce, but progress was also made on several international secured transactions projects. The following survey focuses on these and other projects that touch on subject matter within the scope of the Uniform Commercial Code.' As in the past,2 the survey examines completed projects, pending projects, and proposed projects before the U.N. Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL), the International Institute for the Unification of Private Law (UNIDROIT), and the Organization of American States (OAS).3 …

The Emerging Law Of Electronic Commerce, Amelia H. Boss, Jane Kaufman Winn

Articles

Although often not apparent to the average business person or even the average lawyer, changes are currently underway, both domestically and internationally, to adapt existing commercial law doctrines to accommodate electronic transactions and the technologies that underlie them. The Uniform Commercial Code (Code) is undergoing substantial revision in order to respond to changes in business practice and the use of electronic communications technologies. These revisions will provide many of the basic rules to support and facilitate electronic commerce, and, to the extent possible, are being coordinated with international efforts in the field.

While progress in the creation of uniform laws …

Commenting On "Purpose" In The Uniform Commercial Code, Peter A. Alces, David Frisch

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Form Contracts Under Revised Article 2 (Symposium: Consumer Protection And The Uniform Commercial Code), James J. White

Articles

The current draft of section 2-206 in Revised Article 2 of the Uniform Commercial Code ("UCC") entitled "Consumer Contract: Standard Form"1 presents a unique and threatening challenge to the drafters of consumer form contracts. In earlier drafts, one part of the section applied to both to commercial contracts and consumer contracts. It required that "one manifest assent" to any form contract, commercial or consumer, in order for it to be binding.2 Bowing to commercial opposition in the most recent version, the drafters have omitted all reference to commercial contracts. As the section stands, it applies only to consumer contracts.

The Implied Warranty Of Merchantability In Software Contracts: A Warranty No One Dares To Give And How To Change That, Robert W. Gomulkiewicz

Articles

A disclaimer of ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITING THE IMPLIED WARRANTY OF MERCHANTABILITY, greets virtually everyone who prepares to use a computer software product. Software publishers disclaim the implied warranty of merchantability because they do not know what they might be promising if they give it. Though the disclaimer is routine, software publishers have little interest in needlessly eroding confidence in the quality of their products by conspicuously disclaiming a warranty with which their products may well comply. Disclaimers feed suspicion, voiced by industry critics, that software publishers care little about software quality or standing behind their products. Nonetheless, …

The New Economics Of Jurisdictional Competition: Devolutionary Federalism In A Second-Best World, William W. Bratton, Joseph A. Mccahery

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Liberalized Immigration As Free Trade: Economic Welfare And The Optimal Immigration Policy, Howard F. Chang

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Legal Aspect And Problems In International American Franchise Transaction In Indonesia, Veronika

LLM Theses and Essays

The Republic of Indonesia, a country in Southeast Asia, faced serious economic problems in 1966, the total debt was (U.S.) $2.3 billion and exceeded export earnings. The government encourages the private sector to take part in this economic development since the government itself faced a scarcity of fund. The government has tried to attract private investment either domestic or foreign investor by launching the deregulation program. The purpose of this thesis is to make an argument that Indonesian franchises need protection and that it is time now for the legislative body in Indonesia to enact a franchise law. The study …

Legal Design And The Evolution Of Commercial Norms, Jody S. Kraus

Faculty Scholarship

The Uniform Commercial Code determines the content of most commercial law default rules by incorporating common merchant practices. The success of this incorporation strategy depends on the likely efficiency of evolved commercial practices. In this Article, I use the best available theory of cultural evolution to analyze how and why commercial practices evolve. This analysis confirms that the incorporation strategy is far superior to a system in which lawmakers rely predominantly on individual analysis and experimentation to design commercial law. But the analysis also demonstrates that common commercial practices, and the laws incorporating them, are unlikely to be optimal, in …

Copyright Preemption After The Procd Case: A Market-Based Approach, Maureen A. O'Rourke

Faculty Scholarship

As information becomes increasingly available in digital form, a little noted yet significant legal change is occurring in the way in which information providers use the law to establish the terms under which they market their products. Electronic information providers, in contrast to their hard-copy counterparts, have continually turned to the private law of contract both to supplement and modify the public law of copyright.' While this trend began when most users were relatively large commercial, academic, or governmental enterprises, it accelerated as software providers began to market pre-packaged software to consumers, using the infamous "shrinkwrap" as a device to …