Commercial Law Commons^™

Livingstone Motor Assemblers Limited (In Receivership) V Indeco Estates Development Company And Others (Supreme Court Judgment No. 1 Of 2013), Ntemena Mwanamwambwa

SAIPAR Case Review

The appeal stems from a winding-up petition filed in the High Court by the respondents seeking an order to commence winding-up proceedings as well as the appointment of a liquidator in respect of the appellant, Livingstone Motor Assemblers Limited. The latter was heavily indebted to several creditors, including the respondents and the Zambia National Commercial Bank (ZANACO) which had commenced receivership proceedings and appointed a receiver/manager extra judiciously, prior to the High Court granting the winding-up order. Disgruntled by the grant of the order, the receiver/manager made an application to vary it so that only he would retain possession of …

Determining The Liability For Carriage Of Goods By Road In West Africa – Can Ohada Uniform Rules On Transport Be A Foundation?, Damilola Osinuga

Southern African Journal of Policy and Development

Economic integration has been on African leaders' lips since the Organization of African Unity was created in 1963. The justification for this is not implausible — to promote regional trade and ensure economic prosperity. On January 1, 2020, African nations opened their borders to duty-free trade of goods and services under the continental free trade agreement. Transport of commodities is without a doubt essential for market access and intra-African trade. The low purchasing power of the populace and the geography of the continent, which is made up of a sizable number of landlocked provinces, favours road transportation. However, in West …

Zambia Breweries Plc V. Betternow Family Limited Selected Judgment No. 48 Of 2016, Chanda Chungu

SAIPAR Case Review

This matter dealt with a distributorship contract between Zambia Breweries and Betternow Family Limited. Betternow paid K100, 000 as a pre-condition to trading Zambia Breweries’ products – but after three (3) months of trading, Zambia Breweries terminated the supply of its products to Betternow Family Limited.

In this case, the contract provided that the contract can be terminated with one month’s notice. The contract was cancelled by Zambia Breweries and Betternow Family Limited sued for breach of contract. The trial court awarded damages equivalent to the unserved or remaining period of the contract.

The Supreme Court held that: Any damages …

Chimanga Changa Limited V. Export Trading Limited Caz Appeal No. 76/2020 And Caz Appeal No. 053/2021, Chanda Chungu

SAIPAR Case Review

The Court of Appeal delivered two judgments with respect two separate Rulings delivered by the Commercial Division of the High Court of Zambia. The facts that led to the Rulings stemmed from a judgment rendered against Chimanga Changa Limited whereby the Commercial Division of the High Court of Zambia awarded Export Trading Limited a sum of money relating to unpaid goods supplied. Thereafter, Chimanga Changa failed to pay the judgment sum and entered business rescue proceedings.

The first Ruling dealt with a preliminary objection raised by Chimanga Changa Limited with respect to the need for leave or permission from the …

Vedanta Resources Holding Limited V Zccm Investment Holdings Plc And Konkola Copper Mines Plc Caz 08/249/2019, Muna B. Ndulo

SAIPAR Case Review

No abstract provided.

Zccm Investment Holdings Plc V Konkola Copper Mines Plc And Vedanta Resources Holdings Ltd 2019/Hp/0761, Sangwani Patrick Ng’Ambi

SAIPAR Case Review

No abstract provided.

Vedanta Resources Holdings Limited V Zccm Investment Holdings Plc And Konkola Copper Mines Plc, Caz/08/249/2019, Sangwani Patrick Ng’Ambi, Chanda Chungu

SAIPAR Case Review

No abstract provided.

Hertz So Good: Amazon, General Jurisdiction's Principal Place Of Business, And Contacts Plus As The Future Of The Exceptional Case, D. (Douglas) E. Wagner

Cornell Law Review

No abstract provided.

Oil, Gas, And Rhesus Monkeys: A New Framework For Natural Resources Under The Commercial Activity Exception, Madelaine J. Horn

Cornell International Law Journal

The Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976 (FSIA) constitutes an exception for sovereign states to the normal jurisdictional rules that govern when parties are subject to suit in US courts. The commercial activity provision is a carveout within that broad exception-it deprives sovereign states of their exceptional immunity when they engage in commercial conduct. Within this framework, courts have used the natural resource rule to circumvent the commercial activity carveout and restore immunity to sovereign states. This Note argues that the rule should be abandoned in favor of a much more limited test, thereby increasing the number of sovereign states …

Regulatory Takings And The Constitutionality Of Commercial Rent Regulation In New York City, Henry Topper

Cornell Law Library Prize for Exemplary Student Research Papers

In recent years, the plight of small businesses in New York City has become a contentious topic. Although the city and its current mayoral administration share a long-standing commitment to affordable housing, the city’s small businesses—an integral and defining feature of the urban landscape—have suffered immensely. In the past decade, local establishments have largely given way to a homogeneous landscape of empty storefronts and national chain stores.The loss of local busi- ness occurs with such staggering frequency that there is an entire thriving blog subculture documenting their “vanishing” and the Center for an Urban Future publishes an annual report on …

Regulatory Takings And The Constitutionality Of Commercial Rent Regulation In New York City, Henry Topper

Cornell Law Review

This Note surveys the current status of small businesses and commercial tenant law in New York City and discusses whether or not the Small Business Jobs Survival Act (SBJSA) and commercial rent control are constitutional in light of current regulatory takings jurisprudence. Part I surveys the history of land use regulations in the city, the introduction of residential rent control, and the city's brief flirtation with commercial rent control in the mid-20th century. Part II explains the decline and current state of small businesses and the commercial law regime in the city, including the SBJSA proposal. Part III describes the …

Article 2 Of The Ucc: Some Thoughts On Success Or Failure In The Twenty-First Century, Robert A. Hillman

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The volume of litigation on Uniform Commercial Code Article 2, along with the rise of e-commerce, raises the question of whether Article 2 can succeed in the twenty-first century. There are, of course, many ways to measure success or failure of legislation. One strategy, applied here, is to evaluate Article 2 against the UCC’s ambitious “purposes and policies” of simplifying, clarifying, and modernizing commercial law, supporting commercial practices, and promoting uniformity of the law among the states. In doing so, I ask three questions that help determine when particular sections of Article 2 impede these goals and are ripe for …

Foreign Initial Coin Offering Issuers Beware: The Securities And Exchange Commission Is Watching, Julianna Debler

Cornell International Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act: Imposing An American Definition Of Corruption On Global Markets, Mateo J. De La Torre

Cornell Law Library Prize for Exemplary Student Research Papers

Mateo de la Torre’s research had an international focus in examining the cross-cultural implications of Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA).

de la Torre’s research required a comparative analysis of foreign laws that are similar to the United States’ FCPA and included statutes, legislative histories, and commentary from Brazil, Japan, and the United Kingdom. He also consulted extensively with several members of the Cornell Law faculty. de la Torre’s findings provided the basis for his examination of the FCPA’s impact on nondomestic actors and markets, arguing that the United States’ aggressive stance belies the Act’s original purpose. He then presented frameworks …

The Macroprudential Turn: From Institutional 'Safety And Soundness' To Systematic 'Financial Stability' In Financial Supervision, Robert C. Hockett

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Since the global financial dramas of 2008-09, authorities on financial regulation have come increasingly to counsel the inclusion of macroprudential policy instruments in the standard ‘toolkit’ of finance-regulatory measures employed by financial supervisors. The hallmark of this perspective is its focus not simply on the safety and soundness of individual financial institutions, as is characteristic of the traditional ‘microprudential’ perspective, but also on certain structural features of financial systems that can imperil such systems as wholes. Systemic ‘financial stability’ thus comes to supplement, though not to supplant, institutional ‘safety and soundness’ as a regulatory desideratum.

The move from primarily micro- …

Beyond Finance: Permissible Commercial Activities Of U.S. Financial Holding Companies, Saule T. Omarova

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

!is essay explains the legal basis for, and examines public policy implications of, recent expansion of large U.S. financial holding companies’ non-financial business activities. Despite its potentially significant impact on economic growth and systemic stability, this phenomenon of financial conglomeration beyond finance remains poorly understood. Yet, any truly comprehensive and effective reform of financial services regulation must address public policy issues that arise when “too-big-to-fail” banks grow even bigger and more systemically significant by combining finance with commerce.

The Merchants Of Wall Street: Banking, Commerce, And Commodities, Saule T. Omarova

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

This Article explores the legal, regulatory, policy, and theoretical aspects of an ongoing transformation of large U.S. banking organizations into global merchants of physical commodities and energy. In the absence of detailed and reliable information, it is difficult to draw definitive conclusions as to the social efficiency and desirability of allowing this transformation to continue. What we can already ascertain about U.S. financial institutions' physical commodity assets and activities, however, raises potentially serious public policy concerns that must be addressed through a fully-informed public deliberation. Even if big U.S. FHCs were, in fact, to scale down their physical commodity operations …

Bretton Woods 1.0: A Constructive Retrieval For Sustainable Finance, Robert C. Hockett

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Global trade imbalance and domestic financial fragility are intimately related. When a nation runs persistently massive current account deficits to maintain global liquidity as has the United States now for decades, its central bank effectively relinquishes exchange rate flexibility to become a de facto central bank to the world. That in turn prevents the bank from playing its essential credit-modulatory role at home, at least absent strict capital controls that are difficult to administer and have long been taboo. And this can in turn render credit-fueled asset price bubbles and busts all but impossible to prevent, irrespective of the nation's …

Were "It" To Happen: Contract Continuity Under Euro Regime Change, Robert C. Hockett

Cornell Law Faculty Working Papers

One way or another, the European Monetary Union (EMU) is apt to endure. The prospect of continuation under the precise contours of the regime as we presently find it, however, is anything but certain. Hence many investors and other actual or prospective contract parties are likely to remain skittish until matters grow clearer. This skittishness, importantly, can itself hamper the prospect of expeditious European recovery. Addressing particular sources of ongoing uncertainty about EMU prospects can itself therefore aid in the project of recovery.

This Essay accordingly aims to impose structure upon one particular, and indeed particularly complex, source of uncertainty …

Known And Unknown, Property And Contract: Comments On Hoofnagle And Moringiello, James Grimmelmann

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

In addition to gerund-noun-noun titles and a concern with the misaligned incentives of businesses that handle consumers' financial data, Chris Hoofnagle's Internalizing Identity Theft and Juliet Moringiello's Warranting Data Security share something else: hidden themes. Hoofnagle's paper is officially about an empirical study of identity theft, but behind the scenes it's also an exploration of where we draw the line between public information shared freely and secret information used to authenticate individuals. Moringiello's paper is officially a proposal for a new warranty of secure handling of payment information, but under the surface, it invites us to think about the relationship …

Maybe Dick Speidel Was Right About Court Adjustment, Robert A. Hillman

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

In a symposium to honor Professor Richard Speidel, a giant in the field of contract and commercial law for over four decades, this contribution argues that Speidel may have been correct in asserting that, in limited circumstances, court adjustment of disrupted long-term contracts makes sense. I assert that nothing courts have decided or writers have analyzed since the ALCOA case proves that court adjustment is wrong-headed. But, as with so many policy issues, we may never identify the "best" judicial approach to disrupted long-term contracts because resolution depends on too many variables and unknowns.

The Mexican Constitution And Its Safeguards Against Foreign Investments, Álvaro Ramírez Martínez

Cornell Law School Inter-University Graduate Student Conference Papers

Every state has safeguards against foreign investment in its country. Most of the times these safeguards are contained in a main document which governs said countries. This document can take the form of a Constitution.

The Mexican constitution contains a safeguard against foreign investments in Article 27, where it is stated that the Mexican state can expropriate private property among other things, due to public interest. Any expropriation must be followed by an indemnification. The price to pay as indemnification shall not exceed the assessment for tax purposes.

Mexico has an invaluable opportunity to attract foreign investments but it must …

Rethinking Consideration In The Electronic Age, Robert A. Hillman, Maureen O'Rourke

Cornell Law Faculty Working Papers

Our fast-paced age of electronic agreements that ostensibly govern transactions as diverse as downloading software, ordering goods, and engaging in collaborative development projects raises questions regarding the suitability of contract law as the appropriate legal framework. While this question arises in many settings, we focus here on the free and open source software (FOSS) movement because of the maturity and success of its model and the ubiquity of its software. We explore in particular whether open source licenses are supported by consideration, and argue that they are, and that open source licenses are contracts. We further argue that a contractual …

Protecting Against Plunder: The United States And The International Efforts Against Looting Of Antiquities, Asif Efrat

Cornell Law Faculty Working Papers

In 1970 UNESCO adopted a convention intended to stem the flow of looted antiquities from developing countries to collections in art-importing countries. The majority of art-importing countries, including Britain, Germany, and Japan, refused to join the Convention. Contrary to other art-importing countries, and reversing its own traditionally-liberal policy, the United States accepted the international regulation of antiquities and joined the UNESCO Convention. The article seeks to explain why the United States chose to establish controls on antiquities, to the benefit of foreign countries facing archaeological plunder and to the detriment of the US art market. I argue that the concern …

Commerce In Religion, Bernadette Meyler

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

As this Symposium Article contends, religion increasingly overlaps with the commercial sphere, and courts are obligated to determine whether or not to adopt an entirely hands-off approach simply because the specter of religion lurks on the horizon. Whereas the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights tends to accept its member states' separation of commercial elements out from the protections more generally accorded to religion, the U.S. Supreme Court has treated the two spheres as overlapping. To the extent that each court does consider religious transactions in terms of commercial relations, each also arrives at a very different conception …

Warranties And Disclaimers In The Electronic Age, Robert A. Hillman, Ibrahim Barakat

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

This paper reports on software-licensor express warranty and disclaimer practices on the Internet. Our data show that virtually all of the websites and End User License Agreements (EULAs) we sampled include express warranties on the website and disclaimers of the warranties in the EULAs that may erase all or much of the quality protection. Next, the paper reviews the reasons why consumers generally do not read their e-standard forms despite the prevalence of disclaimers and other adverse terms. We then argue that e-commerce exacerbates the problem of warranties and disclaimers and that lawmakers should address this issue. We contend that …

Insource The Shareholding Of Outsourced Employees: A Global Stock Ownership Plan, Robert C. Hockett

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

With the American economy stalled and another federal election campaign season well underway, the “outsourcing” of American jobs is again on the public agenda. Latest figures indicate not only that claims for joblessness benefits are up, but also that the rate of American job-exportation has more than doubled since the last electoral cycle. This year’s political candidates have been quick to take note. In consequence, more than at any time since the early 1990s, continued American participation in the World Trade Organization, in the North American Free Trade Agreement, and in the processes of global economic integration more generally appear …

Changing The Paradigm Of Stock Ownership From Concentrated Towards Dispersed Ownership? Evidence From Brazil And Consequences For Emerging Countries, Erica Gorga

Cornell Law Faculty Working Papers

This paper analyzes micro-level dynamics of changes in ownership structures. It investigates a unique event: changes in ownership patterns currently taking place in Brazil. It builds upon empirical evidence to advance theoretical understanding of how and why concentrated ownership structures can change towards dispersed ownership.

Commentators argue that the Brazilian capital markets are finally taking off. The number of listed companies and IPOs in the Sao Paulo Stock Exchange (Bovespa) has greatly increased. Firms are migrating to Bovespa’s special listing segments, which require higher standards of corporate governance. Companies have sold control in the market, and the stock market has …

How To Create A Commercial Calamity, Robert A. Hillman

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

This Article briefly catalogs the kinds of commercial calamities and then focuses on one of them, namely laws that are so imprecise and ambiguous that judges do not know how to apply them, and lawyers cannot explain them. The Article illustrates the problem with Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) section 2-209, dealing with contract modification and waiver. The paper does not focus on the ambiguities and obfuscations of section 2-209, but on the strategy of lawmaking that inevitably produces such a result. The drafters of section 2-209 ambitiously sought to reform the law, but then lost their nerve. In short, they …

How To Create A Commercial Calamity, Robert A. Hillman

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

There are many ways to define a legal calamity. For example, a grossly unfair or inefficient law constitutes a legal calamity. A law that produces serious and deleterious unintended effects, such as effects opposite from those intended, is another kind of legal calamity. A law that is so imprecise and confusing that judges do not know how to apply it and lawyers do not know how to advise their clients is still another example of a legal calamity, which I focus on in this paper. Because this paper is a contribution to a symposium on commercial legal calamities, my example …