Commercial Law Commons^™

Non-Compete Legislation Is Getting Worse With Latest Revisions, Nathan B. Oman

Nathan B. Oman

No abstract provided.

Money Norms, Julia Y. Lee

Julia Lee

Money norms present a fundamental contradiction. Norms embody the social sphere, a system of internalized values, unwritten rules, and shared expectations that informally govern human behavior. Money, on the other hand, evokes the economic sphere of markets, prices, and incentives. Existing legal scholarship keeps the two spheres distinct. Money is assumed to operate as a medium of exchange or as a tool for altering the payoffs of different actions. When used to make good behavior less costly and undesirable behavior more costly, money functions to incentivize, sanction, and deter. Although a rich literature on the expressive function of law exists, …

Trapped In A Metaphor: The Limited Implications Of Federalism For Corporate Governance, Robert B. Ahdieh

Robert B. Ahdieh

Trapped in a metaphor articulated at the founding of modern corporate law, the study of corporate governance has - for some thirty years - been asking the wrong questions. Rather than a singular race among states, whether to the bottom or the top, the synthesis of William Cary and Ralph Winter’s famous exchange is better understood as two competitions, each serving distinct normative ends. Managerial competition advances the project that has motivated corporate law since Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means - effective regulation of the separation of ownership and control. State competition, by contrast, does not promote a race to …

The (Misunderstood) Genius Of American Corporate Law, Robert B. Ahdieh

Robert B. Ahdieh

In this Reply, I respond to comments by Bill Bratton, Larry Cunningham, and Todd Henderson on my recent paper - Trapped in a Metaphor: The Limited Implications of Federalism for Corporate Governance. I begin by reiterating my basic thesis - that state competition should be understood to have little consequence for corporate governance, if (as charter competition's advocates assume) capital-market-driven managerial competition is also at work. I then consider some of the thoughtful critiques of this claim, before suggesting ways in which the comments highlight just the kind of comparative institutional analysis my paper counsels. Rather than a stark choice …

Dialectical Regulation, Robert B. Ahdieh

Robert B. Ahdieh

While theories of regulation abound, woefully inadequate attention has been given to growing patterns of "intersystemic" and "dialectical" regulation in the world today. In this rapidly expanding universe of interactions, independent regulatory agencies, born of autonomous jurisdictions, nonetheless face a combination of jurisdictional overlap with, and regulatory dependence on, one another. Here, the cross-jurisdictional interaction of regulators is no longer the voluntary interaction embraced by transnationalists; it is, instead, an unavoidable reality of acknowledgement and engagement, potentially culminating in the integration of discrete sets of regulatory rules into a collective whole.

Such patterns of regulatory engagement are increasingly evident, across …

Between Mandate And Market: Contract Transition In The Shadow Of The International Order, Robert B. Ahdieh

Robert B. Ahdieh

Boilerplate in sovereign debt contracts issued in the United States has long dictated the unanimous consent of bondholders to any debt restructuring. This requirement persisted for decades, notwithstanding wide consensus that such unanimous action provisions increased transaction costs, produced inefficient delays in debt restructuring, enhanced the moral hazards of the sovereign debt market, and otherwise encouraged collective action failures. Yet the sovereign debt markets has recently made an about-face, replacing the unanimity requirement for debt restructuring with a less demanding provision for collective, or majority, action by creditors. Completed over the course of just a few months in 2003, this …

Legal Origins, Investor Protection, And Canada, Poonam Puri

Poonam Puri

No abstract provided.

Dealing With Dirty Deeds: Matching Nemo Dat Preferences With Property Law Pragmatism, Donald J. Kochan

Donald J. Kochan

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

Robert C. Hockett

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- …

Some Basic Marxist Concepts To Understand Income Tax, John Passant

John Passant

The paper introduces readers to some basic Marxist concepts to give the building blocks for an alternative understanding of tax and perhaps even to inspire some to use these concepts and ideas in their future research. It argues that the tax system reflects the phenomena of wealth and income and that there is a deeper reality obscured and ignored by the income tax system as an outcrop of a capitalist system which does the same. This deeper reality is that capital exploits workers and that profit, rent, interest and the like are the money form of the unpaid labour of …

Dirty Debts Sold Dirt Cheap, Dalie Jimenez

Dalie Jimenez

More than 77 million Americans have a debt in collections. Many of these debts will be sold to debt buyers for pennies, or fractions of pennies, on the dollar. This Article details the perilous path that debts travel as they move through the collection ecosystem. Using a unique dataset of 84 consumer debt purchase and sale agreement, it examines the manner in which debts are sold, oftentimes as simple data on a spreadsheet, devoid of any documentary evidence. It finds that in many contracts, sellers disclaim all warranties about the underlying debts sold or the information transferred. Sellers also sometimes …

Desconsideração Da Personalidade Jurídica Em Favor De Credores Comerciais, Bruno Meyerhof Salama, Alberto Barbosa Jr.

Bruno Meyerhof Salama

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

Robert C. Hockett

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 …

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

Robert C. Hockett

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 …

The Macroprudential Turn: From Institutional “Safety And Soundness” To “Systemic Stability” In Financial Supervision, Robert C. Hockett

Robert C. Hockett

This Working Paper is no longer available. The published version of this article is available at: http://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/facpub/1405/ 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, …

Hollywood Deals: Soft Contracts For Hard Markets, Jonathan Barnett

Jonathan M Barnett

Hollywood film studios, talent and other deal participants regularly commit to, and undertake production of, high-stakes film projects on the basis of unsigned “deal memos”, informal communications or draft agreements whose legal enforceability is uncertain. These “soft contracts” constitute a hybrid instrument that addresses a challenging transactional environment where neither formal contract nor reputation effects adequately protect parties against the holdup risk and project risk inherent to a film project. Parties negotiate the degree of contractual formality, which correlates with legal enforceability, as a proxy for allocating these risks at a transaction-cost savings relative to a fully formalized and specified …

Directors’ Legal Duties And Csr: Prohibited, Permitted Or Prescribed In Contemporary Corporate Law?, Benedict Sheehy, Donald Feaver

Benedict Sheehy

Abstract: The interaction between CSR obligations and directors’ legal duties is seriously under examined. This article addresses that lack by examining directors’ duties in case law and legislation across the major commonwealth countries and the USA. It provides an analysis of leading cases and examines how they deal with the issues of the shareholder primacy doctrine, corporate legal theory, CSR and directors’ duties. The article reviews fiduciary relations and duties, analyses the directors’ duties to exercise power in the best interests of the company as a whole and for proper purposes. As this area of law is highly contested there …

Gambling On Our Financial Future: How The Federal Government Fiddles While State Common Law Is A Safer Bet To Prevent Another Financial Collapse, Brian M. Mccall

Brian M McCall

Creditors Right Of The Productive Unities Of The Company As Reimbursement For The Participation In Extrajudicial Withdrawal, Claudia Ribeiro Pereira Nunes

Claudia Ribeiro Pereira Nunes

The creditors of any category, when acting in community to obtain their rights, are holders of the Right to Collective Credit in a given society which conducts business. Thus, where a company resolves an action in relation to a member who retires, securitization may permit a productive unit of the company to continue as a limited liability company, as a way of compensation for this withdrawal, and implies the need to discuss how the rights of the creditors must be met, and by whom. The general aim of this paper is to present a solution to the issues of liability …

The Productive Unities Of The Company As Reimbursement For The Participation In Judicial Withdrawal Decision, Claudia Ribeiro Pereira Nunes, Priscilla Menezes Silva

Claudia Ribeiro Pereira Nunes

All companies are formed by consensus. When the ‘affectio societatis’ is broken, partners no longer have the intention of proceeding with business activities. There are then two possibilities, when dealing with limited liability companies: liquidation of the company, or termination of the company in relation to a partner, among others. During this period, due to the principle of preservation of the company, it is important to analyze the economic view regarding the possibility of a partner’s departure from the company and reimbursement for his participation as one of the productive unities of the company which he was part of. The …

Profits As Commercial Success, Andrew Blair-Stanek

Andrew Blair-Stanek

Courts often use the extent of a patented invention’s commercial success as crucial nontechnical proof of the patent’s validity. Relying on misguided economic reasoning, most courts use revenue as the primary yardstick for commercial success. This Note argues that courts instead should use profits as the proper measure of an invention’s commercial success. Current jurisprudence’s use of revenue reflects the flawed premise that firms maximize revenues rather than maximizing profits. As a result, courts will often find commercial success when the financial data suggest otherwise and vice versa. This Note finds the accounting and economic issues involved to be insubstantial, …

Janus Capital Group, Inc. V. First Derivative Traders: The Culmination Of The Supreme Court’S Evolution From Liberal To Reactionary In Rule 10b-5 Actions, Charles W. Murdock

Charles W. Murdock

“Political” decisions such as Citizens United and National Federation of Independent Business (“Obamacare”) reflect the reactionary bent of several Supreme Court justices. But this reactionary trend is discernible in other areas as well. With regard to Rule 10b-5, the Court has handed down a series of decisions that could be grouped into four trilogies. The article examines the trend over the past 40 years which has become increasingly conservative and finally reactionary.

The first trilogy was a liberal one, arguably overextending the scope of Rule 10b-5. This was followed by a conservative trilogy which put a brake on such extension, …

Janus Capital Group, Inc. V. First Derivative Traders: The Culmination Of The Supreme Court’S Evolution From Liberal To Reactionary In Rule 10b-5 Actions, Charles W. Murdock

Charles W. Murdock

“Political” decisions such as Citizens United and National Federation of Independent Business (“Obamacare”) reflect the reactionary bent of several Supreme Court justices. But this reactionary trend is discernible in other areas as well. With regard to Rule 10b-5, the Court has handed down a series of decisions that could be grouped into four trilogies. The article examines the trend over the past 40 years which has become increasingly conservative and finally reactionary.

The first trilogy was a liberal one, arguably overextending the scope of Rule 10b-5. This was followed by a conservative trilogy which put a brake on such extension, …

Certainty Of Title: Perspectives After The Mortgage Foreclosure Crisis On The Essential Function Of Effective Recording Systems, Donald J. Kochan

Donald J. Kochan

Recording systems for property play a pivotal, market-facilitating role for the players engaged in any transaction, the judiciary that must resolve disputes between the players, and others members of the general public by informing each about the true nature of ownership of the real property things in the world. This symposium article explores the essential character of such systems in providing certainty of title, and takes a tour through the mortgage foreclosure crisis to see where adherence to and respect for these systems’ roles broke down. Leading up to the crisis, as securitization became vogue and the housing boom blurred …

Capitalización De Intereses Y Cierre De La Cuenta Corriente Bancaria, Martin Paolantonio

Martin Paolantonio

Se analiza la cuestión a propósito de un caso que llegó incluso a la Corte Suprema de Justicia de la Nación. Esencialmente, el tema pasa por la interpretación de la norma que autoriza la capitalización de intereses, sin una referencia expresa a su vigencia luego del cierre de la cuenta corriente bancaria.

El Pacto Comisorio De La Ley De Garantias Mobiliarias Vs. El Pacto Marciano Del Real Decreto 5-2005, John Pineda Galarza, José Jareño Torrente

John Pineda Galarza

El pacto comisorio se encuentra prohibido en España, no obstante se promulgó el Real Decreto 5/005, el cual recoge al pacto marciano como una excepción a la prohibición del pacto comisorio. En ese contexto, se hizo un análisis económico comparativo sobre la aceptación del pacto comisorio en el sistema peruano y en su modalidad marciana española.

Attorney-General Of Pakistan - A Brief Overview, Umair Ghori

Umair H. Ghori

The legal system of Pakistan represents a fusion of the Shariah law and common law systems. Traditionally, the Pakistani legal system adapted the pre-1947 colonial law for local use. Amendments to these colonial laws, in particular inspired by the Islamic traditions, have been interspersed in intervals. As a result, the Pakistan legal system retains fundamental common law doctrines (such as binding precedent and delegated legislation) while gradually integrating laws of Islamic origin within the existing common law framework. However, Pakistan's legal system is far from being a complete mirror of the English legal system. One such major distinction is that …

Global Textiles And Clothing Trade - Trade Policy Perspectives, Umair Ghori

Umair H. Ghori

The author presents substantial case studies of the effect of the abolition of quotas on global trade in this sector. Concentrating mainly on China and Pakistan but also examining India, Indonesia, Vietnam, and seven other Asian T&C manufacturing countries, he contrasts post-abolition reality with pre-abolition predictions of the impact of abolishing quotas, and details the continuing distortion caused by tariffs, non-tariff barriers and through trade remedies such as safeguards and anti-dumping. All of the analysis is supported by the judicious use and interpretation of extensive statistics, compelling arguments, and interviews with entrepreneurs and trade officials in Pakistan (as a case …

Legality Of Put Option Under The Securities Contract Regulation Act, 1956, Harshad Pathak

Harshad Pathak

No abstract provided.

Reforma Del Mercado De Capitales, Martin Paolantonio

Martin Paolantonio

Primer análisis de la ley 26831, que reforma de manera integral el marco legal del mercado de capitales en la Argentina