Commercial Law Commons^™

Beyond Trade Secrecy: Confidentiality Agreements That Act Like Noncompetes, Camilla A. Hrdy, Christopher B. Seaman

Scholarly Articles

There is a substantial literature on noncompete agreements and their adverse impact on employee mobility and innovation. But a far more common restraint in employment contracts has been underexplored: confidentiality agreements, sometimes called nondisclosure agreements (NDAs). A confidentiality agreement is not a blanket prohibition on competition. Rather, it is simply a promise not to use or disclose specific information. Confidentiality agreements encompass trade secrets, as defined by state and federal laws, but confidentiality agreements almost always go beyond trade secrecy, encompassing any information the employer imparted to the employee in confidence.

Despite widespread use, confidentiality agreements have received little attention. …

Constitutional Resilience, Shannon M. Roesler

Washington and Lee Law Review

Since the New Deal era, our system of constitutional governance has relied on expansive federal authority to regulate economic and social problems of national scale. Throughout the twentieth century, Congress passed ambitious federal statutes designed to address these problems. In doing so, it often enlisted states as regulatory partners—creating a system of shared governance that underpins major environmental statutes, such as the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act. These governance structures remain important today as we seek to adapt our laws and institutions to the serious disruptions of climate change. But recent Supreme Court decisions challenge this long-established …

Keynote Address, Sultan Meghji

Washington and Lee Law Review

Keynote address presented virtually at the Washington and Lee Law Review's 54th Annual Lara D. Gass Symposium: The Future of E-Commerce: Is It on a Blockchain? on Friday, March 17, 2023 in Lexington, Virginia.

Do Not Touch My Data: Exploring A Disclosure-Based Framework To Address Data Access, Francis Morency

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

Companies have too much control over people’s information. In the data marketplace, companies package and sell individuals’ data, and these individuals have little to no bargaining power over the process. Companies may freely buy and sell people’s data in the private sector for targeted marketing and behavior manipulation. In the justice system, an unchecked data marketplace leaves black and brown communities vulnerable to serious data access issues caused by predictive sentencing, for example. Risk assessment algorithms in predictive sentencing rely on data on individuals and run all relevant data points to provide the likelihood that a defendant will recidivate low …

Making Virtual Things, Joshua A.T. Fairfield

Scholarly Articles

People value virtual things—such as NFTs—because such assets trigger and satisfy deep-seated narratives of property and ownership. The cause of the recent series of failures to regulate virtual assets, and the resulting crashes, has been a failure to take seriously the ways people perceive and use the assets. Current legal frameworks fail to support buyers’ and users’ expectations of ownership in virtual things they purchase.

Making virtual things is a matter of social construction of value. Virtual things, like real-world things, have value because a community values them for a purpose. It therefore makes no sense to discount how and …

Teaching Slavery In Commercial Law, Carliss N. Chatman

Scholarly Articles

Public status shapes private ordering. Personhood status, conferred or acknowledged by the state, determines whether one is a party to or the object of a contract. For much of our nation’s history, the law deemed all persons of African descent to have a limited status, if given personhood at all. The property and partial personhood status of African-Americans, combined with standards developed to facilitate the growth of the international commodities market for products including cotton, contributed to the current beliefs of business investors and even how communities of color are still governed and supported. The impact of that shift in …

Unfair By Default: Arbitration's Reverse Default Judgment Problem, Alexi Pfeffer-Gillett

Scholarly Articles

It is a foundational principle of civil law that a defendant who fails to respond to allegations is deemed to have admitted those allegations and can be subjected to default judgment liability. This threat of default judgment incentivizes defendants to respond to claims, thereby discouraging delay tactics and helping ensure cases are resolved efficiently on the merits.

In consumer and employment arbitration, though, the fairness and efficiency benefits of traditional default judgment are flipped, rewarding rather than punishing unresponsive defendants. This difference from civil litigation arises out of arbitration’s fee structures: if a defendant-company fails to pay its share of …

Mass Arbitration 2.0, Andrew B. Nissensohn

Washington and Lee Law Review

Over the past four decades, corporate interests, in concert with the Supreme Court, have surgically dismantled the American civil litigation system. Enacted nearly a century ago, the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) was once a procedural law mandating that federal courts enforce arbitration agreements between sophisticated parties with equal bargaining power. Through death by a thousand cuts, corporate interests shielded themselves from nearly all methods of en masse dispute resolution. These interests weaponized the FAA into a “one size fits all” means to compel potential litigants with unequal bargaining power into arbitration. The so-called “Arbitration Revolution” is the subject of much …

Creating Cryptolaw For The Uniform Commercial Code, Carla L. Reyes

Washington and Lee Law Review

A contract generally only binds its parties. Security agreements, which create a security interest in specific personal property, stand out as a glaring exception to this rule. Under certain conditions, security interests not only bind the creditor and debtor, but also third-party creditors seeking to lend against the same collateral. To receive this extraordinary benefit, creditors must put the world on notice, usually by filing a financing statement with the state in which the debtor is located. Unfortunately, the Uniform Commercial Code (U.C.C.) Article 9 filing system fails to provide actual notice to interested parties and introduces risk of heavy …

Opportunity Zones Providing Opportunity For Whom?: How The Current Regulations Are Failing And A Solution To Uplift Communities, Ruta R. Trivedi

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

In 2017, the newly enacted Tax Cuts and Jobs Act created an incentive for taxpayers to invest in Qualified Opportunity Zones— census tracts that consist of low-income communities. These investments, which are incentivized via lucrative tax deferral benefits, are intended to uplift communities and leave them in a better position than they were pre-investment. However, the initiative lacks regulation requiring investments to actually benefit low-income areas, resulting in money going to places that do not need help, while communities that are in need may face displacement. This is a result of many wealthy investors finding that luxury projects are the …

Noncompetes And Other Post-Employment Restraints On Competition: Empirical Evidence From Trade Secret Litigation, Christopher B. Seaman

Scholarly Articles

Noncompete clauses in employment agreements are both common and controversial. An estimated twenty-eight million Americans—nearly twenty percent of the U.S. workforce—are currently bound by a noncompete. The traditional view that noncompete agreements can facilitate increased productivity by encouraging employers to invest in employee training has been challenged by numerous legal and economics scholars in recent years, who contend noncompetes hinder employment options for skilled workers and limit information spillovers, which are both vital drivers of innovation. Based on these claims, several states have recently limited the enforcement of noncompetes, and legislation is pending at the federal level to effectively ban …

Compliance As An Exchange Of Legitimacy For Influence, In The Oxford Handbook Of Global Legal Pluralism (Paul Schiff Berman Ed., 2020), Kishanthi Parella

Books and Chapters

This chapter explains that business actors comply with legally nonbinding institutions because of an exchange between legitimacy and influence. Specifically, the information effects produced by both binding and nonbinding institutions can cause reputational damage to a company. To regain its legitimacy, that company associates itself with a more reputable organization than itself, regaining legitimacy through that association. However, that association often comes at a price. In exchange for conferring legitimacy, the external organization will promote its own institutions for the company’s adoption. Companies therefore adopt these institutions in order to credibly signal the quality of their association with the external …

A Commercial Law For Software Contracting, Michael L. Rustad, Elif Kavusturan

Washington and Lee Law Review

Since the 1980s, software is at the core of most modern organizations, most products and most services. Part II of this Article examines how the U.C.C. evolved as the primary source of law for the first generation of computer contracts during the mainframe computer era. Part III examines how courts have overextended U.C.C. Article 2, as the main source of law for software licensing, to the limits. Part IV argues that the ALI and the NCCUSL should propose a new Article 2B for software licensing. Part V recommends a new Article 2C for “software as a service.”

The Human Element: The Under-Theorized And Underutilized Component Vital To Fostering Blockchain Development, Joshua A.T. Fairfield

Scholarly Articles

This Article constitutes a lightly edited transcription of Joshua Fairfield's oral remarks at the April 6, 2018 Cleveland State Law Review Symposium on Blockchain Law and Technology.

The author posits that there is a tendency to think that technology will emerge triumphant in resolving physical problems, including banking and transactional recording; that there is sort of a "tech-bro utopianism," epitomized by Mark Zuckerberg, suggesting that what we need is a technological, not a human, solution. He states that one major problem is that social technologists, psychologists, historians, linguists, and cultural anthropologists are not on the development teams that are building …

Looking Back, Looking Forward: Personal Reflections On A Scholarly Career, David K. Millon

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Reflecting On Three Decades Of Corporate Law Scholarship, Lyman P.Q. Johnson

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Next Iteration Of Progressive Corporate Law, Matthew T. Bodie

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Peeling Back The Student Privacy Pledge, Alexi Pfeffer-Gillett

Scholarly Articles

Education software is a multi-billion dollar industry that is rapidly growing. The federal government has encouraged this growth through a series of initiatives that reward schools for tracking and aggregating student data. Amid this increasingly digitized education landscape, parents and educators have begun to raise concerns about the scope and security of student data collection.

Industry players, rather than policymakers, have so far led efforts to protect student data. Central to these efforts is the Student Privacy Pledge, a set of standards that providers of digital education services have voluntarily adopted. By many accounts, the Pledge has been a success. …

The Regulation Of Commercial Profiling — A Comparative Analysis, Indra Spiecker, Olivia Tambou, Paul Bernal, Margaret Hu, Carlos Alberto Molinaro

Scholarly Articles

The authors, all data protection experts, discuss the status of the relevant data protection regulatory framework on profiling in the business sector in sev eral countries worldwide, from the constitutional level to some individual regulation including the general attitude towards the topic. The EU perspective is presented on the basis of the present directives as well as the General Data Protection Regulation. The United Kingdom, Germany and France, as three of the largest EU Member States with partly highly differing regulatory approaches represent Member State law. Australia, Brazil and the US regulation exemplify the different integration of data protection standards …

“Waiving” Goodbye To Arbitration: A Contractual Approach, Paul Bennett Iv

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Drug Markets, Fringe Markets, And The Lessons Of Hamsterdam, Lance Mcmillian

Washington and Lee Law Review

The Wire is the greatest television series of all-time. Not only that, it is the most important. One of the most memorable story arcs from The Wire’s five seasons is the rise and fall of Hamsterdam—a quasi-legalized drug zone in West Baltimore. Stories are powerful teaching tools because they marry information and context. By seeing how the application of law affects characters we know and care about, we become more attune to the potential effects of legal decisions in the real world. The story of Hamsterdam—which is essentially an attempt to transform a black market into a fringe market—presents just …

Good Faith In Revlon-Land, Christopher M. Bruner

Scholarly Articles

The Delaware Supreme Court has set a very high hurdle for plaintiffs challenging directors' good faith in the sale of a company. In Lyondell Chemical Company v. Ryan, the court held that unconflicted directors could be found to have breached the good faith component of their duty of loyalty in the transactional context only if they "knowingly and completely failed to undertake," and "utterly failed to attempt" to discharge their duties.

In this essay I argue that the Lyondell standard effectively imports into the transactional context the exacting standard previously applied in the oversight context — a move clearly aimed …

Filling In The Blank: Defining Breaches Of Contract Excepted From Discharge As Willful And Malicious Injuries To Property Under 11i U.S.C. § 523(A)(6), Bryan Hoynak

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

A Question Of Sovereignty, Development, And Natural Resources: A New Standard For Binding Third Party Nonsignatory Governments To Arbitration, Jacob Stoehr

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Interjurisdictional Competition In Enforcing Noncompetition Agreements: Regulatory Risk Management And The Race To The Bottom, Timothy P. Glynn

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Inadequate Checks And Balances: Critiquing The Imbalance Of Power In Arms Export Regulation, Charles L. Capito Iii

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

What Does Granholm V. Heald Mean For The Future Of The Twenty-First Amendment, The Three-Tier System, And Efficient Alcohol Distribution?, Gregory E. Durkin

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Limiting The Vicarious Liability Of Franchisors For The Torts Of Their Franchisees, Joseph H. King, Jr.

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Commercial Law Collides With Cyberspace: The Trouble With Perfection - Insecurity Interests In The New Corporate Asset, Xuan-Thao N. Nguyen

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Let The Buyer Beware: The Seventh Circuit's Approach To Accept-Or-Return Offers, Kristin Johnson Hazelwood

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.