Business Commons^™

The Sources And Consequences Of Disputes Over Contractual Meaning, Randy D. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

With some frequency, parties agree to the particular words used in a contract they sign, only to later disagree as to the meaning of those words and their legal effect. That is, they each assent to something, but that “something” is something different for each of them. In this Article, I first categorize and trace the sources of recurring points of disagreement as a matter of language and linguistics. Then, I look at the consequences of a dispute that leads a fact finder to conclude that the parties genuinely did not agree to the same thing, which is to say …

Horse Racing And Historical Horse Racing’S Impact On The Kentucky Economy: Possible Hhr Saturation?, Thomas E. Lambert

Faculty Scholarship

The Commonwealth of Kentucky currently has 5 thoroughbred racing tracks and 3 harness racing tracks (Kentucky Horse Racing Commission 2023 and Mint Julep Louisville 2021). As Table 1 below shows, the industry employees roughly 7,000 people (direct jobs), and these jobs annually support another 2,000 jobs or so throughout the state. These 2,000 jobs are jobs that are provided by the suppliers to the horse race tracks (indirect jobs) and jobs that are created by the spending of the race track employees and the employees of suppliers on food, housing, transportation, and clothing by vendors and retailers throughout the state …

“Safe” Annuity Retirement Products And A Possible Us Retirement Crisis, Thomas E. Lambert, Christopher B. Tobe

Faculty Scholarship

This paper examines a looming possible crisis in many Americans’ retirement plans due to the proliferation of annuity products in their retirement investment portfolios. As defined benefit pension plans have almost completely disappeared as a means of retirement savings and have been replaced by defined contribution retirement plans over the last 40 to 50 years, a great number of private and public sector defined contribution retirement plans have become laden with insurance contracts called annuities. Of the remaining solid defined benefit plans many, through a process called Pension Risk Transfer are being converted to high-risk single entity annuities. Such products …

Historical Horse Racing Dominates Gambling Expenditures In Kentucky—Even Outperforms The Lottery. But Why?, Thomas E. Lambert

Faculty Scholarship

With sports gambling coming to the Commonwealth of Kentucky in September 2023, another competitor to various gaming activities in the state raises the question of how it is doing relative to the others, especially its major competition. As can be seen in the table below, for its first four months of operation, sports gambling in the state brings in almost $900 million and averages around $223 million per month. This average is better than typical monthly lottery sales which come in at around $161 million per month and is far above on and off-track (including simulcasting) racing betting which averages …

Anti-Patents, Roy Baharad, Stuart Minor Benjamin, Ehud Gutte

Faculty Scholarship

Conventional wisdom has long perceived the patent and tort systems as separate legal entities, each tasked with a starkly different mission. Patent law rewards novel ideas; tort law deters harmful conduct. Against this backdrop, this Essay uncovers the opposing effects of patent and tort law on innovation, introducing the "injurer-innovator problem." Patent law incentivizes injurers --often uniquely positioned to make technological breakthroughs--by allowing them to profit from licensing their inventions to competitors. Yet tort law, by imposing liability for failures to invest in care, forces injurers to incur the cost of implementing their own innovations. When the cost of self-implementation …

Arbitrating Corruption, Rachel Brewster

Faculty Scholarship

One of the most controversial issues in international investment law is how arbitral panels should deal with investments tainted by corruption at their inception. The current practice of investment arbitrators is to refuse to hear investors’ claims when bribery allegations are substantiated. A recent wave of scholarship has attacked this “corruption defense,” arguing that the practice unfairly harms investors and encourages governments to maintain corrupt practices. This Essay responds to that scholarship, arguing that the current approach is the best policy choice on balance. The Essay analyzes three core policy questions at the heart of the debate: Would eliminating the …

Corporate Racial Responsibility, Gina-Gail S. Fletcher, H. Timothy Lovelace Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

The 2020 mass protests in response to the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor had a significant impact on American corporations. Several large public companies pledged an estimated $50 billion to advancing racial equity and committed to various initiatives to internally improve diversity, equity, and inclusion. While many applauded corporations’ willingness to engage with racial issues, some considered it further evidence of corporate capitulation to extreme progressivism at shareholders’ expense. Others, while thinking corporate engagement was long overdue, critiqued corporate commitment as insincere.

Drawing on historical evidence surrounding the passage of Title II of the Civil Rights Act of …

Displaced Worker Angst And Far Right Populism, Thomas E. Lambert

Faculty Scholarship

Background

Nothing causes more anguish and frustration than downward social mobility such as that experienced by less-educated workers and especially by displaced workers. Those who lose economic status lose more than income because they become so socially isolated that they are further frustrated through loneliness (Case and Deaton 2020). Hanna Arendt points out that lonely men are susceptible to authoritarian influence (1973, p. 475).

There is yet another aspect to the downward social mobility of low skilled men, namely that they are losing ground not only relative to social norms but also relative to the wages of low-skilled women. In …