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Full-Text Articles in Law
Litigation And The Optimal Combination Of Vague And Precise Clauses In Contracts, Alvaro E. Bustos
Litigation And The Optimal Combination Of Vague And Precise Clauses In Contracts, Alvaro E. Bustos
Faculty Working Papers
In this paper we determine the optimal combination of precise and vague clauses written in contracts when the parties face writing and enforcement costs, the second ones in the form of litigation. We show that the parties may prefer to write vague instead of precise clauses not only because they are cheaper to write but also because they are cheaper to enforce. We extend Battigalli and Maggi (2002) to model the decision of a principal who chooses clauses to describe the actions that an agent has to perform. As both players observe nature imperfectly they may call for a court …
Practical Insights From An Empirical Study Of Cooperative Lawyers In Wisconsin, John M. Lande
Practical Insights From An Empirical Study Of Cooperative Lawyers In Wisconsin, John M. Lande
Faculty Publications
This article reports on a study of members of the Divorce Cooperation Institute (DCI), a group of Wisconsin lawyers who use a "Cooperative" process to provide a constructive and efficient negotiation process in divorce cases. The study involved in-depth telephone interviews and several surveys of DCI members. Although DCI members use this process only in divorce cases, it can be readily adapted for other types of cases.DCI's approach generally involves an explicit process agreement at the outset, based on principles of: (1) acting civilly, (2) responding promptly to reasonable requests for information, (3) disclosing all relevant financial information, (4) obtaining …
Mandatory Arbitration: Why It's Better Than It Looks, Theodore J. St. Antoine
Mandatory Arbitration: Why It's Better Than It Looks, Theodore J. St. Antoine
Articles
"Mandatory arbitration" as used here means that employees must agree as a condition of employment to arbitrate all legal disputes with their employer, including statutory claims, rather than take them to court. The Supreme Court has upheld the validity of such agreements on the grounds that they merely provide for a change of forum and not a loss of substantive rights. Opponents contend this wrongfully deprives employees of the right to a jury trial and other statutory procedural benefits. Various empirical studies indicate, however, that employees similarly situated do about as well in arbitration as in court actions, or even …
A Winning Solution For Youtube And Utube? Corresponding Trademarks And Domain Name Sharing, Jacqueline D. Lipton
A Winning Solution For Youtube And Utube? Corresponding Trademarks And Domain Name Sharing, Jacqueline D. Lipton
Articles
In June of 2007, the United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio ruled on a motion to dismiss various claims against the Youtube video-sharing service. The claimant was Universal Tube and Rollform Equipment Corp ("Universal"), a manufacturer of pipes and tubing products. Since 1996, Universal has used the domain name utube.com - phonetically the same as Youtube's domain name, youtube.com. Youtube.com was registered in 2005 and gained almost-immediate popularity as a video-sharing website. As a result, Universal experienced excessive web traffic by Internet users looking for youtube.com and mistakenly typing utube.com into their web browsers. Universal's servers …