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Full-Text Articles in Law
Investigating The Contract Production Process, Stephen J. Choi, Robert E. Scott, G. Mitu Gulati
Investigating The Contract Production Process, Stephen J. Choi, Robert E. Scott, G. Mitu Gulati
Faculty Scholarship
Contract law and theory have traditionally paid little attention to the processes by which contracts are made. Instead, contracts among sophisticated parties are assumed to be full articulations of the desires of the parties; whatever the process, the outcome is the same. This article compares sovereign debt contracts from US and UK firms, with different production processes, that are trying to do the same thing under very similar legal regimes. We find that that the production process likely matters quite a bit to the final form that contracts take.
Enhancing Efficiency At Nonprofits With Analysis And Disclosure, David M. Schizer
Enhancing Efficiency At Nonprofits With Analysis And Disclosure, David M. Schizer
Faculty Scholarship
The U.S. nonprofit sector spends $2.54 trillion each year. If the sector were a country, it would have the eighth largest economy in the world, ahead of Brazil, Italy, Canada, and Russia. The government provides nonprofits with billions in tax subsidies, but instead of evaluating the quality of their work, it leaves this responsibility to nonprofit managers, boards, and donors. The best nonprofits are laboratories of innovation, but unfortunately some are stagnant backwaters, which waste money on out-of-date missions and inefficient programs. To promote more innovation and less stagnation, this Article makes two contributions to the literature.
First, this Article …
Innovation Versus Encrustation: Agency Costs In Contract Reproduction, Stephen J. Choi, Mitu Gulati, Robert E. Scott
Innovation Versus Encrustation: Agency Costs In Contract Reproduction, Stephen J. Choi, Mitu Gulati, Robert E. Scott
Faculty Scholarship
This article studies the impact of exogenous legal change on whether and how lawyers across four different deal types revise their contracts’ governing law clauses in order to solve the problem that the legal change created. The governing law clause is present in practically every contract across a wide range of industries and, in particular, it appears in deals as disparate as private equity M&A transactions and sovereign bond issuances. Properly drafted, the clause increases the ex ante economic value of the contract to both parties by reducing uncertainty and litigation risk. We posit that different levels of agency costs …
Fragmentation Nodes: A Study In Financial Innovation, Complexity, And Systemic Risk, Kathryn Judge
Fragmentation Nodes: A Study In Financial Innovation, Complexity, And Systemic Risk, Kathryn Judge
Faculty Scholarship
This Article resents a case study in how complexity arising from the evolution and proliferation of a financial innovation can increase systemic risk. The subject of the case study is the securitization of home loans, an innovation which played a critical and still not fully understood role in the 2007-2009 financial crisis. The Article introduces the term "fragmentation node" for these transaction structures, and it shows how specific sources of complexity inherent in fragmentation nodes limited transparency and flexibility in ways that undermined the stability of the financial system. In addition to shedding new light on the processes through which …