Law Commons^™

Who Benefits?: How The Aia Hurt Deceptively Non-Joined Inventors, Jordana Goodman

Faculty Scholarship

Congress enacted the America Invents Act (“AIA”) to bolster economic development, sustain American innovation, and protect American jobs. This pro-business legislation, however, overlooked one actor critical to any successful innovation endeavor: the inventor. The AIA created access barriers, preventing inventors from efficiently and effectively seeking the entire remedy spectrum to which they are entitled. Paul Morinville and others have opined that the new first-to-file system put small inventors out of business, naming the AIA the single worst disaster in the history of the U.S. patent system. Beyond the filing and subject matter changes, the AIA created fundamental access to justice …

Capitalizing On Healthy Lawyers: The Business Case For Law Firms To Promote And Prioritize Lawyer Well-Being, Jarrod F. Reich

Faculty Scholarship

This Article is the first to make the business case for firms to promote and prioritize lawyer well-being. For more than three decades, quantitative research has demonstrated that lawyers suffer from depression, anxiety, and addiction far in excess of the general population. Since that time, there have been many calls within and outside the profession for changes to be made to promote, prioritize, and improve lawyer well-being, particularly because many aspects of the current law school and law firm models exacerbate mental health and addiction issues, as well as overall law student and lawyer distress. These calls for change, made …

The Missing Regulatory State: Monitoring Businesses In An Age Of Surveillance, Rory Van Loo

Faculty Scholarship

An irony of the information age is that the companies responsible for the most extensive surveillance of individuals in history—large platforms such as Amazon, Facebook, and Google—have themselves remained unusually shielded from being monitored by government regulators. But the legal literature on state information acquisition is dominated by the privacy problems of excess collection from individuals, not businesses. There has been little sustained attention to the problem of insufficient information collection from businesses. This Article articulates the administrative state’s normative framework for monitoring businesses and shows how that framework is increasingly in tension with privacy concerns. One emerging complication is …

Reconsidering Realization-Based Accounting For Equity Compensation, David I. Walker

Faculty Scholarship

The U.S. equity compensation landscape continues to evolve. Recent innovations have improved the linkage between pay and firm-specific performance, but have added complexity. Against that backdrop, this Article urges reconsideration of the accounting rules for equity pay. Under current rules, most equity pay awards are expensed based on grant date valuation with no updating for changes in value post grant. This Article advocates the adoption of a mark-to-market or realization-based approach under which the expense recorded for all equity pay awards would ultimately be trued to the value received by employees. Increasingly, equity pay awards are more analogous to commissions …

Implications Of Globalization For The Professional Status Of Lawyers In The United States And Elsewhere, Nancy J. Moore

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Upper-Level Courses: Three Examplars, Mark Fagan, Tamar Frankel, Eric J. Gouvin, Kathy Z. Heller

Faculty Scholarship

I'm Mark Fagan, and I co-teach a course on securitization with Tamar Frankel at Boston University School of Law. We have come together to teach several interdisciplinary courses that combine law, business and public policy. Our course on securitization is a wonderful exemplar because it touches so many aspects of law as well as business and public policy.

We spent quite a bit of time wrestling with how to teach it. Do you teach it in a process fashion? Do you teach it by legal topic? Do you take examples and examine them? After much debate and discussion, we actually …

Preserving Competition: Economic Analysis, Legal Standards And Microsoft, Keith N. Hylton, Ronald A. Cass

Faculty Scholarship

In a recent symposium issue of the George Mason Law Review, Steven Salop and R. Craig Romaine use the Microsoft litigation as a focus for discussion of antitrust law. Salop and Romaine argue that each of the allegations against Microsoft could constitute evidence of a design by Microsoft to reduce competition and to preserve or extend monopoly power. They argue as well that the right legal standard to apply in monopolization cases is a "competitive effects" test that balances the benefits and harms of the monopolist's conduct. This article exposes problems with their approach, explains why it departs from current …

Taking Future Claims Seriously: Future Claims And Successor Liability In Bankruptcy, Frederick Tung

Faculty Scholarship

Treatment of contingent tort liabilities when a business is sold presents a particular challenge for corporate and bankruptcy law. In this article, I focus on the precarious position of future tort claimants-those who may be harmed by a manufacturer's defective product after the manufacturer has sold its business and disappeared. By the time the future claimant's injury occurs, she may be left with no means of recovery. While the article focuses primarily on the bankruptcy sale context, a discussion of the nonbankruptcy context provides important background.

In the article, I make two claims. First, I address recent proposals suggesting that …