Law Commons^™

Deals, Victor P. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

Over a quarter of a century ago, Ron Gilson, Dan Raff, and I developed a new course, The Economics of Complex Transactions, which came to be known as Deals. The motivation for the course was our perception of a great imbalance in the law school curriculum, which was weighted heavily toward litigation, particularly appellate litigation. While a substantial number of our graduates were becoming transactional lawyers, there was hardly anything available to prepare them for that practice. Our concept was that lawyers were transaction engineers and, when designing contracts, they faced a generic set of problems. Furthermore, there were techniques …

Purchasing Health? The Promise And Limits Of Public Health Insurance, Kristen Underhill

Faculty Scholarship

The 2010s have been a momentous decade for Medicaid. With enrollment of over seventy-two million people (19% of the country’s population), Medicaid is the nation’s largest public health insurance program, and it is the primary or sole source of health insurance for vulnerable groups such as low-income children and pregnant women, adults with disabilities, and people in need of long-term care. Since 2014, the pendulum of Medicaid policy has swung from an unprecedented expansion of coverage under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), toward more recent federal regulations and state policy innovations that are instead predicted to limit uptake of benefits. …

The Core Corporate Governance Puzzle: Contextualizing The Link To Performance, Merritt B. Fox, Ronald J. Gilson, Darius Palia

Faculty Scholarship

There is a puzzle at the core of corporate governance theory. Prior scholarship reports a strong relationship between firms best at creating shareholder value and those rated highly by the established corporate governance indices. Little work explores why, however. We hypothesize that the link between governance and performance depends centrally on context. We illustrate the importance of context by exploring circumstances when a firm's governance structure can operate as a signal of the quality of its management. The idea is that better managers are on average more likely to choose a highly rated governance structure than are bad managers because …

Confronting Financial Crisis: Dodd-Frank's Dangers And The Case For A Systemic Emergency Insurance Fund, Jeffrey N. Gordon, Christopher Muller

Faculty Scholarship

Inherent tensions in the financial sector mean that episodes of extreme stress are inevitable, if unpredictable. This is true even when financial regulatory and supervisory regimes are effective in many respects. The government's capacity to intervene may determine whether distress is confined to the financial sector or breaks out into the real economy Although adequate resolution authority to address a failing financial firm is a necessary objective of the current regulatory reforms, a firm-by-firm approach cannot address a major systemic failure. Major blows to the financial system, such as the financial crisis of 2007-2009, may require capital support of the …

Cultivating Justice For The Working Poor: Clinical Representation Of Unemployment Claimants, Colleen F. Shanahan

Faculty Scholarship

The combination of current economic conditions and recent changes in the United States' welfare system makes representation of unemployment insurance claimants by clinic students a timely learning opportunity. While unemployment insurance claimants often share similarities with student attorneys, they are unable to access justice as easily as student attorneys, and as a result, face the risk of severe poverty. Clinical representation of unemployment claimants is a rich opportunity for students to experience making a difference for a client, and to understand the issues of poverty and justice that these clients experience along the way. These cases reveal that larger lessons …

The Devil Made Me Do It: The Corporate Purchase Of Insurance, Victor P. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

Despite the fact that public corporations ought to be risk neutral, they often carry insurance. This note first considers why insurance (or more precisely, the package of services provided by insurance companies) might create value, regardless of the risk preferences of managers, shareholders, or other corporate stakeholders. One motive is that their contractual counterparties – buyers, lessors, and lenders – require that they carry insurance. Three explanations for why the requirement might be value enhancing are proposed.

Private Insurance, Social Insurance, And Tort Reform: Toward A New Vision Of Compensation For Illness And Injury, Kenneth S. Abraham, Lance Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

The United States does not have a system for compensating the victims of illness and injury; it has a set of different institutions that provide compensation. We rely on both tort law and giant programs of public and private insurance to compensate the victims of illness and injury. These institutions perform related functions, but the relationships among them are far from coherent. Indeed, the institutions sometimes work at cross-purposes, compensating some victims excessively and others not at all.

The absence of a coherent system of compensation is reflected even in suggested reforms of existing institutions. Proposals to reform tort law …

Accountable Accountants: Is Third-Party Liability Necessary?, Victor P. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

Should accountants be liable to third parties if they conduct an audit in negligent manner? A half century ago, in Ultramares Corporation v. Touche, Niven & Co., Cardozo argued that they should not, unless their performance could be characterized as fraud. In recent years, courts in a minority of jurisdictions have concluded that Cardozo's argument is no longer compelling and they have found that "foreseeable" third parties could bring a tort action for ordinary negligence against the accountants. In addition to being subject to tort actions, accountants may also be liable under federal and state securities laws.

Suits against …