Law Commons^™

Rhetoric Versus Reality In Arbitration Jurisprudence: How The Supreme Court Flaunts And Flunks Contracts (And Why Contracts Teachers Need Not Teach The Cases), Lawrence A. Cunningham

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Supreme Court rhetoric about the role of contracts and contract law in arbitration jurisprudence differs sharply from the reality of its applications. In the name of contracts, the Court administers a self-declared national policy favoring arbitration, a policy directly benefiting the judicial branch of government. This often puts the Court’s preferences ahead of those of contracting parties while declaring its mission as solely to enforce contracts in accordance with contract law. The Court thus cloaks in the rhetoric of volition a policy in tension with constitutionally-pedigreed access to justice and venerable principles of federalism.

This Article documents the rhetoric-reality gap …

A Prescription To Retire The Rhetoric Of 'Principles-Based Systems' In Corporate Law, Securities Regulation And Accounting, Lawrence A. Cunningham

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This Article corrects widespread misconception about whether complex regulatory systems can be fairly described as either "rules-based" or "principles-based" (also called "standards-based"). Promiscuous use of these labels has proliferated in the years since the implosion of Enron Corp. While the concepts of rules and principles (or standards) are useful to classify individual provisions, they are not scalable to the level of complex regulatory systems. The Article uses examples from corporate law, securities regulation and accounting to illustrate this problematic phenomenon before turning to a series of possible explanations for the widespread use of these misleading labels. The piece contributes to …

Thinking Race, Making Nation (Reviewing Glenn C. Loury, The Anatomy Of Racial Inequality), Christopher A. Bracey

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

We live in a race-conscious culture. As Americans, we are a nation of people who self-consciously chose to adopt a vision of society that embraced lofty ideals of individual freedom and democracy for all along with powerful mechanisms for devastating racial oppression. Our history is replete with instances of differential treatment on account of race - slavery being only the most egregious example - that achieved the desired effect of generating remarkable disparities in socioeconomic well-being among individuals and between different racial groups. Such disparities are not simply historical artifacts. They are facts of the contemporary American racial landscape as …