Law Commons^™

Artworks As Business Entities: Sculpting Property Rights By Private Agreement, Christopher G. Bradley

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Modern business entities, such as LLCs, are increasingly created and deployed to accomplish customized transactions and evade legal restrictions. Rather than acting as traditional business enterprises, entities serve as tools to facilitate complex commercial transactions and surmount limitations presented by existing bodies of law. One limitation constrains the ways that private parties can agree to divide property rights—a doctrinal limitation sometimes referred to as numerus clausus. This Article shows that such limitations on the customizing of property rights by private agreement now can be surmounted by virtue of modern business entity law. After describing the key features of modern …

Against Deaccessioning Rules, Brian L. Frye

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Art museums are the aristocrats of the charitable sector, with all

the virtues and vices of the aristocracy. In their prime, they are glorious

exemplars of the finest in cultural expression. But in their dotage,

they are weak and vulnerable, constitutionally incapable of avoiding

financial ruin. Some art museums have even gone bankrupt and dissolved,

despite owning large collections of extremely valuable objects.

What explains this paradox? Deaccessioning rules: professional

rules governing art museums and art museum directors that prohibit

the sale of works of art for the purpose of generating capital. When

art museums find themselves in financial distress, …