Law Commons^™

Laying Down The "Brics": Enhancing The Portability Of Awards In International Commercial Arbitration, Benjamin C. Mccarty

Benjamin C McCarty

The drafters of the 1958 New York Convention intended Article V(2)(b) to be interpreted narrowly, and while most pro-arbitration national courts do maintain narrowly defined areas of public policy that are sufficient for refusal of the recognition and enforcement of a foreign arbitral award, this is not always the case. Developing states and jurisdictions that maintain corrupt or inefficient judicial systems have shown a greater willingness to invoke the public policy exception for a broader, amorphous variety of reasons. This phenomenon has created a sense of unpredictability among international investors, arbitrators, and business executives as to the amount of deference …

An Approach To The Regulation Of Spanish Banking Foundations, Miguel Martínez

Miguel Martínez

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the legal framework governing banking foundations as they have been regulated by Spanish Act 26/2013, of December 27th, on savings banks and banking foundations. Title 2 of this regulation addresses a construct that is groundbreaking for the Spanish legal system, still of paramount importance for the entire financial system insofar as these foundations become the leading players behind certain banking institutions given the high interest that foundations hold in the share capital of such institutions.

Studying Is Dangerous? Possible Federal Remedies For Study Abroad Liability, Robert J. Aalberts, Chad G. Marzen, Darren A. Prum

Chad G. Marzen

Every year, thousands of U.S. students study abroad for academic credit. Study abroad programs have traditionally garnered strong congressional support, and proponents of the programs emphasize the educational, cultural, and diplomatic benefits from study abroad experiences.

Despite the many benefits of study abroad programs, risks are incurred overseas. In the past several years, a number of incidents have resulted in which students studying abroad have not only incurred physical harm, but in some instances have died while enrolled in a study abroad program. The current liability standards governing study abroad programs are murky. This article not only discusses the various …

The Personal Liability Of Insurance Claims Adjusters For Insurance Bad Faith, Chad G. Marzen

Chad G. Marzen

One of the currents of change sweeping through the insurance industry is the rise of insurance bad faith liability. There is an emerging legal question today as to whether the individual employee adjusters of insurance companies can be subject to bad faith liability.This article examines the question of whether employee-adjusters of insurance companies can and should be held liable for insurance bad faith liability. Early reported cases involving personal liability for bad faith generally held that insurance company employee adjusters were immune from bad faith claims as they were not in privity of contract with insureds. However, three significant decisions …

Illegal Agreements And The Lesser Evil Principle, Chunlin Leonhard

Chunlin Leonhard

Illegal agreement disputes force U.S. courts to wrestle with multiple competing interests. The courts’ approach has been generally explained and understood in terms of the general rule of non-enforcement of illegal agreements with numerous exceptions. The case law on this topic has been described as “a vast, confusing and rather mysterious area of the law.” This article offers the insight that, contrary to common belief, courts’ approach to illegal agreements shows a consistent pattern. A review of randomly selected cases shows that the courts have by and large consistently (albeit implicitly) applied the lesser evil principle in resolving the disputes. …

Avoiding The Road To Ferc-Dom: The Supreme Court Affirms The Right To Contract In Morgan Stanley V. Snohomish, Jorge A. Mestre

Jorge A Mestre

No abstract provided.

Short-Circuiting Contract Law: The Federal Circuit's Contract Law Jurisprudence And Intellectual Property Federalism, Shubha Ghosh

Shubha Ghosh

The Federal Circuit was established in 1982 as an appellate court with limited jurisdiction over patent claims. However, the Federal Circuit has used this limited jurisdiction to expand its reach into contract law, developing a federal common law of contract. Given the growing importance of patent litigation in the past three decades, this creation of an independent body of contract law creates uncertainty in transactions involving patents. This troublesome development received attention in Stanford v Roche, a 2011 Supreme Court decision upholding the Federal Circuit's invalidation of a patent assignment to Stanford University. This Article documents the development of …

Boilerplate Shock, Gregory Shill

Gregory Shill

No nation was spared in the recent global downturn, but several countries in the Eurozone arguably took the hardest punch, and they are still down. Doubts about the solvency of Greece, Spain, and a number of their neighbors are increasing the likelihood of a breakup of the common European currency. Observers believe a single departure and sovereign debt default might set off a “bank run” on the euro, with devastating regional and global consequences.

What mechanisms are available to address—or ideally, to prevent—such a disaster?

One unlikely candidate is boilerplate language in the contracts that govern Eurozone sovereign bonds. As …

Flawed Transparency: Shared Data Collection And Disclosure Challenges For Google Glass And Similar Technologies, Jonathan I. Ezor

Jonathan I. Ezor

Current privacy law and best practices assume that the party collecting the data is able to describe and disclose its practices to those from and about whom the data are collected. With emerging technologies such as Google Glass, the information being collected by the wearer may be automatically shared to one or more third parties whose use may be substantially different from that of the wearer. Often, the wearer may not even know what information is being uploaded, and how it may be used. This paper will analyze the current state of U.S. law and compliance regarding personal information collection …

Too Complex To Perceive?: Drafting Cash Distribution Waterfalls Directly As Code To Reduce Complexity And Legal Risk In Structured Finance, Master Limited Partnership, And Private Equity Transactions, Ralph Carter Mayrell

Ralph Carter Mayrell

The intricate procedural and data-driven decision trees that play a critical role in complex financial contracts like cash distribution waterfalls in structured finance agreement indentures (e.g., collateralized debt obligations (CDOs)), master limited partnership agreements, and private equity fund agreements are inefficiently depicted as written contracts. As Professor Henry Hu explains in Too Complex to Depict?, the difficulty of translation—or depiction—between original mathematical models, plain English prospectuses, legal contracts, and programmed execution means that often the written depictions that form the basis of disclosures do not accurately define the act of execution. To overcome this, the SEC proposed an amendment to …

Much Ado About Nothing?: What The Numbers Tell Us About How State Courts Apply The Unconscionability Doctrine, Susan D. Landrum

Susan Landrum

No abstract provided.

The Arbitration Clause As Super Contract, Richard Frankel

Richard Frankel

It is widely acknowledged that the purpose of the Federal Arbitration Act was to place arbitration clauses on equal footing with other contracts. Nonetheless, federal and state courts have turned arbitration clauses into “super contracts” by creating special interpretive rules for arbitration clauses that do not apply to other contracts. In doing so, they have relied extensively, and incorrectly, on the Supreme Court’s determination that the FAA embodies a federal policy favoring arbitration.

While many scholars have focused attention on the public policy rationales for and against arbitration, few have explored how arbitration clauses should be interpreted. This article fills …

Coase V. Pigou: A Still Difficult Debate, Enrico Baffi

enrico baffi

This paper examines the positions of Coase and Pigou about the problem of the externalities. From the reading of their most two important works it appears that Coase has a more relevant preference for a evaluation of efficiency at the total, while Pigou, with some exception, is convinced that is possible to reach marginal efficiency through taxes or responsibility. It’s interesting that Coase, who has elaborated the famous theorem, is convinced that is not possible to reach the efficiency at the margin every time and that sometimes is necessary a valuation at the total, that tells us which solution is …

Rise Of The Intercontinentalexchange And Implications Of Its Merger With Nyse Euronext, Latoya C. Brown

Latoya C. Brown, Esq.

This paper examines the impending merger between the IntercontinentalExchange (ICE) and NYSE Euronext against the backdrop of the current structure of the global financial services industry. The paper concludes that the merger embodies what the financial services industry is becoming and captures the model that will allow exchanges to remain competitive in today’s marketplace: mega-exchanges with broader asset classes and electronic platforms. As technology and globalization threaten their vitality, exchanges will need to continue reinventing and adapting. Increasingly over the last decade they have done so by merging and by moving, at least a part of, their operations on screen. …

Standard Contract Clauses As Public Goods: A New Approach, Enrico Baffi

enrico baffi

The aim of this work is to show how it is possible to identify market failures other than those traditionally identified by lawyers and law and economics scholars to justify the mandatory provisions of contracts between professionals and consumers and the equally mandatory provisions governing the abuse of economic dependency. This is a new approach that can be extended to other provisions and appears to rest on fairly solid microeconomic foundations. There is no doubt, however, that many criticisms can be leveled against it. Very briefly, I shall argue that the production of clauses characterized by being rather vague, indeterminate …

Standard Contract Clauses. A Different Way To Consider This Problem, Enrico Baffi

enrico baffi

The aim of this work is to show how it is possible to identify market failures other than those traditionally identified by lawyers and law and economics scholars to justify the mandatory provisions of contracts between professionals and consumers and the equally mandatory provisions governing the abuse of economic dependency. This is a new approach that can be extended to other provisions and appears to rest on fairly solid microeconomic foundations. There is no doubt, however, that many criticisms can be leveled against it. Very briefly, I shall argue that the production of clauses characterized by being rather vague, indeterminate …

Standard Contract Clauses As Public Goods: A New Way To Approach The Problem, Enrico Baffi

enrico baffi

The aim of this work is to show how it is possible to identify market failures other than those traditionally identified by lawyers and law and economics scholars to justify the mandatory provisions of contracts between professionals and consumers and the equally mandatory provisions governing the abuse of economic dependency. This is a new approach that can be extended to other provisions and appears to rest on fairly solid microeconomic foundations. There is no doubt, however, that many criticisms can be leveled against it. Very briefly, I shall argue that the production of clauses characterized by being rather vague, indeterminate …

Contracting I The -Modern Woerld, Enrico Baffi

enrico baffi

In this paper I want to show that the change that we observe in the way of contracting do not depend by the market powers that firms would have obtained, but it is a phenomenon due to the change in relative costs of activities. There are activities that are labor intensive that must be abandoned in favor of activities that capital intensive, and there are activities that are time consuming that the people do not want to bea, as reading all the contract clauses of a standard form contract, that determine the necessity, probably, if there is not a state …

Regulation Not Prohibition: The Comparative Case Against The Insurable Interest Doctrine, Sharo Michael Atmeh

Sharo M Atmeh

American law requires an insurable interest—a pecuniary or affective stake in the subject of an insurance policy—as a predi-cate to properly obtaining insurance. In theory, the rule prevents both wagering on individual lives and moral hazard. In practice, the doctrine is avoided by complex insurance transaction structuring to effectuate both origination and transfers of insurance by individuals without an insurable interest. This paper argues that it is time to ab-andon the insurable interest doctrine. As both the English and Aus-tralian experiences indicate, elimination of the insurable interest doctrine will have little detrimental pecuniary effect on the insurance industry, while freeing …

Explaining Adversarial Boilerplate Language In The Battle Of The Forms: Are Consequential Damages In The U.C.C. Gap Fillers A Penalty Default Rule?, Ryan D. Griffee

Ryan D Griffee

In this article, game theory is applied to the battle of the forms and related scenarios to explain Daniel Keating’s observations, reported in the article "Exploring the Battle of the Forms in Action," 98 MICH. L. REV. 2678 (2000). The first of the two major findings in the paper is that drafters of boilerplate language should use adversarial, U.C.C. § 2-207(1) proviso-conforming language to ensure that clients receive terms that are no worse than the default U.C.C. gap fillers. This is done first by explaining how courts apply U.C.C. § 2-207 to the battle of the forms, and then applying …

Recent Private International Law Developments Before The Supreme Court Of Canada, Antonin I. Pribetic

Antonin I. Pribetic

A trilogy of interesting cases involving private international law recently wended their way to the Supreme Court of Canada: (1) King v. Drabinsky (an Ontario case addressing the applicability of the Charter in respect of the enforcement of a foreign judgment); (2) Teck Cominco Metals Ltd. v. Lloyd's Underwriters (a British Columbia case involving declaratory relief in the context of parallel proceedings and forum non conveniens); and (3) Yugraneft v. Rexx Management Corporation (an Alberta case which affirmed that the two-year limitation period under s.3 of Alberta's Limitations Act, governs when a party seeks the recognition and enforcement in Alberta …