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Common-Law Compulsory Counterclaim Rule: Creating Effective And Elegant Res Judicata Doctrine, Kevin M. Clermont
Common-Law Compulsory Counterclaim Rule: Creating Effective And Elegant Res Judicata Doctrine, Kevin M. Clermont
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
Even in the absence of an applicable statute or court rule, failure to assert an available counterclaim precludes bringing a subsequent action thereon if granting relief would nullify the judgment in the initial action. This so-called common-law compulsory counterclaim rule emerges from the intuitive principle of claim preclusion that a valid and final judgment generally precludes the defendant from later asserting mere defenses to the claim. The implicit extension of this idea is that once a plaintiff obtains a judgment, the defendant generally cannot bring a new action to undo the judgment by reopening the plaintiff’s claim and pushing those …
The Jurisprudence Of Enron: Professionalism As Interpretation, W. Bradley Wendel
The Jurisprudence Of Enron: Professionalism As Interpretation, W. Bradley Wendel
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
Jurisprudence can seem like a formidably esoteric field, with conceptual arguments carried on at a high level of abstraction, seemingly remote from the concerns of practicing lawyers. In fact, it is impossible to ignore jurisprudence when thinking about the role of lawyers in the wave of financial accounting scandals exemplified by the collapse of Enron. The Enron case is not about ethics so much as it is about the interpretation and application of a complex scheme of legal norms to innovative business transactions. The lawyers believed they were taking a legitimate, albeit aggressive interpretive attitude toward the law, by structuring …