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Full-Text Articles in Law
Bargaining Around Bankruptcy: Small Business Workouts And State Law, Edward R. Morrison
Bargaining Around Bankruptcy: Small Business Workouts And State Law, Edward R. Morrison
Faculty Scholarship
Federal bankruptcy law is rarely used by distressed small businesses. For every 100 that suspend operations, at most 20 file for bankruptcy. The rest use state law procedures to liquidate or reorganize. This paper documents the importance of these procedures and the conditions under which they are chosen using firm-level data on Chicago-area small businesses. I show that business owners bargain with senior lenders over the resolution of financial distress. Federal bankruptcy law is invoked only when bargaining fails. This tends to occur when there is more than one senior lender or when the debtor has defaulted on senior debt …
Challenges And Opportunities For New Lawyers, David Nersessian, Maureen A. O'Rourke
Challenges And Opportunities For New Lawyers, David Nersessian, Maureen A. O'Rourke
Faculty Scholarship
These are challenging times to be a lawyer. They may even be transformational times. Recent upheavals in financial, industrial and real estate markets have many lawyers (and clients) not only cutting back, but also fundamentally re-thinking their business models and the ways in which legal services are provided. Until very recently, hardly a day passed without news of law firm layoffs, deferred start dates, or canceled summer programs. In-house lawyers face substantial budget cuts at the very time their departments must navigate a broader range of legal and organizational challenges. And many government and public interest employers are dealing with …
Responsibility And The Negligence Standard, Joseph Raz
Responsibility And The Negligence Standard, Joseph Raz
Faculty Scholarship
The paper has dual aim: to analyse the structure of negligence, and to use it to offer an explanation of responsibility (for actions, omissions, consequences) in terms of the relations which must exist between the action (omission, etc.) and the agents powers of rational agency if the agent is responsible for the action. The discussion involves reflections on the relations between the law and the morality of negligence, the difference between negligence and strict liability, the role of excuses and the grounds of duties to pay damages.
A Tale Of Two Debtors: Bankruptcy Disparities By Race, Rory Van Loo
A Tale Of Two Debtors: Bankruptcy Disparities By Race, Rory Van Loo
Faculty Scholarship
This article offers the first quantitative evidence on race and bankruptcy. Minority debtors fare worse overall in bankruptcy — blacks are 40% and Hispanics 43% less likely than whites to receive a discharge in Chapter 13 after controlling for variables such as education, income, and employment. While the data do not allow for causal inference, Chapter 13 trustees were twice as likely to have made a motion to dismiss even against black debtors who ultimately completed their multi-year bankruptcy plans than against similar white debtors. The paper also indicates that a lack of attorney representation by minority debtors may make …
Debunking Blackstonian Copyright, Shyamkrishna Balganesh
Debunking Blackstonian Copyright, Shyamkrishna Balganesh
Faculty Scholarship
More than two decades ago, in attempting to make sense of the structural dissonance between copyright and free expression, the U.S. Supreme Court famously declared that copyright was intended to be “the engine of free expression.” Ironically, this characterization was at the time intended as little more than a rhetorical device. In that very case, the Court proceeded immediately thereafter to analyze copyright as a “marketable” property right and conclude that absent a showing of market failure, neither fair use nor the First Amendment would preclude a finding of infringement. Instead of injecting a new set of values into copyright …