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Articles 211 - 237 of 237
Full-Text Articles in Agency
Notes On The Difficulty Of Studying The Corporation, Marina Welker
Notes On The Difficulty Of Studying The Corporation, Marina Welker
Seattle University Law Review
In the award-winning documentary The Corporation, public intellectuals and activists characterize corporations as “externalizing machines,” “doom machines,” “persons with no moral conscience,” and “monsters trying to devour as much profit as possible at anyone’s expense.” In other footage, people on the street personify corporations: “General Electric: a kind old man with lots of stories;” “Nike: young, energetic;” “Microsoft: aggressive;” “McDonald’s: young, outgoing, enthusiastic;” “Monsanto: immaculately dressed;” “Disney: goofy;” “The Body Shop: deceptive.” The documentary, like screenwriter and legal scholar Joel Bakan’s book The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, imparts dissonant messages about corporations. On the one hand, …
The Rhetoric Of Negative Externalities, Claire A. Hill
The Rhetoric Of Negative Externalities, Claire A. Hill
Seattle University Law Review
Negative externalities are costs imposed on third parties. The paradigmatic example is pollution. A firm manufactures a product that generates toxic waste, and dumps the waste; society pays for the associated cost, including, for instance, the community’s health problems caused by the waste. Profit is supposed to measure the firm’s revenues in excess of the associated costs; because this cost is not included, the firm’s profits are higher than they should be, and there is more pollution than there should be. What is privately optimal diverges from what is socially optimal. The concept of negative externalities is intuitively appealing. It …
"Special," Vestigial, Or Visionary? What Banking Regulation Tells Us About The Corporation—And Vice Versa, Robert C. Hockett, Saule T. Omarova
"Special," Vestigial, Or Visionary? What Banking Regulation Tells Us About The Corporation—And Vice Versa, Robert C. Hockett, Saule T. Omarova
Seattle University Law Review
A remarkable yet seldom noted set of parallels exists between modern U.S. bank regulation, on the one hand, and what used to be garden-variety American corporate law, on the other hand. For example, just as bank charters are matters not of right but of conditional privilege even today, so were all corporate charters not long ago. Just as chartered banks are authorized to engage only in limited, enumerated activities even today, so were all corporations restricted not long ago. And just as banks are subject to strict capital regulation even today, so were all corporations not long ago. In this …
Three Out Of Four Economists Recommend Raising The Minimum Wage! A Closer Look At The Debate Surrounding Seattle's Minimum Wage Ordinance, Erica Bergmann
Three Out Of Four Economists Recommend Raising The Minimum Wage! A Closer Look At The Debate Surrounding Seattle's Minimum Wage Ordinance, Erica Bergmann
Seattle University Law Review
This Note will discuss the implications of a high minimum wage by examining the debate around the Seattle Ordinance with a particular focus on the IFA lawsuit. To analyze the possible impacts of the Seattle Ordinance, current and historical arguments both in support of and in opposition to minimum wage laws are considered. This Note ultimately concludes that the U.S. District Court rightly denied the IFA’s motion for a preliminary injunction, which would have frustrated Seattle’s experiment before it began. Seattle’s plan to implement a $15 minimum wage, and similar experiments, should be permitted to proceed because the problem of …
Cgmp Violations Should Not Be Used As A Basis For Fca Actions Absent Fraud, Kyle Faget
Cgmp Violations Should Not Be Used As A Basis For Fca Actions Absent Fraud, Kyle Faget
Seattle University Law Review
Since Congress amended the False Claims Act (FCA) in 1986, the statute has evolved into a seemingly boundless weapon for enforcing other statutes and regulations applicable to every industry that accepts any form of government funding. Use of the FCA by the Department of Justice (DOJ) and by private citizens bringing actions on behalf of the U.S. government to enforce other statutes and regulations is particularly evident in the field of health care. The FCA has been utilized in actions where the allegations include off-label promotion of drugs, kickbacks, and violations of current good manufacturing practices (cGMPs) by linking the …
Ironic Simplicity: Why Shaken Baby Syndrome Misdiagnoses Should Result In Automatic Reimbursement For The Wrongly Accused, Jay Simmons
Seattle University Law Review
Shaken baby syndrome (SBS)’s shortcomings include the debatable science behind SBS theory and diagnosis—the questioning of which has grown more vociferous—and the arguably biased, discriminatory treatment of the accused. Professor Deborah Tuerkheimer notes that the evolving SBS skepticism and contentious debate has resulted in "chaos" in many SBS adjudications and within the medical and biomechanical fields, with the same SBS proponents and opponents continually crusading for and clashing over their beliefs. The issues surrounding the medical and biomechanical components of SBS diagnoses have been repeatedly examined and discussed, and are not the focus of this Note. This Note recounts those …
Mind Control: Firms And The Production Of Ideas, Anthony J. Casey
Mind Control: Firms And The Production Of Ideas, Anthony J. Casey
Seattle University Law Review
The central questions for economic theories of the firm concern how the production of a good is organized (in the market or within a firm) and why that organization prevails. Derivative to these questions, legal scholars ask how the law affects and is affected by any particular organizational structure. Emerging literature looks at these questions in connection with the law of intellectual property. The prevailing theories in that literature focus primarily, though not exclusively, on patent law and generally adopt a property-rights theory of the firm. Those theories, focusing on residual control and hold-up problems, have shown that as patent …
Theories Of The Firm And Judicial Uncertainty, Andrew S. Gold
Theories Of The Firm And Judicial Uncertainty, Andrew S. Gold
Seattle University Law Review
There is no necessary connection between academics’ theories of the firm and judicial theories of the firm. Economists and legal scholars may adopt one theory of the firm, and courts may adopt another. We might even predict this result. Judges are not economists, and as increasingly sophisticated theories of the firm emerge in the academic literature, judges are not well-positioned to keep pace with the evolving accounts. Indeed, judges may reasonably choose to adopt no theory at all. Given these premises, this Essay explores the relationship between academically developed theories of the firm and corporate legal doctrine. Legal scholars who …
Coase, Knight, And The Nexus-Of-Contracts Theory Of The Firm: A Reflection On Reification, Reality, And The Corporation As Entrepreneur Surrogate, Charles R.T. O'Kelley
Coase, Knight, And The Nexus-Of-Contracts Theory Of The Firm: A Reflection On Reification, Reality, And The Corporation As Entrepreneur Surrogate, Charles R.T. O'Kelley
Seattle University Law Review
Working within the nexus-of-contracts model, scholars have struggled to develop a rhetorical paradigm that accurately predicts or describes corporation law. This difficulty flows from twin flaws in the currently dominant model—the equation of the corporation and the firm and the exclusion of the entrepreneur. Coase and his progenitor, Frank Knight, saw the firm as having an “inside” and an “outside” and a distinct central actor—the entrepreneur. Contrary to the allocation of resources by the unconscious processes of the market fundamental to the perfect competition model favored by free-market, nexus-of-contracts theorists, Knight and Coase looked inside the firm and identified the …
Salomon Redux: The Moralities Of Business, Allan C. Hutchinson, Ian Langlois
Salomon Redux: The Moralities Of Business, Allan C. Hutchinson, Ian Langlois
Seattle University Law Review
In this Essay, we revisit the Salomon case and its related litigation not only from a legal standpoint but also from a broader moral perspective. 4 In the second Part, we offer a detailed context for and account of the Salomon litigation. The third Part focuses on the historical roots of the corporation and the judicial arguments in Salomon. In the fourth Part, we explore the moral and legal consequences of the Salomon decision. Throughout the Essay, our ambition will be not only to give the Salomon case a more contextual and richer spin but also to tackle the relationship …
A Shallow Harbor And A Cold Horizon: The Deceptive Promise Of Modern Agency Law For The Theory Of The Firm, David A. Westbrook
A Shallow Harbor And A Cold Horizon: The Deceptive Promise Of Modern Agency Law For The Theory Of The Firm, David A. Westbrook
Seattle University Law Review
Modern agency law—the consensual agreement of one person to work for and under the control of another—has been widely used to provide a general framework for understanding a great deal of business law. Agency law concepts can be used to frame pedagogical, scholarly, institutional, and even political discourses. In so doing, modern agency law addresses concerns about the institution of the corporation, generally by reference to contract: institutions are created out of essentially consensual, and hence justifiable, relationships among autonomous individuals. So modern agency law is more than a “theory” of the firm in the narrow sense of theory; modern …
The Future Of Socialism, Robert Paul Wolff
The Future Of Socialism, Robert Paul Wolff
Seattle University Law Review
An unpromising title, this, in the seventh year of the third millennium of the Common Era; rather like “Recent Developments in Ptolemaic Astronomy” or “Betamax—a Technology Whose Time Has Come.” My grandfather’s dream, the faith of my younger days, has turned to ashes. And yet, I remain persuaded that Karl Marx has something important to teach us about the world in which we live today. In what follows, I propose to take as my text a famous statement from Marx’s A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy1—a sort of preliminary sketch of Das Kapital2—and see what it can tell …
Strengthening Investment In Public Corporations Through The Uncorporation, Kelli A. Alces
Strengthening Investment In Public Corporations Through The Uncorporation, Kelli A. Alces
Seattle University Law Review
We cannot completely overcome the difficulties caused by the separation of ownership and control. In The Modern Corporation and Private Property, Adolf A. Berle and Gardiner Means focused our attention on what was then a relatively new phenomenon: widely dispersed public shareholding.1 They marveled at how, for the first time in the history of the American economy, the owners of assets had so little to do with the management of those assets, and managers had so much power over so much health that did not belong to them.2 Berle and Means described what we now call the Berle−Means corporation, the …
Hired To Invent Vs. Work Made For Hire: Resolving The Inconsistency Among Rights Of Corporate Personhood, Authorship, And Inventorship, Sean M. O'Connor
Hired To Invent Vs. Work Made For Hire: Resolving The Inconsistency Among Rights Of Corporate Personhood, Authorship, And Inventorship, Sean M. O'Connor
Seattle University Law Review
Corporations have long held core aspects of legal personhood, such as rights to own and divest property and to sue and be sued. U.S. copyright law allows corporations to be authors while U.S. patent law does not allow them to be inventors. To be sure, both copyright law and patent law allow corporations to own copyrights and patents as assignees. But only copyright law, through its work-made-for-hire doctrine, provides for the nonnatural person of the corporation to “be” the author in an almost metaphysical sense. Under patent law, the natural-person inventors must always be listed in the patent documents, even …
The Evolution Of The American Corporation And Global Organizational Biodiversity, Ugo Pagano
The Evolution Of The American Corporation And Global Organizational Biodiversity, Ugo Pagano
Seattle University Law Review
The Evolution of the Modern Corporate Structure has been one of the most influential chapters of The Modern Corporation & Private Property. But Berle and Means’s superb analysis is framed in the American context and cannot be easily generalized to other experiences. Their corporate model arose in a democratic country where “production engineers” commanded more respect than financiers and capitalist dynasties. Other countries followed different organizational paths, characterized by different institutional complementarities between labor and financial markets that generated “concentrated equilibria” different from the American “dispersed equilibrium.” This Article argues that the divide can be traced to the different aristocratic …
Consumer Lock-In And The Theory Of The Firm, David G. Yosifon
Consumer Lock-In And The Theory Of The Firm, David G. Yosifon
Seattle University Law Review
The advent of the modern corporation separated not only ownership from control but also production from consumption. The agency problem that arose between owners and managers of firms also emerged between producers and consumers. Just as corporations needed to lock-in capital to sustain large-scale operations, so too did they need to lock-in consumers to justify and reduce the risks of asset-specific investment. Large corporate operations succeeded because they solved both the capital and consumer lock-in challenges. This Article explores ways in which modern consumers, like shareholders, can find themselves in a very real sense locked into the corporations with which …
The Post-Revolutionary Period In Corporate Law: Returning To The Theory Of The Firm, Matthew T. Bodie
The Post-Revolutionary Period In Corporate Law: Returning To The Theory Of The Firm, Matthew T. Bodie
Seattle University Law Review
The consensus on corporate law theory has narrowed the field’s doctrinal and methodological foci. Although the vibrancy of shareholder primacy has at times been called into question as a matter of law, both boardrooms and courts have taken the normative call for shareholder wealth maximization increasingly to heart. There is little doubt that the revolution has not only substantially affected legal theory but also legislation, court decisions, and corporate behavior. It achieved a level of success unusual for an academic discipline; it not only transformed the field but also the world. We now find ourselves in the post-revolutionary period. For …
The Citizen Shareholder: Modernizing The Agency Paradigm To Reflect How And Why A Majority Of Americans Invest In The Market, Anne Tucker
Seattle University Law Review
This Article examines corporate law from the perspective of personal investment and discusses the economic realities of modern investments in order to understand the role of shareholders within the agency paradigm. Corporate law, its scholars, and suggested reforms traditionally focus on the internal organization of the corporation. For example, agency principles inform corporate law by acknowledging a potential conflict of interest between the managers and shareholders of a corporation. Reforms such as increased shareholder voting rights and proxy access, which seek to give shareholders a more direct means to make their interests known to managers, illustrate corporate law’s focus on …
Law And Legal Theory In The History Of Corporate Responsibility: Corporate Personhood, Lyman Johnson
Law And Legal Theory In The History Of Corporate Responsibility: Corporate Personhood, Lyman Johnson
Seattle University Law Review
This Article, the first of a multipart project, addresses the nature of corporate personhood, one area where law has played a central role in the history of corporate responsibility in the United States.1 The treatment will be illustrative, not exhaustive. Consistent with the theme of the larger project, the Article serves to make the simple but important point that a full historical understanding of corporate responsibility requires an appreciation of the law’s significant, if ultimately limited, contribution to the longstanding American quest for more responsible corporate conduct. On one hand, the spheres of law and corporate responsibility, although clearly complementary, …
Nevada And The Market For Corporate Law, Bruce H. Kobayashi, Larry E. Ribstein
Nevada And The Market For Corporate Law, Bruce H. Kobayashi, Larry E. Ribstein
Seattle University Law Review
Berle and Means’s view that managers rather than shareholders control our largest corporations finds important expression in William Cary’s famous article arguing that managers have led shareholders on a “race to the bottom” whose finish line is Delaware. These views, in turn, support supplanting state corporation law with federal regulation of corporate governance. Concerns about a race to the bottom lately focus on Nevada, which seeks to be Delaware’s first real competitor for out-of-state firms in the national incorporation market. Evidence suggests that Nevada’s strategy is to raise tax revenues by offering a significantly laxer corporate law than Delaware. We …
We Don’T Need You Anymore: Corporate Social Responsibilities, Executive Class Interests, And Solving Mizruchi And Hirschman’S Paradox, Richard Marens
We Don’T Need You Anymore: Corporate Social Responsibilities, Executive Class Interests, And Solving Mizruchi And Hirschman’S Paradox, Richard Marens
Seattle University Law Review
Previously, Northern Italian, Dutch, and then English entrepreneurs had dominated global trade in turn, and when after a century or so their respective hegemonies began to show cracks, each group refocused its efforts in the service of tapping already-accumulated wealth through financial speculation and, in the process, also financed the rise of their successors.20 If Dahrendorf was correct, and American capital was managed during the era of American industrial dominance by “a class of career bureaucrats, whose primary loyalty lay with their employer rather than with a class of property owners,”21 there are good reasons to believe that that has …
Rethinking The Nature Of The Firm: The Corporation As A Governance Object, Peer Zumbansen
Rethinking The Nature Of The Firm: The Corporation As A Governance Object, Peer Zumbansen
Seattle University Law Review
This Article attempts to bridge two discourses—corporate governance and contract governance. Regarding the latter, a group of scholars has recently set out to develop a more comprehensive research agenda to explore the governance dimensions of contractual relations, highlighting the potential of contract theory to develop a more encompassing theory of social and economic transactions. While a renewed interest in the contribution of economic theory for a concept of contract governance drives one dimension of this research, another part of this undertaking has been to move contract theory closer to theories of social organization. Here, these scholars emphasize the “social” or …
The Treatment Of Nominee Corporations For Income Tax Purposes, Norton L. Steuben
The Treatment Of Nominee Corporations For Income Tax Purposes, Norton L. Steuben
Seattle University Law Review
This Article traces the development of the nonentity and agency approaches to the treatment of nominee corporations. The nonentity approach had a short lifespan and is of little use today. The agency approach, in contrast, experienced a period of development that resulted in a complex six-factor test that was employed in at least three circuits. When a conflict in the application of the six-factor test developed, the Supreme Court in Commissioner v. Bollinger enunciated a different approach and established a new, more workable standard. This Article explores the limitations of that standard as well as its practical application for planners.
Does The Agency Die When The Principal Becomes Mentally Incapacitated?, W. Alfred Mukatis
Does The Agency Die When The Principal Becomes Mentally Incapacitated?, W. Alfred Mukatis
Seattle University Law Review
This Article explores the status of an agency when a competent principal enters into an agency relationship and thereafter becomes mentally incapacitated. On the one hand, does the status of the agency depend on factors relating to the principal such as type, length, or permanence of the incapacity? For instance, is the status of the agency the same when a principal lapses into a coma as it is when a conscious principal is incapacitated because of a mental disease such as schizophrenia? If in a coma, how does the length of the coma affect the status of the agency? Is …
Impacts Of The Pacific Northwest Electric Power Planning And Conservation Act On The Development Of Energy Resources In The Pacific Northwest: An Analysis Of The Resource Acquisition Priority Scheme, Preston Michie
Seattle University Law Review
This article discusses how the Pacific Northwest Electric Power Planning and Conservation Act may affect the region's choice of resources to construct. Potential choices range from conventional resources such as coal and nuclear to renewable resources such as geothermal, biomass, wave, tidal, solar, and wind. In addition, conservation and cogeneration are now viable energy alternatives. This discussion focuses on PNEPPCA's resource acquisition priority scheme and provides an overview of the incentives and disincentives which may influence the resource selection process. Rather than predicting which resources the region's utilities may ultimately construct, this article analyzes the legal barriers proponents of particular …
The Pacific Northwest Electric Power Planning And Conservation Act-Solution For A Regional Dilemma, Henry M. Jackson
The Pacific Northwest Electric Power Planning And Conservation Act-Solution For A Regional Dilemma, Henry M. Jackson
Seattle University Law Review
For the past four decades, the Bonneville Power Administration(BPA) has played a singular and powerful role in developing the Northwest regional electric power system, and indirectly in the regional economy that system supports. The federal government's decision during the first half of this century to develop multi-purpose water resource projects led to the construction of many dams, most of them in the Western United States, most built since the mid-1930s, and most including hydroelectric generation. As we enter the 1980s, fundamental changes have occurred. Historically, BPA has had sufficient resources to sell power to any utility or other customer in …
The Pacific Northwest Electric Power Planning And Conservation (And Thermal Power Plant Relief) Act, Ralph Cavanagh
The Pacific Northwest Electric Power Planning And Conservation (And Thermal Power Plant Relief) Act, Ralph Cavanagh
Seattle University Law Review
Supporters of the proposed Pacific Northwest Electric Power Planning and Conservation Act have not produced satisfactory answers to two fundamental questions. First, why does the region require significant new incentives for the construction of nuclear and coal-fired power plants? Second, why must Congress link urgently needed encouragement of conservation and renewable energy measures to the creation of such incentives?