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Full-Text Articles in Commercial Law

East Meets West: Introducing Sharia Into The Rules Governing International Arbitrations At The Bcdr-Aaa, Elana Levi-Tawil Jan 2011

East Meets West: Introducing Sharia Into The Rules Governing International Arbitrations At The Bcdr-Aaa, Elana Levi-Tawil

Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution

As the size and complexity of international commercial transactions grow, parties to international commercial transactions are increasingly utilizing Alternative Dispute Resolution ("ADR") methods, specifically international commercial arbitration, to resolve the disputes that arise. However, since international commercial players first began to use international commercial arbitration to resolve these disputes, transnational recognition and enforcement of foreign arbitral awards has been a major issue. Since 1958, the New York Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards (the "New York Convention"), an agreement executed by the United Nation's General Assembly, has vastly expanded the recognition and enforcement of foreign arbitral …


The Limited Case For Permitting Sme Procurement Preferences In The Wto Agreement On Government Procurement, John Linarelli Jan 2011

The Limited Case For Permitting Sme Procurement Preferences In The Wto Agreement On Government Procurement, John Linarelli

Scholarly Works

This is a chapter in the book, Sue Arrowsmith & Robert D. Anderson, The WTO Regime on Government Procurement: Challenge and Reform (Cambridge University Press, 2011). The chapter puts under scrutiny public procurement policies designed to benefit SMEs per se, as small or medium sized enterprises, and to evaluate whether the GPA (and hence possibly other trade agreements liberalizing procurement markets) should be more accommodating to these policies, even though these policies might restrict international trade. The chapter also evaluates whether the GPA should be more accommodating to policies designed to benefit firms controlled by individuals who belong to historically …


Global Issues In Commercial Law, Claude D. Rohwer, Kristen David Adams Jan 2010

Global Issues In Commercial Law, Claude D. Rohwer, Kristen David Adams

McGeorge School of Law Teaching Materials

This book seeks to provide an international perspective and also sufficient domestic context to facilitate a comparative-law discussion. The book includes staples of international commercial law, such as the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG) and international insolvency, but also items of particular contemporary concern, including clawbacks, microfinance, and religious objections to the payment of interest in commercial contracts.


See No Evil? Revisiting Early Visions Of The Social Responsibility Of Business: Adolf A. Berle’S Contribution To Contemporary Conversations, Erika George Jan 2010

See No Evil? Revisiting Early Visions Of The Social Responsibility Of Business: Adolf A. Berle’S Contribution To Contemporary Conversations, Erika George

Seattle University Law Review

Much corporate legal scholarship considers such fact patterns as beyond the scope of the discipline’s core concerns. Yet, increasingly, questions are asked concerning the scale and scope of modern corporate power. This Article will challenge the conventional understanding of what the core discipline of corporate law should encompass and argues that the failure to focus on precisely these sorts of factual scenarios involving allegations of corporate complicity in human rights violations and environmental degradation is misguided and short-sighted.


Neo-Brandeisianism And The New Deal: Adolf A. Berle, Jr., William O. Douglas, And The Problem Of Corporate Finance In The 1930s, Jessica Wang Jan 2010

Neo-Brandeisianism And The New Deal: Adolf A. Berle, Jr., William O. Douglas, And The Problem Of Corporate Finance In The 1930s, Jessica Wang

Seattle University Law Review

This essay revisits Adolf A. Berle, Jr. and The Modern Corporation and Private Property by focusing on the triangle of Berle, Louis D. Brandeis, and William O. Douglas in order to examine some of the underlying assumptions about law, economics, and the nature of modern society behind securities regulation and corporate finance in the 1930s. I explore Douglas and Berle’s academic and political relationship, the conceptual underpinnings of Brandeis, Berle, and Douglas’s critiques of modern finance, and the ways in which the two younger men—Berle and Douglas—ultimately departed from their role model, Brandeis.


International Commercial Surrogacy And Its Parties, 43 J. Marshall L. Rev. 1009 (2010), Margaret Ryznar Jan 2010

International Commercial Surrogacy And Its Parties, 43 J. Marshall L. Rev. 1009 (2010), Margaret Ryznar

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.


Foreword: In Berle’S Footsteps, Charles R.T. O'Kelley Jan 2010

Foreword: In Berle’S Footsteps, Charles R.T. O'Kelley

Seattle University Law Review

On the weekend of November 6–8, 2009, scholars from around the world gathered in Seattle for a symposium—In Berle’s Footsteps—celebrating the launch of the Adolf A. Berle, Jr. Center on Corporations, Law and Society. As founding director of the Berle Center, I described our undertaking: “It is with a profound sense of obligation to the legacy that has been entrusted to my care, that I announce the launching of the Adolf A. Berle, Jr. Center on Corporations, Law and Society. It is a privilege to follow in Berle’s footsteps.”


Opening Remarks, Chancellor William B. Chandler Iii Jan 2010

Opening Remarks, Chancellor William B. Chandler Iii

Seattle University Law Review

Law is, in many ways, a backwards-looking field. We litigate over facts that have already occurred, challenge deals that have already been signed, and apply rules of decision based on previously-established precedent or statutes already enacted. To the extent that this Center and the symposium reflect on Berle’s work, they too are an exercise in looking back. Indeed, some might say the establishment of a Center named in Berle’s honor is a monument to the past.


Revisiting Berle And Rethinking The Corporate Structure, Kelli A. Alces Jan 2010

Revisiting Berle And Rethinking The Corporate Structure, Kelli A. Alces

Seattle University Law Review

Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means painted what remains a defining portrait of corporate law. The separation of ownership and control they described and the agency costs it causes are still a central concern of the law of corporate governance. For that reason, Berle’s work is relevant nearly eighty years after its publication. Seemingly forgotten, however, is that Berle’s enduring description of the corporate structure was published before most of today’s corporate law was in place. His work preceded the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and even preceded the dominance of Delaware common law in …


Power Without Property, Still: Unger, Berle, And The Derivatives Revolution, Cristie Ford, Carol Liao Jan 2010

Power Without Property, Still: Unger, Berle, And The Derivatives Revolution, Cristie Ford, Carol Liao

Seattle University Law Review

We are in a time when the notion of property is in flux. The derivatives revolution has shattered the “atom of property” well beyond what was originally imagined in 1932 by Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means. This disaggregation has had fascinating, and often adverse, effects on corporate law and securities regulation. Moreover, the phenomenon has had the unexpected effect of permitting some parties that already possess considerable social, economic, and political power to accumulate even more.


The New Financial Assets: Separating Ownership From Control, Tamar Frankel Jan 2010

The New Financial Assets: Separating Ownership From Control, Tamar Frankel

Seattle University Law Review

In The Modern Corporation and Private Property, Adolf A. Berle and Gardiner Means wrote about the separation of ownership from control in corporations. They noted that the interests of the controlling directors and managers can diverge from those of the shareholder owners of the firm. . . . There are those who consider such a decoupling beneficial. Others express the same concern that Berle and Means have expressed. And depending on what one focuses on in viewing the pluses and minuses of these separations, one could reach different conclusions. I reach a number of conclusions. First, the separation of …


Then And Now: Professor Berle And The Unpredictable Shareholder, Jennifer G. Hill Jan 2010

Then And Now: Professor Berle And The Unpredictable Shareholder, Jennifer G. Hill

Seattle University Law Review

Shareholders, and the relationship between shareholders and management, lay at the heart of Professor Berle’s scholarship. The goal of this Article is to compare the image of shareholders emerging from The Modern Corporation and Private Property and the Berle/Dodd debate with a range of contemporary visions of the shareholder that underpin some international regulatory responses to recent financial debacles, from Enron to the current global financial crisis. As the Article dis- cusses, these recent developments in the era of financial crises have prompted a reevaluation of the traditional image of the shareholder—and the role of the shareholder in the modern …


Berle And The Entrepreneur, Charles R.T. O'Kelley Jan 2010

Berle And The Entrepreneur, Charles R.T. O'Kelley

Seattle University Law Review

In the first and last four chapters (“the Five Chapters”) of The Modern Corporation and Private Property, Adolf Berle, Jr. describes in sweeping terms a fundamental transformation of the American economy. . . . Writing more than ten years before Berle, another seminal scholar, Frank Knight . . . developed a theory of the entrepreneur as part of his larger effort to more carefully explain the theoretical underpinnings of a free-market economy. . . . Given Knight’s prominence and the fact that Knight apparently reached dramatically different conclusions than did Berle concerning the consequences flowing from separation of ownership …


The Birth Of Corporate Governance, Harwell Wells Jan 2010

The Birth Of Corporate Governance, Harwell Wells

Seattle University Law Review

Part I of this Article briefly examines the concept of “corporate governance” and argues for dating the concept’s origins to the debates of the 1920s. Part II then moves on to examine early scholarly and popular discussions of the separation of ownership and control. After surveying the historical developments that produced the recognizably modern corporate economy around the turn of the century, it examines early scholarly and popular discussions of the separation of ownership and control, focusing on three major thinkers, Louis D. Brandeis, Walter Lippmann, and Thorstein Veblen. It argues that, while each of these authors examined the separation …


Monitoring To Reduce Agency Costs: Examining The Behavior Of Independent And Non-Independent Boards, Anita Anand, Frank Milne, Lynnette Purda Jan 2010

Monitoring To Reduce Agency Costs: Examining The Behavior Of Independent And Non-Independent Boards, Anita Anand, Frank Milne, Lynnette Purda

Seattle University Law Review

Berle and Means’s analysis of the corporation—in particular, their view that those in control are not the owners of the corporation—raises questions about actions that corporations take to counter concerns regarding management’s influence. What mechanisms, if any, do corporations implement to balance the distribution of power in the corporation? To address this question, we analyze boards of directors’ propensity to voluntarily adopt recommended corporate governance practices. Because board independence is one way to enhance shareholders’ ability to monitor management, we probe whether firms with independent boards of directors (which we define as boards with either an independent chair or a …


Securities Intermediaries And The Separation Of Ownership From Control, Jill E. Fisch Jan 2010

Securities Intermediaries And The Separation Of Ownership From Control, Jill E. Fisch

Seattle University Law Review

The Modern Corporation & Private Property is a paradigm-shifting analysis of the modern corporation. The book is perhaps best known for the insights of Berle and Means about the separation of ownership from control and the consequences of that separation for the allocation of power within the corporation. The Berle and Means story focuses on the shareholder as the owner of the corporation. Berle and Means saw the mechanism of centralized management—in which the shareholder retains the economic interest but not the control rights associated with ownership—as threatening the conception of shareholder interests in terms of property rights. In particular, …


The Modern Corporation As Social Construction, Mark S. Mizruchi, Daniel Hirschman Jan 2010

The Modern Corporation As Social Construction, Mark S. Mizruchi, Daniel Hirschman

Seattle University Law Review

Classic works, Mark Mizruchi and Lisa Fein argued, share a particular fate. Authors often cite classic works without reading them—or without reading them carefully. . . . Yet perhaps no single work fits the above description better than one of the most important books on the large corporation ever published: Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means’s The Modern Corporation and Private Property. One can speculate that few works in the social sciences have been as often cited and as little read. As a consequence, we would expect The Modern Corporation to be a good candidate for either selective interpretation or …


Sales Or Plans: A Comparative Account Of The "New" Corporate Reorganization, Stephanie Ben-Ishai, Stephen J. Lubben Jan 2010

Sales Or Plans: A Comparative Account Of The "New" Corporate Reorganization, Stephanie Ben-Ishai, Stephen J. Lubben

Articles & Book Chapters

In this article, Professors Stephanie Ben-Ishai and Stephen Lubben explore the recent surge in popularity of “quick-sales,” essentially the pre-reorganization plan sale of an insolvent debtor’s assets. In their examination of quick sales, the authors use the recent examples of Lehman Brothers and Chrysler to illustrate the popularity and relevance of the pre-plan sales. The authors then move on to a more detailed discussion of the quick sales process in both Canada and the United States, isolating the differences and similarities between both countries, and weighing the costs and benefits of each approach. Ultimately, the authors argue that questions of …


Corporate Power In The Public Eye: Reassessing The Implications Of Berle’S Public Consensus Theory, Marc T. Moore, Antoine Rebérioux Jan 2010

Corporate Power In The Public Eye: Reassessing The Implications Of Berle’S Public Consensus Theory, Marc T. Moore, Antoine Rebérioux

Seattle University Law Review

We analyze Berle’s overall corporate governance project in accordance with what we see as its four core sub-themes: (A) the limitations of external market forces as a constraint on managerial decision-making power; (B) the desirability of internal (corporate) over external (market) actors in allocating corporate capital; (C) civil society and the public consensus as a continuous informal check on managerial decision-making power; and (D) shareholder democracy (as opposed to shareholder primacy or shareholder wealth maximization) as a socially instrumental institution. We seek to debunk the popular misconception that Berle’s early work was a defense of the orthodox shareholder primacy paradigm …


Tracking Berle’S Footsteps: The Trail Of The Modern Corporation’S Last Chapter, William W. Bratton, Michael L. Wachter Jan 2010

Tracking Berle’S Footsteps: The Trail Of The Modern Corporation’S Last Chapter, William W. Bratton, Michael L. Wachter

Seattle University Law Review

Readers game enough to work through all three hundred pages of The Modern Corporation and Private Property looking for insights on corporate law today encounter two, apparently contradictory, lines of thought. One line, set out in Books II and III, resonates comfortably with today’s shareholder-centered corporate legal theory. Here the book teaches that even as ownership and control have separated, managers should function as trustees for the shareholders and so should exercise their wide-ranging powers for the shareholders’ benefit. The other line of thought emerges in Books I and IV, where The Modern Corporation encases this shareholder trust model in …


Rethinking The Separation Of Ownership From Management In American History, Kenneth Lipartito, Yumiko Morii Jan 2010

Rethinking The Separation Of Ownership From Management In American History, Kenneth Lipartito, Yumiko Morii

Seattle University Law Review

In <em>The Modern Corporation and Private Property</em>, Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means would use AT&T as a prime example of what they saw as a dangerous new trend, the replacement of ownership-based capitalism with giant corporations controlled by a small group of propertyless managers. Indeed, AT&T became Berle and Means’ favorite example. . . . As we shall see, however, the claim that AT&T was a leading example of the separation of ownership from management is incomplete. More importantly, the common interpretation of Berle and Means’ work is mistaken, placing the emphasis incorrectly on the number of shareholders and reading …


Berle’S Vision Beyond Shareholder Interests: Why Investment Bankers Should Have (Some) Personal Liability, Claire Hill, Richard Painter Jan 2010

Berle’S Vision Beyond Shareholder Interests: Why Investment Bankers Should Have (Some) Personal Liability, Claire Hill, Richard Painter

Seattle University Law Review

This essay, published in a symposium on the work of Adolf Berle, approaches the Berle-Dodd debate from the perspective that corporate managers have responsibilities beyond pursuing the interests of shareholders. Stock based executive compensation, designed to align managers’ interests with those of shareholders, has, in the investment banking industry in particular, failed to avert, and may have caused, managers (in this case, bankers) to take excessive risks that in the present financial crisis inflicted great damage on creditors and on society as a whole. We describe here the broad outlines of a proposal that we will discuss in future publications …


Enumerating Old Themes? Berle’S Concept Of Ownership And The Historical Development Of English Company Law In Context, Lorraine E. Talbot Jan 2010

Enumerating Old Themes? Berle’S Concept Of Ownership And The Historical Development Of English Company Law In Context, Lorraine E. Talbot

Seattle University Law Review

This paper offers some tentative suggestions as to why Berle’s work has been read and interpreted so selectively in the United Kingdom. I suggest that this must be partly attributable to the historical developments in English company law that entrenched the notion of shareholder ownership claims. Specifically, unincorporated associations’ normative values—that members are owners and there is no distinction between small organizations with no share dispersal and large organizations with wide share dispersal—have a continuing influence on this entrenched notion of shareholder ownership claims. First, I provide an overview of the origins of English company law. Next, I address how …


Promoting Commercial Law Reform In Eastern Europe, Samuel Bufford Jan 2010

Promoting Commercial Law Reform In Eastern Europe, Samuel Bufford

Faculty Scholarship

This article is my account of what I did in a decade of advising governments and teaching judicial seminars on commercial law matters in Central and Eastern Europe, beginning in 1991. This article contains my individual reflections on more than a dozen visits to developing countries in Central and Eastern Europe to advise governments and to educate their judges, and several visits of judges from some of those countries to the United States. In many ways, my experiences are typical of United States judges who have done the same kind of work in developing countries. In some ways, my experiences …


Information Disclosure, Risk Trading And The Nature Of Derivative Instruments: From Common Law Perspective, Christopher Chao-Hung Chen Mar 2009

Information Disclosure, Risk Trading And The Nature Of Derivative Instruments: From Common Law Perspective, Christopher Chao-Hung Chen

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

This paper explores issues of pre-contractual disclosure for derivative instruments, of which this paper describes as contracts to trade risks, in the UK and US. While there is no general duty of disclosure in common law, this paper focuses on whether there should be a duty of disclosure for derivative instruments by comparing with securities law and insurance law. This paper argues that mandatory disclosure in the securities market cannot be extended to exchange-traded futures contracts (save where securities are involved) because of the nature of securities. In addition, this paper argues that derivative instruments, though similar to insurance in …


Buying Or Selling A Horse In France: An Introduction To The Legal Context Proposed To The Attention Of U.S. Equine Lawyers, Philippe E. Corruble Jan 2009

Buying Or Selling A Horse In France: An Introduction To The Legal Context Proposed To The Attention Of U.S. Equine Lawyers, Philippe E. Corruble

Kentucky Journal of Equine, Agriculture, & Natural Resources Law

No abstract provided.


China's Restructured Commercial Banks: Nomenklatura, Nicholas C. Howson Jan 2009

China's Restructured Commercial Banks: Nomenklatura, Nicholas C. Howson

Book Chapters

In the wake of the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997-98, and accelerating after 2003 the People's Republic of China (PRC or China) has implemented an ambitious reform program directed at the commanding heights of what once pa ed for China ' financial system-the large state-owned and state-managed commercial banks. Contrary to a good deal of advice offered by policy and finance specialists, China did not liquidate or fully privatize these institutions. Instead, the PRC sought to avoid the significant social (and no doubt political) cost associated with liquidation, or real privatization, by instead changing (1) the internal dynamics of, and …


The Boundary Of Futures Regulation: From U.K. And U.S. Judgments Regarding Commodity Forward Contracts, Christopher Chao-Hung Chen Jan 2009

The Boundary Of Futures Regulation: From U.K. And U.S. Judgments Regarding Commodity Forward Contracts, Christopher Chao-Hung Chen

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

No abstract provided.


Commerce In Religion, Bernadette Meyler Jan 2009

Commerce In Religion, Bernadette Meyler

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

As this Symposium Article contends, religion increasingly overlaps with the commercial sphere, and courts are obligated to determine whether or not to adopt an entirely hands-off approach simply because the specter of religion lurks on the horizon. Whereas the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights tends to accept its member states' separation of commercial elements out from the protections more generally accorded to religion, the U.S. Supreme Court has treated the two spheres as overlapping. To the extent that each court does consider religious transactions in terms of commercial relations, each also arrives at a very different conception …


Analytical Jurisprudence And The Concept Of Commercial Law, John Linarelli Jan 2009

Analytical Jurisprudence And The Concept Of Commercial Law, John Linarelli

Scholarly Works

Commercial lawyers working across borders know that globalization has changed commercial law. To think of commercial law as only the law of states is to have an inadequate understanding of the norms governing commercial transactions. Some have argued for a transnational conception of commercial law, but their grounds of justification have been unpersuasive, often grounded on claims about the common content among national legal systems. Legal positivism is a rich literature on the concept of a legal system and the validity conditions for rules in legal systems, but it has not been used to understand legal order outside or beyond …