Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Contracts Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 1 - 30 of 33

Full-Text Articles in Contracts

Corporate And Business Law, Laurence V. Parker Jr. Nov 2016

Corporate And Business Law, Laurence V. Parker Jr.

University of Richmond Law Review

Over the past three years, there have been a number of legislative changes to Virginia's business entity statutes. In Part I,this article highlights the changes to the Virginia Stock Corporation Act ("VSCA") and the Virginia Nonstock Corporation Act ('"VNSCA"). Part II highlights changes to the Limited Liability Company Act ("LLC Act"). Part III summarizes Virginia's new intrastate crowdfunding law. The Supreme Court of Virginia has also addressed several significant issues over the last three years, including the applicability of appraisal rights in a stepped transaction. Part IV reviews several of the significant cases during this period.


Foreign Nation Judgments - If State Law Provides For The Enforceability Of Foreign Judgments, The Judgment Is Enforceable Without Determination Of Whether The Arbitration Award On Which It Is Based Is Independently Enforceable Under The Convention On The Recognition And Enforcement Of Foreign Arbitral Awards, John W. Kindt Jul 2016

Foreign Nation Judgments - If State Law Provides For The Enforceability Of Foreign Judgments, The Judgment Is Enforceable Without Determination Of Whether The Arbitration Award On Which It Is Based Is Independently Enforceable Under The Convention On The Recognition And Enforcement Of Foreign Arbitral Awards, John W. Kindt

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.


Contracts - Arbitration Agreement - An Arbitration Agreement In An International Contract Is To Be Given Full Effect By Federal Courts Except Where Public Policy Or Equity Dictate Otherwise, James D. Dunham, J. S. Schuster Jul 2016

Contracts - Arbitration Agreement - An Arbitration Agreement In An International Contract Is To Be Given Full Effect By Federal Courts Except Where Public Policy Or Equity Dictate Otherwise, James D. Dunham, J. S. Schuster

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.


Foreign Investment Protection And Icsid Arbitration, Charles Vuylsteke Jun 2016

Foreign Investment Protection And Icsid Arbitration, Charles Vuylsteke

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.


Contracting Out Of Fiduciary Duties In Llcs: Delaware Will Lead, But Will Anyone Follow?, H. Justin Pace Jun 2016

Contracting Out Of Fiduciary Duties In Llcs: Delaware Will Lead, But Will Anyone Follow?, H. Justin Pace

Nevada Law Journal

No abstract provided.


Three Problems (And Two Solutions) In The Law Of Partnership Formation, Shawn Bayern Apr 2016

Three Problems (And Two Solutions) In The Law Of Partnership Formation, Shawn Bayern

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

This Article considers several foundational questions concerning the formation of general partnerships, a topic that has received little modern attention and that is governed largely by classical axioms rather than adaptive modern considerations. Its three main topics concern (1) the timing of partnership formation, (2) the aggregation of multiple distinct questions under the single heading of “partnership formation,” and (3) the rarely challenged proposition that general partners ought to be liable for partnership obligations, a doctrine that is surprisingly at odds with the rest of modern business-entity law.


Recent Supreme Court Employment Law Developments, Olati Johnson, Douglas D. Scherer Mar 2016

Recent Supreme Court Employment Law Developments, Olati Johnson, Douglas D. Scherer

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.


Dismantling Democracy: Common Sense And The Contract Jurisprudence Of Frank Easterbrook, Deborah Post Mar 2016

Dismantling Democracy: Common Sense And The Contract Jurisprudence Of Frank Easterbrook, Deborah Post

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.


Preface To The Gateway Thread, Deborah Post Mar 2016

Preface To The Gateway Thread, Deborah Post

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.


Where's The Sense In Hill V. Gateway 2000?: Reflections On The Visible Hand Of Norm Creation, Shubha Ghosh Mar 2016

Where's The Sense In Hill V. Gateway 2000?: Reflections On The Visible Hand Of Norm Creation, Shubha Ghosh

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.


Cognition And Common Sense In Contract Law, Beverly Horsburgh, Andrew Cappel Mar 2016

Cognition And Common Sense In Contract Law, Beverly Horsburgh, Andrew Cappel

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.


Common Sense, Contracts, And Law And Literature: Why Lawyers Should Read Henry James, Lenora Ledwon Mar 2016

Common Sense, Contracts, And Law And Literature: Why Lawyers Should Read Henry James, Lenora Ledwon

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.


Of Contract, Culture, And The Code: Judge Easterbrook And The Cheyenne Indians, John M. Conley Mar 2016

Of Contract, Culture, And The Code: Judge Easterbrook And The Cheyenne Indians, John M. Conley

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.


Common Sense And Contract Law: Fear Of A Normative Planet?, Thomas Joo Mar 2016

Common Sense And Contract Law: Fear Of A Normative Planet?, Thomas Joo

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.


The English East India Company And The Modern Corporation: Legacies, Lessons, And Limitations, Philip J. Stern Mar 2016

The English East India Company And The Modern Corporation: Legacies, Lessons, And Limitations, Philip J. Stern

Seattle University Law Review

The English East India Company was first chartered in 1600, endured until the late nineteenth century, and, in a clever act of corporate resurrection, has even recently returned as a global, upmarket retail outlet selling fine foods and commemorative coins. It has also endured in the popular imagination and culture, churning out heroes and villains alike in film, television, and video games. The script writer for a forthcoming BBC miniseries, in which the East India Company stars as the prime antagonist, even noted recently that the Company was like “the CIA, the NSA, and the biggest, baddest multinational corporation on …


Remarks: The Declining Role Of Outside Counsel In Enhancing Ethical Conduct By Corporations, Jed S. Rakoff Mar 2016

Remarks: The Declining Role Of Outside Counsel In Enhancing Ethical Conduct By Corporations, Jed S. Rakoff

Seattle University Law Review

Judge Rakoff’s remarks from the seventh annual Berle Symposium, held May 26–27, 2015 at Seattle University School of Law.


"Special," Vestigial, Or Visionary? What Banking Regulation Tells Us About The Corporation—And Vice Versa, Robert C. Hockett, Saule T. Omarova Mar 2016

"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 …


Corporations In The Flow Of Culture, Greg Urban Mar 2016

Corporations In The Flow Of Culture, Greg Urban

Seattle University Law Review

As an anthropologist, coming out of three decades of research among indigenous Brazilian populations, I naturally saw modern for-profit business corporations as tribes—the collective bearers of adaptive cultural know-how. They appeared to me to be the entities housing the culture needed to produce commodities, to trade commodities on the open market, or both. I was also, of course, aware of the legal concept of the corporation as fictive person capable of owning property and having standing in court cases, which I thought of as akin to the anthropological corporation insofar as both recognized the group as social actor. However, it …


What Might Replace The Modern Corporation? Uberization And The Web Page Enterprise, Gerald F. Davis Mar 2016

What Might Replace The Modern Corporation? Uberization And The Web Page Enterprise, Gerald F. Davis

Seattle University Law Review

The number of public corporations in the United States has been in decline for almost twenty years. Alternative forms of organization, from LLCs and benefit corporations to Linux and Wikipedia, provide robust competition to traditional corporations, while short-lived, project-based enterprises that assemble supply chains from available parts are increasingly cost effective. Yet our understanding of corporate governance has not kept pace with the new organization of the economy and we continue to treat the public corporation with dispersed ownership as the default form of doing business. Meanwhile, many of the corporations going public in recent years have abandoned traditional standards …


On The Existential Function Of The Social And The Limits Of Rationalist Accounts Of Human Behavior, Doug Mcadam Mar 2016

On The Existential Function Of The Social And The Limits Of Rationalist Accounts Of Human Behavior, Doug Mcadam

Seattle University Law Review

Rational choice theory has achieved widespread influence in a number of social science disciplines, most notably economics and political science. Given its prominent position within economics, it is not surprising that rational choice theory (and other rationalist perspectives) dominates theory and research on the corporation and decision-making by corporate actors. By contrast, however, the theory has failed to gain more than a toehold in sociology. Indeed, most sociologists are downright hostile to rational choice theory. When pressed to explain why, those in the discipline are very likely to complain that the perspective is “asociological”; that the theory posits an atomized …


The Theory Of Fields And Its Application To Corporate Governance, Neil Fligstein Mar 2016

The Theory Of Fields And Its Application To Corporate Governance, Neil Fligstein

Seattle University Law Review

My goal here is twofold. First, I want to introduce the theory of strategic action fields to the law audience. The main idea in field theory in sociology is that most social action occurs in social arenas where actors know one another and take one another into account in their action. Scholars use the field construct to make sense of how and why social orders emerge, reproduce, and transform. Underlying this formulation is the idea that a field is an ongoing game where actors have to understand what others are doing in order to frame their actions. Second, I want …


Benefit Corporations And Strategic Action Fields Or (The Existential Failing Of Delaware), Brett Mcdonnell Mar 2016

Benefit Corporations And Strategic Action Fields Or (The Existential Failing Of Delaware), Brett Mcdonnell

Seattle University Law Review

This Article analyzes the creation and growth of benefit corporations from the perspective of strategic action field theory in an attempt to shed some light upon both the subject and the methodology. It considers how the new legal field of benefit corporations responded to weaknesses in the existing fields of business and nonprofit corporations. Where major field participants such as directors, officers, employees, shareholders, or donors wish to pursue both financial and public-spirited goals that sometimes conflict without subordinating either type of goal to the other, both profit and nonprofit corporations may be unsatisfactory. Benefit corporations attempt not only to …


Agency Theory As Prophecy: How Boards, Analysts, And Fund Managers Perform Their Roles, Jiwook Jung, Frank Dobbin Mar 2016

Agency Theory As Prophecy: How Boards, Analysts, And Fund Managers Perform Their Roles, Jiwook Jung, Frank Dobbin

Seattle University Law Review

In 1976, Michael Jensen and William Meckling published a paper reintroducing agency theory that explained how the modern corporation is structured to serve dispersed shareholders. They purported to describe the world as it exists but, in fact, they described a utopia, and their piece was read as a blueprint for that utopia. We take a page from the sociology of knowledge to argue that, in the modern world, economic theories function as prescriptions for behavior as much as they function as descriptions. Economists and management theorists often act as prophets rather than scientists, describing the world not as it is, …


Culture In Corporate Law Or: A Black Corporation, A Christian Corporation, And A Māori Corporation Walk Into A Bar . . ., Gwendolyn Gordon Mar 2016

Culture In Corporate Law Or: A Black Corporation, A Christian Corporation, And A Māori Corporation Walk Into A Bar . . ., Gwendolyn Gordon

Seattle University Law Review

Recent Supreme Court cases have entrenched a new image of corporate civic identity, assigning to the corporate person rights and abilities based upon the cultural characteristics, social ties, civic commitments, and internal lives of the human beings involved in it. This vision of the corporation is exemplified in recent cases implicating a corporate right to engage in political speech (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission) and a right of corporations to be free of government interference regarding religious convictions (Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc.). Although much is being written about the soundness of the results in these cases and …


Notes On The Difficulty Of Studying The Corporation, Marina Welker Mar 2016

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 Mar 2016

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 …


Law And The Theory Of Fields, Frank Partnoy Mar 2016

Law And The Theory Of Fields, Frank Partnoy

Seattle University Law Review

The distinction between “material” and “existential” plays a prominent role in A Theory of Fields, and it played a prominent role in discussions at the Berle VII Symposium. In general, the authors advocated the importance of the ongoing use of social skills and the collaborative efforts to seek meaning, particularly in ways beyond the merely “material.” However, the extent to which rules might matter in these efforts was less clear. Overall, Fligstein and McAdam seek to use the concept of a strategic action field to develop a theory of social change and stability. Yet social change and stability are inextricably …


The Widening Scope Of Directors' Duties: The Increasing Impact Of Corporate Social And Environmental Responsibility, Thomas Clarke Mar 2016

The Widening Scope Of Directors' Duties: The Increasing Impact Of Corporate Social And Environmental Responsibility, Thomas Clarke

Seattle University Law Review

This Article concerns the widening scope of directors’ duties under the increasing impact of the pressures for corporate social and environmental responsibility. Narrow interpretations of directors’ duties that focus simply on the commercial success of the business and relegate other considerations to externalities are not tenable in the present context. The dawning realization of the global consequences of imminent climate change provides a series of inescapable challenges for business enterprises.


Bringing Continuity To Cryptocurrency: Commercial Law As A Guide To The Asset Categorization Of Bitcoin, Evan Hewitt Mar 2016

Bringing Continuity To Cryptocurrency: Commercial Law As A Guide To The Asset Categorization Of Bitcoin, Evan Hewitt

Seattle University Law Review

This Note will undertake to analyze bitcoin under the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) and the Internal Revenue Code (IRC)—two important sources of commercial law—to see whether any existing asset categories adequately protect bitcoin’s commercial viability. This Note will demonstrate that although commercial law dictates that bitcoin should—nay must—be regulated as a currency in order to sustain its existence, the very definition of currency seems to preclude that from happening. Therefore, this Note will recommend that we experiment with a new type of asset that receives currency-like treatment, specifically designed for cryptocurrencies, under which bitcoin can be categorized in order to …


Share And Share Dislike: The Rise Of Uber And Airbnb And How New York City Should Play Nice, Alexandra Jonas Jan 2016

Share And Share Dislike: The Rise Of Uber And Airbnb And How New York City Should Play Nice, Alexandra Jonas

Journal of Law and Policy

Uber and Airbnb are two companies in the emerging “sharing economy” that provide individuals with a means to become entrepreneurs and benefit from a laissez-faire business model. The problem, however, is that while the benefits to users are great, so too are the risks. The dangers of operating without restraint and circumventing existing law are not only potentially harmful to unapprised users, but also adversely affect the continued use of these businesses. Every aggrieved user complaint has the potential for a lawsuit and every violation creates an opportunity for penalties. Left over are attempts by the courts and city government …