Law and Economics Commons^™

The Future Of The Agricultural Industry – Is Blockchain A New Beginning?, Ryan Bisel

Seattle University Law Review

As we advance into a digital era, we begin to depend on technological innovations to rapidly help develop and update processes and methods within different industries. Blockchain technology—popularized by cryptocurrency—is slowly making its debut in the agricultural supply chain. Implementing a blockchain requirement for suppliers would be beneficial because it would allow agricultural suppliers and distributors to track their products in a more efficient manner. However, there are four potential legal issues that are foreseeable: (1) preemption, (2) overlapping regulatory authority, (3) applying current legal rules to new technology, and (4) contracting. This Note will specifically focus on issues of …

The Deans' Roundtable, Dean Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Dean Danielle Conway, Dean Tamara Lawson, Dean Mario Barnes, Dean L. Song Richardson

Seattle University Law Review

The Deans' Roundtable.

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents.

Accountability For Employers Or Independence For Contractors? Accomplishing Ab5’S Labor Classification Goals In The Gig Economy, Chelsea Rauch

Seattle University Law Review

U.S. employment law traditionally classifies workers as either employees or independent contractors; each worker under this traditional legal rubric can only be classified as one or the other—there can be no ambiguity or overlap. An employee is generally defined as “a person hired for a regular, continuous period to perform work for an employer who maintains control over both the service details and the final product.” In contrast, an independent contractor is generally defined as “a worker who performs services for others, usually under contract, while at the same time retaining economic independence and complete control over both the method …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents and Special Thanks.

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

The Market As Negotiation, Rebecca E. Hollander-Blumoff, Matthew T. Bodie

Scholarship@WashULaw

Our economic system counts on markets to allocate most of our societal resources. The law often treats markets as discrete entities, with a native intelligence and structure that provides clear answers to questions about prices and terms. In reality, of course, markets are much messier—they are agglomerations of negotiations by individual parties. Despite theoretical and empirical work on markets and on negotiation, legal scholars have largely overlooked the connection between the two areas in considering how markets are constructed and regulated.

This Article brings together scholarship in law, economics, sociology, and psychology to better understand the role that negotiation plays …

Obsolescence: The Intractable Production Problem In Contract Law, Alan Schwartz, Robert E. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

Contract law has long suffered from an institutional problem: Which legal institution can best create an efficient law for commercial contracts that can overcome "obsolescence” – the persistence of rules that only solve yesterday’s contracting problems? Until the early 20th century, contract law was largely created by common law courts. The law's default rules were efficient when created and courts updated them as commerce changed. But there were few rules and the common law process is slow. In response, the 20th century saw public and private lawmaking bodies enact commercial statutes in discrete legal areas such as secured credit, commercial …

Investigating The Contract Production Process, Stephen J. Choi, Robert E. Scott, G. Mitu Gulati

Faculty Scholarship

Contract law and theory have traditionally paid little attention to the processes by which contracts are made. Instead, contracts among sophisticated parties are assumed to be full articulations of the desires of the parties; whatever the process, the outcome is the same. This article compares sovereign debt contracts from US and UK firms, with different production processes, that are trying to do the same thing under very similar legal regimes. We find that that the production process likely matters quite a bit to the final form that contracts take.

Directors’ Duty Of Care In Times Of Financial Distress Following The Global Epidemic Crisis, Leon Yehuda Anidjar

Brooklyn Journal of International Law

The global COVID-19 pandemic is causing the large-scale end of life and severe human suffering globally. This massive public health crisis created a significant economic crisis and is reflected in a recession of global production and the collapse of confidence in the functions of markets. Corporations and boards of directors around the world are required to design specific strategies to tackle the negative consequences of the crisis. This is especially true for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that suffered tremendous economic loss, and their continued existence as ongoing concern is under considerable risk. Given these uncertain financial times, this Article …

The Modern Pay For Play Model: Laws That Protect Student-Athletes' Fundamental Right To Commercialze Their Names, Images, And Likeness, Paul A. Schwabe Jr.

Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law

In O’Bannon v. NCAA, the United States District Court for the Northern District of California entered a permanent injunction against the National Collegiate Athletic Association enjoining the collegiate sports governing body from enforcing limits on student-athlete compensation derived from the use of their name, images, and likenesses rights. The court concluded that NCAA rules unreasonably restrained trade in violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, however, neither the court nor the NCAA laid out a framework for lawfully implementing these new economic rights to student-athletes. Since that ruling, only one state’s legislature, California, has attempted to pass legislation to prevent the …

The Behavioral Effects Of (Unenforceable) Contracts, Evan Starr, Jj Prescott, Norman Bishara

Articles

Do contracts influence behavior independent of the law governing their enforceability? We explore this question in the context of employment noncompetes using nationally representative data for 11,500 labor force participants. We show that noncompetes are associated with reductions in employee mobility and changes in the direction of that mobility (i.e., toward noncompetitors) in both states that do and do not enforce noncompetes. Decomposing mobility into job offer generation and acceptance, we detect no evidence of differences in job search, recruitment, or offer activity associated with noncompetes. Rather, we find that employees with noncompetes—even in states that do not enforce them—frequently …

Enough Is As Good As A Feast, Noah C. Chauvin

Seattle University Law Review

Ipse Dixit, the podcast on legal scholarship, provides a valuable service to the legal community and particularly to the legal academy. The podcast’s hosts skillfully interview guests about their legal and law-related scholarship, helping those guests communicate their ideas clearly and concisely. In this review essay, I argue that Ipse Dixit has made a major contribution to legal scholarship by demonstrating in its interview episodes that law review articles are neither the only nor the best way of communicating scholarly ideas. This contribution should be considered “scholarship,” because one of the primary goals of scholarship is to communicate new ideas.

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

Class Actions And Private Antitrust Litigation, Albert H. Choi, Kathryn E. Sprier

Law & Economics Working Papers

When firms collude and charge supra-competitive prices, consumers can bring antitrust lawsuits against the firms. When the litigation cost is low, firms accept the cost as just another cost of doing business, whereas when the cost is high, the firms lower the price to deter litigation. Class action is modeled as a mechanism that allows plaintiffs and attorneys to obtain economies of scale. We show that class actions, and the firms' incentive to block them, may or may not be socially desirable. Agency problems, settlement, fee-shifting, treble damages, public enforcement, and sustaining collusion through repeat play are also considered.

China's Belt And Road Initiative: An Examination Of Project Financing Issues And Alternatives, August Nelson Dinwiddie

Brooklyn Journal of International Law

In 2013, China launched the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to realize the vision of revitalizing the ancient Silk Road. The BRI can be characterized as a vast infrastructure development initiative spanning over sixty-five countries that total almost half of the world's GDP. Since its launch, BRI projects have primarily been financed through commercial loans provided by Chinese banks, creating concerns over debt sustainability. At the top of these concerns are fears over whether participation in the BRI will lead to a "debt-trap scenaro." Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) provide an alternative financing option. In project development under a PPP, particularly the …

Blockchain & Smart Contract Technology: Alternative Incentives For Legal Contract Innovation, Erika J. Nash

BYU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Property Rights In Children, Barry E. Adler, Alexis A. Alvarez

Notre Dame Law Review

In 1978, Dr. Elisabeth Landes and then-Professor, later-Judge Richard Posner, published The Economics of the Baby Shortage. The article openly discussed how economic analysis can address the allocation of babies available for adoption. The ideas expressed in the article were widely denounced as an inhumane commodification of children, something tolerable only in the twisted minds of academic authors. Despite the backlash, an odd thing happened in the more than four decades since Landes and Posner wrote on this topic: their ideas began to take hold. Today, almost all states in the United States permit, in some form, the contractual …

The Impossibility Doctrine In Commercial Contracts: An Empirical Analysis, Uri Benoliel

Brooklyn Law Review

The impossibility doctrine – under which a contracting party has no duty to perform the agreement if performance thereof is rendered impossible – is a basic building block of U.S. contract law. The prevailing law-and-economics analysis of this doctrine suggests that when contract performance becomes impossible, courts should assign the contractual risk of non-performance to the superior risk bearer, i.e., to the party that can bear said risk at least cost. This article empirically tests, for the first time, the economic theory of the impossibility doctrine. It first hypothesizes that most sophisticated parties to commercial contracts are unlikely to adopt …

Fmc Corp. V. Shoshone-Bannock Tribes, Seth T. Bonilla

Public Land & Resources Law Review

In 1998, FMC Corporation agreed to submit to the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes’ permitting processes, including the payment of fees, for clean-up work required as part of consent decree negotiations with the Environmental Protection Agency. Then, in 2002, FMC refused to pay the Tribes under a permitting agreement entered into by both parties, even though the company continued to store hazardous waste on land within the Shoshone-Bannock Fort Hall Reservation in Idaho. FMC challenged the Tribes’ authority to enforce the $1.5 million permitting fees first in tribal court and later challenged the Tribes’ authority to exercise civil regulatory and adjudicatory jurisdiction over …

Contract Law’S Transferability Bias, Paul Macmahon

Indiana Law Journal

When A makes a contract with B, it comes as no surprise that she is liable to B. If B can transfer her contractual rights to C, A is now liable to C. Parties in A’s position often have strong reasons to avoid being liable to suit by C. Contract law, however, seems determined to minimize and override these concerns. Under current doctrine on the assignment of contractual rights—the focus of this Article—the law often imposes its own preference for transferability on the parties. The law generally assumes that contractual rights are assignable, construes exceptions to that general rule narrowly, …

Law In The Time Of Covid-19, Katharina Pistor

Faculty Books

The COVID-19 crisis has ended and upended lives around the globe. In addition to killing over 160,000 people, more than 35,000 in the United States alone, its secondary effects have been as devastating. These secondary effects pose fundamental challenges to the rules that govern our social, political, and economic lives. These rules are the domain of lawyers. Law in the Time of COVID-19 is the product of a joint effort by members of the faculty of Columbia Law School and several law professors from other schools.

This volume offers guidance for thinking about some the most pressing legal issues the …

Nyc V. Airbnb: New York City's Attempt To Regulate Home-Sharing Platforms And Airbnb's Attempt To Fight Back, Moshe Goldblatt

Cardozo International & Comparative Law Review

The note examines the legal battle between New York City (NYC) and Airbnb over the Homesharing Surveillance Ordinance, arguing that the ordinance violates constitutional rights and federal laws. It suggests that while NYC aims to regulate short-term rentals to address housing issues, the ordinance oversteps by compelling platforms to disclose private information without warrants, infringing on Fourth and First Amendment rights, and violating the Stored Communications Act. The note proposes a balanced approach allowing individuals to rent their homes while curbing commercial exploitation.

Considering Law And Macroeconomics, Anna Gelpern, Adam J. Levitin

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The worst financial and economic crisis to hit the world’s richest economies since the Great Depression inspired a flood of scholarship that straddled the disciplines of law and macroeconomics. With few exceptions, this crisis scholarship did not set out to build a new interdisciplinary movement and did not claim the legacy of earlier efforts to mine the intersection of law and macroeconomics. What are we to make of this moment ten years on? Could Law and Macroeconomics (#LawMacro for short) be an important new turn in legal and economic thought, a casual interdisciplinary tryst on the margins of a hundred-year …

De Facto Shareholder Primacy, Jeff Schwartz

Maryland Law Review

No abstract provided.

Revisiting The Enforceability Of Online Contracts: The Need For Unambiguous Assent To Inconspicuous Terms, Tom Mozingo

Seattle University Law Review

In determining the enforceability of online contracts, namely those formed from the use of smartphone applications, courts typically look to whether the contract terms were reasonably conspicuous or communicated to the consumer. With the rise of “browse-wrap” contracts, where terms are not directly communicated to the consumer or where the consumer is not required to click the equivalent of an “I agree” button clearly manifesting assent to the terms, courts have inconsistently applied the reasonable communicativeness standard to the detriment of consumers and application developers alike. This Comment will explore the development of browse-wrap contracting jurisprudence and the need to …

In Memory Of Professor James E. Bond, Janet Ainsworth

Seattle University Law Review

Janet Ainsworth, Professor of Law at Seattle University School of Law: In Memory of Professor James E. Bond.

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

Attorney–Client Privilege In Bad Faith Insurance Claims: The Cedell Presumption And A Necessary National Resolution, Klien Hilliard

Seattle University Law Review

Attorney–client privilege is one of the most important aspects of our legal system. It is one of the oldest privileges in American law and is codified both at the national and state level. Applying to both individual persons and corporations, this expanded privilege covers a wide breadth of clients. However, this broad privilege can sometimes become blurred in relationships between the corporation and the individuals it serves. Specifically, insurance companies and those they cover have complex relationships, as the insurer possesses a quasi-fiduciary relationship in relation to the insured. This type of relationship requires that the insurer act in good …

The Myth Of Optimal Expectation Damages, Theresa Arnold, Amanda Dixon, Madison Sherrill, Mitu Gulati

Faculty Scholarship

A much-debated question in contract law scholarship is what the optimal measure of damages for breach should be. The casebook answer-drawing from the theory of efficient breach-is expectation damages. This standard answer, which was a major contribution of the law and economics field, has come under attack by theoreticians within that field itself. To shed an empirical perspective on the question, we look at data on the types of damages provisions parties contract/or themselves in international debt contracts. Specifically, we examine issuer call provisions, which are economically equivalent to damages for prepayment, yet not viewed as legally problematic in the …