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Seattle University School of Law

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Articles 271 - 300 of 302

Full-Text Articles in Legal Profession

Consumer Lock-In And The Theory Of The Firm, David G. Yosifon Jun 2011

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 Jun 2011

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 Jun 2011

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 …


We Don’T Need You Anymore: Corporate Social Responsibilities, Executive Class Interests, And Solving Mizruchi And Hirschman’S Paradox, Richard Marens Jun 2011

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 Jun 2011

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 …


Strengthening Investment In Public Corporations Through The Uncorporation, Kelli A. Alces Jun 2011

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 …


Salomon Redux: The Moralities Of Business, Allan C. Hutchinson, Ian Langlois Jun 2011

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 …


Law And Legal Theory In The History Of Corporate Responsibility: Corporate Personhood, Lyman Johnson Jun 2011

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 Jun 2011

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 …


Hired To Invent Vs. Work Made For Hire: Resolving The Inconsistency Among Rights Of Corporate Personhood, Authorship, And Inventorship, Sean M. O'Connor Jun 2011

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 Jun 2011

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 …


A Shallow Harbor And A Cold Horizon: The Deceptive Promise Of Modern Agency Law For The Theory Of The Firm, David A. Westbrook Jun 2011

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 Jun 2011

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 …


Race Bias And The Importance Of Consciousness For Criminal Defense Attorneys, Andrea D. Lyon Apr 2011

Race Bias And The Importance Of Consciousness For Criminal Defense Attorneys, Andrea D. Lyon

Seattle University Law Review

This Article will begin with a discussion of race bias and will examine who in the criminal justice system has such biases. These concepts will provide a backdrop to the next Part, where I will turn to an analysis about the need for criminal defense lawyers to be conscious of race bias. I focus on two specific circumstances in which awareness of one’s own racial bias is imperative: interacting with clients and voir dire. But first, we must come to an understanding about the nature of race bias itself.


From Both Sides Now: The Job Talk’S Role In Matching Candidates With Law Schools, Anne Enquist, Paula Lustbader, John B. Mitchell Jan 2011

From Both Sides Now: The Job Talk’S Role In Matching Candidates With Law Schools, Anne Enquist, Paula Lustbader, John B. Mitchell

Faculty Articles

In the heavily competitive law school teaching job market, the so-called “job talk” has assumed increasing importance in the ultimate hiring decision. Nevertheless, there is little published information to assist a law school faculty in structuring or evaluating the job talk and a similar paucity of information for candidates to guide them in creating and preparing for the presentation of their talk. This article is intended to fill that void. The article guides the preparation of faculty and candidates for both the job talk itself and for the crucial Q&A period that follows the talk. The article represents the authors’ …


Lawyering And Learning In Problem-Solving Courts, Paul Holland Jan 2010

Lawyering And Learning In Problem-Solving Courts, Paul Holland

Faculty Articles

The introduction of Drug Courts and other problem-solving courts has brought significant change to the American criminal justice system. This change has required lawyers working in these courts to re-examine their role and to re-consider and re-calibrate the nature of their interactions and relationships with their clients and all of the other actors in the system. This article looks beyond the rhetorically charged debate that has marked these changes and offers instead a close examination of the actual experience of lawyers, judges, and most importantly, defendant-participants, in these courts. This examination demonstrates that many of the traditional values embedded in …


Be Professional!, Dean Spade Jan 2010

Be Professional!, Dean Spade

Faculty Articles

In 2010, the Harvard Journal of Law and Gender published a series of letters between Adrienne Davis and Bob Chang entitled, "Making Up Is Hard to Do: Race/Gender/Sexual Orientation in the Law School Classroom," along with three response pieces by Adele Morrison, Darren Rosenblum and Dean Spade. "Be Professional!" is written in letter form like "Making Up Is Hard to Do" and discusses Spade's experience becoming and being a trans law professor, as well as broader questions about activism, academia, professionalism and the neo-liberal academy.


Sharing Stories: Narrative Lawyering In Bench Trials, Paul Holland Jan 2009

Sharing Stories: Narrative Lawyering In Bench Trials, Paul Holland

Faculty Articles

Narrative lawyering theorists have demonstrated the ways in which the dynamics of stories affect the way lawyers deliver and jurors receive messages within trial. However, relatively little attention has been paid to the distinctive ways in which stories are developed in bench trials. Examining three roughly contemporaneous bench trials, this Article illuminates how this trial format requires lawyers to be both performers and audience, alternating roles frequently, sometimes within the span of a breath or a gesture. The availability of feedback to the lawyer and the possibility of direct intervention by the fact-finder produce a stark contrast to what lawyers …


Storytelling, Narrative Rationality, And Legal Persuasion, Chris Rideout Jan 2008

Storytelling, Narrative Rationality, And Legal Persuasion, Chris Rideout

Faculty Articles

Professor Chris Rideout has long been interested in persuasion, and for many years he has included theories of persuasion in an advanced legal writing seminar that he teaches. He always asks his students the same question—“what persuades in the law?”—and after looking at different theories of persuasion, they then develop their own theory of legal persuasion. When he first taught the course, he had in mind rhetorical models of persuasion, starting with Aristotle and Cicero and moving toward more contemporary rhetorical work. Very quickly, however, he had to add narrative models of persuasion, plus a second question—“what is it about …


Letters And Postcards We Wished We Had Sent To Gary Bellow And Bea Moulton, Marilyn Berger, John Mitchell, Annette Clark Jan 2003

Letters And Postcards We Wished We Had Sent To Gary Bellow And Bea Moulton, Marilyn Berger, John Mitchell, Annette Clark

Faculty Articles

To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the publication of Gary Bellow's and Bea Moulton's The Lawyering Process, this essay consists of eleven letters and postcards about how The Lawyering Process inspired the writing of the authors’ books - Pretrial Advocacy: Planning, Analysis & Strategy and Trial Advocacy: Planning, Analysis & Strategy. Alas, this correspondence is imaginary because that exchange of ideas did not take place. This method was inspired by the medieval letters of Abelard and Heloise and the modern-day fictional postcards and letters of Griffin and Sabine. Tracing the evolution of their thoughts from first reading the Bellow and …


A Symposium Tribute To Judge A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr.: The Mentor And His Message, Margaret Chon Jan 2000

A Symposium Tribute To Judge A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr.: The Mentor And His Message, Margaret Chon

Faculty Articles

The articles in this Symposium tribute to Judge A. Leon Higginbotham Jr. emphasize his mentoring as well as his message. This demonstrates that one of the Judge's most important legacies was his "people legacy"—his continual training of the next generation of leaders in ways that would keep alive the more than four-hundred-year-long struggle of American racial justice. The Judge also had a distinct vison of American law, the vision of "we the people” of self-evident truths that "all men are created equal." His second vision was that of "we the people of color," the one that is symbolized by the …


Gender Bias In The American Bar Association Journal: Impact On The Legal Profession, Marilyn Berger, Kari A. Robinson Jan 1998

Gender Bias In The American Bar Association Journal: Impact On The Legal Profession, Marilyn Berger, Kari A. Robinson

Faculty Articles

The ABA Journal presents women in the legal system in a similar fashion to the presentation of women in the journals of other professions. Women are portrayed in traditional sex roles, they are pictured passively and they are often shown negatively as victims. In the volumes the authors studied, they found that the numbers of images of attorneys, judges and professors were not proportionate to the number of men and women in the legal profession. Moreover, the ABA Journal predominantly displayed women as dependent on their male counterparts. The authors also found instances where the ABA Journal portrayed women as …


Fostering Diversity In The Legal Profession: A Model For Preparing Minority And Other Non-Traditional Students For Law School, Lorraine K. Bannai, Marie Eaton Jan 1997

Fostering Diversity In The Legal Profession: A Model For Preparing Minority And Other Non-Traditional Students For Law School, Lorraine K. Bannai, Marie Eaton

Faculty Articles

Undergraduate institutions, on their own and in partnership with law schools, can and should play a more significant role in expanding the pool of law school applicants from non-traditional backgrounds. The Law and Diversity Program at Western Washington University was conceived out of this desire to prepare non-traditional students for the study of law and thereby help bring more diversity to the legal profession. This article discusses the model used by the Law and Diversity Program to prepare non-traditional students for law school and the program's success in accomplishing its goals. It was the hope of the author to create …


On Seeing Chinese Law From A Chinese Point Of View: An Appreciative Look At The Scholarly Career Of Professor William Jones, Janet Ainsworth Jan 1996

On Seeing Chinese Law From A Chinese Point Of View: An Appreciative Look At The Scholarly Career Of Professor William Jones, Janet Ainsworth

Faculty Articles

In this appreciative review, Professor William Jones's work is used to demonstrate that sensitivity to issues of methodology are indispensable for comparative law scholars. Professor Jones's work is valuable because (1) it is marked both by an awareness of the methodological difficulties faced by the comparativist and a confidence that it is nonetheless possible to transcend these difficulties and (2) it makes a meaningful contribution to the development of an understanding of a foreign legal order. The article concludes by stating that Professor Jones's work will influence future generations of scholars trying to answer the why, what, and how of …


Jacques Of All Trades: Derrida, Lacan, And The Commercial Lawyer, Sidney Delong Jan 1995

Jacques Of All Trades: Derrida, Lacan, And The Commercial Lawyer, Sidney Delong

Faculty Articles

Professor DeLong’s article provides humorous advice for legal professors on how to apply deconstructionist and post-Freudian theory to commercial law classes. Professor DeLong explains that the key to the successful integration of postmodern thought into your own scholarship is stunningly simple: all you have to do is not care whether you really get it right. He describes how you too will soon be turning out articles like "The Social Construction of Cowness in the Packers and Stockyards Act," or "Silencing the Lambs: Narratives of Loss and Evisceration in the Packers and Stockyards Act," or "Cattle Prods and Cutting Pens: A …


Woman's Ghetto Within The Legal Profession, Marilyn Berger, Kari A. Robinson Jan 1993

Woman's Ghetto Within The Legal Profession, Marilyn Berger, Kari A. Robinson

Faculty Articles

In this article, we explore how the historical, stereotypical images of women as the timid, delicate caretaker shaped and continue to shape women's roles in the work force. As women entered the workplace, they became nurses, not doctors; dental hygienists, not dentists; paralegals, not lawyers; and kindergarten teachers, not university professors. This pattern persists today. We examine the professions to show how women's nurturing caretaker image has resulted in special niches within the professions, positions which perpetuate women in caretaker roles. Specifically, we examine the legal profession and probe the contemporary barricades erected to channel women into positions that fulfill …


Introduction: Multidimensional Lawyering And Professional Responsibility, Margaret Chon Jan 1992

Introduction: Multidimensional Lawyering And Professional Responsibility, Margaret Chon

Faculty Articles

Professor Margaret Chon introduces three following articles in which the authors posit the identity of the lawyer not just as client representative, but in the multiple roles of respondent to other people, entities and underlying societal values. Each article contributes to the formation of the self qua lawyer by showing how attorneys can and do respond to foils other than clients.


Memorial To Professor Andrew Walkover, Paula Lustbader Jan 1988

Memorial To Professor Andrew Walkover, Paula Lustbader

Faculty Articles

Tribute to Professor Andrew Walkover 1949-1988.


Tribute To Andrew Walkover, James E. Bond Jan 1988

Tribute To Andrew Walkover, James E. Bond

Faculty Articles

In a tribute to Andrew Walkover, Dean James Bond revisits the first meeting he had with Professor Walkover. Dean Bond’s impression of Professor Walkover, with whom he worked for six months, was that he had a marvelous sense of humor, a shrewd insight into other people's motivations, and a detached sense of compassion. He delighted in personalities and politics, and his colleagues delighted in him.


Tribute To Andrew Walkover, John Mitchell Jan 1988

Tribute To Andrew Walkover, John Mitchell

Faculty Articles

Tribute to Professor Andrew Walkover 1949-1988.