Commercial Law Commons^™

Kill Cammer: Securities Litigation Without Junk Science, J. B. Heaton

William & Mary Business Law Review

Securities litigation is a hotbed of junk science concerning market efficiency. This Article explains why and suggests a way out. In its 1988 decision in Basic v. Levinson, the Supreme Court endorsed the fraud on the market presumption for securities traded in an efficient market. Faced with the task of determining market efficiency, courts throughout the nation embraced the ad hoc speculations of a first-mover district court that proclaimed, in Cammer v. Bloom, how to allege (and presumably prove) facts that would do just that. The Cammer court’s analysis did not rely on financial economics for its notions, but instead …

Who Sells? Testing Amazon.Com For Product Defect Liability In Pennsylvania And Beyond, Aaron Doyer

Journal of Law and Policy

Pennsylvania, like other states, has struggled over the past few decades to apply the policy principles of product defect law—a tort characterized by strict liability. Because strict liability bypasses the traditional requirement in tort that a plaintiff prove the defendant’s negligence, and instead requires only a showing that the plaintiff was injured by a product sold in a defective condition, these inquiries raise a deceptively simple question: who sells? Recently, in a landmark case in Pennsylvania, the Third Circuit made waves by declaring Amazon.com, an enormous online marketplace, the legal “seller” of a product shipped and sold by a vendor …

Corporations Hybrid: A Covid Case Study On Innovation In Business Law Pedagogy, Seth C. Oranburg, David D. Tamasy

Law Faculty Scholarship

A worldwide pandemic is forcing schools to close their doors. Yet the need to teach students remains. How can faculty – especially those who are not trained in technology-mediated teaching – maintain educational continuity? This Essay provides some suggestions and relatively quick and easy strategies for distance education in this time of coronavirus. While it is written from the perspective of teaching law school, it can be applied to teaching other humanities such as philosophy, literature, religion, political theory, and other subjects that do not easily lend themselves to charts, graphs, figures, and diagrams. This Essay includes an introductory technology …

Introduction To The Covid-19 Symposium On International Economic Law In The Global South, Olabisi D. Akinkugbe, James Thuo Gathii, Titilayo Adebola, Nthope Mapefane

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted all facets of human relations on a magnitude not witnessed in the post-World War II era. Due to the interdependence of countries in the international system, it is not surprising that the unfolding public health crisis has had significant ramifications for the functioning of the global economy as well. In responding to this global health crisis, and the associated fallouts, the academic community has a crucial role to play in finding solutions to the hydra-headed problems we all face. Driven by this sense of urgency and responsibility, AfronomicsLaw put out a call for contributions in …

Contract Lore As Heuristic Starting Points, Colin P. Marks

Faculty Works

This article examines the concept of “contract lore,” a term used to describe commonly repeated propositions about contract law that may not accurately reflect how courts actually decide cases. Prior scholarship has suggested that the persistence of such statements reflects aspirational thinking among contract scholars and practitioners, maintained through a form of cognitive dissonance. This article challenges that explanation and instead argues that many examples of contract lore are better understood as heuristic starting points used in legal analysis. Rather than functioning as definitive statements of law, these propositions provide an initial framework from which students, lawyers, and judges begin …

Foreword--Comparative Corporate Law & Governance, Dan W. Puchniak, Randall S. Thomas

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Despite the challenges posed by Covid-19, especially for the student editors of the Journal, this special issue has been published on time and has been superbly edited. On behalf of the authors, NUS Law, and the Law & Business Program of Vanderbilt Law School, we would like to express our sincere appreciation to the editor in chief, Joshua D. Minchin, and the entire editorial team of the Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law for their remarkable skill, effort, and dedication in these challenging times. Your performance gives us great hope that the future is extremely bright.

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 …

Circuit Board Jurisdiction: Electronic Payments And The Presumption Against Extraterritoriality, Samuel L. Hatcher

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Maine Corporation Law & Practice, Gregory S. Fryer

Maine Law Review

The scarcity of case law in Maine on corporate law issues of the day is a fact of life for corporate law practitioners in this State. While courts in more populous states fill library shelves with an ever-growing mix of corporate law decisions, we in Maine often can only wonder which way our own courts would turn if presented with those same issues. Faced with a limited amount of local case law, corporate lawyers here might rarely venture beyond well-hewn traditions were it not for two-and now three-fortunate developments. First and foremost is the Maine Business Corporation Act. The Act …

Maine Corporation Law & Practice, Gregory S. Fryer

Maine Law Review

The scarcity of case law in Maine on corporate law issues of the day is a fact of life for corporate law practitioners in this State. While courts in more populous states fill library shelves with an ever-growing mix of corporate law decisions, we in Maine often can only wonder which way our own courts would turn if presented with those same issues. Faced with a limited amount of local case law, corporate lawyers here might rarely venture beyond well-hewn traditions were it not for two-and now three-fortunate developments. First and foremost is the Maine Business Corporation Act. The Act …

Developing Robust And Coherent Regional Trade Policy Could Quell The Chaos Surrounding Land Border Closures In Nigeria, Olabisi D. Akinkugbe

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Despite the pivotal roles played in the establishment and reform on the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) among other continental initiatives in Africa, significant questions remain whether Nigeria is truly committed to a meaningful regional economic integration regime in the implementation phase. The recent inquest into Nigeria’s regional trade policy has exacerbated because of two major occurrences.

First, Nigeria’s delay in signing the African Continental Free Trade Area Agreement (AfCFTA) led to critical reactions on the readiness of one of Africa’s largest economies to embrace a continental rules-based trade regime. Others, including me, however argued that Nigeria’s delay …

Who Carries The Burden Of Proving Causation In An Erisa Section 409(A) Suit For Breach Of Fiduciary Duty?, Edward Rivin

University of Cincinnati Law Review

No abstract provided.

Business Trusts In China: A Reality Check, Lusina Ho

University of Cincinnati Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Rise Of Business Trusts In Sustainable Neo-Innovative Economies, Lee-Ford Tritt, Ryan Scott Teschner

University of Cincinnati Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Oregon Stewardship Trust: A New Type Of Purpose Trust That Enables Steward-Ownership Of A Business, Susan N. Gary

University of Cincinnati Law Review

No abstract provided.

The New Fiduciaries, Natalya Shnitser

University of Cincinnati Law Review

The regulation of employer-sponsored retirement plans in the United States relies on fiduciary standards drawn from donative trust law to regulate the conduct of those with authority or discretion over plan assets. The mismatch between the trust-based fiduciary framework and the rights and interests of employers and employees has contributed to the high cost of pension fund investing and the significant gaps in pension coverage in the private sector. In recent years, state and local governments have stepped in to reduce the retirement coverage gap by creating state-facilitated retirement savings programs for private-sector workers who lack access to employment-based coverage. …

Indenture Trustee Duties: The Pre-Default Puzzle, Steven L. Schwarcz

University of Cincinnati Law Review

This Article addresses a topic at the intersection of finance, agency, contract, and trust law: the pre-default duties of an indenture trustee for bondholders. The existing scholarship on indenture trustee duties focuses on the post-default scenario, when the indenture trustee is required to act as a prudent person in like circumstances on behalf of the bondholders. No prior scholarship addresses an indenture trustee’s pre-default duties. It is critical to try to define those duties because activist investors in the $42-trillion-plus bond market increasingly are making pre-default demands on indenture trustees, requiring them to know how to respond.

High Crimes: Liability For Directors Of Retail Marijuana Corporations, Lauren A. Newell

Law Faculty Scholarship

Selling retail marijuana in the United States is illegal — or is it? A rising number of states have legalized the retail sale of marijuana and are busily regulating these sales and the companies that make them. Even so, the sale of marijuana is a crime under federal law. Are companies that sell retail marijuana duly sanctioned, productive contributors to their state economies, or are they felons just waiting for the wheels of justice to turn in their direction? At this moment, no one can answer that question with certainty.

What is certain is that more companies are being formed …

Equal Treatment Of Shareholders Under The Dual Class Share Structure: Recent Updates Of The Takeover Code In Singapore, Chuanman You

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

On 24 January 2019, a revised Singapore Code on Take-overs and Mergers (the Take-overs Code) was promulgated by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) on the advice of the Securities Industry Council (the SIC). The revisions are to ensure that takeover practices targeting at companies with the dual class share (DCS) structures are conducted in compliance with the principle of equal treatment of all shareholders. The key amendments are two-fold: (a) expanding the application of mandatory offer and its dispensation to target companies with the DCS structures. (b) clarifying the fair pricing norms for multiple classes of equity share capital …

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 …