Contracts Commons^™

Fiduciary Duties Of Llc Managers: Are They Subject To Prospective Waiver Under The New York Llc Statute?, Jack Graves, Yelena Davydan

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

An Empirical Analysis Of Noncompetition Clauses And Other Restrictive Postemployment Covenants, Randall S. Thomas, Norman D. Bishara, Kenneth J. Martin

Vanderbilt Law Review

Employment contracts for most employees are not publicly available, leaving researchers to speculate about whether they contain postemployment restrictions on employee mobility, and if so, what those provisions look like. Using a large sample of publicly available CEO employment contracts, we are able to examine these noncompetition covenants, including postemployment covenants not to compete ("CNCs" or "noncompetes'), nonsolicitation agreements ("NSAs"), and nondisclosure agreements ("NDAs'). What we found confirms some long-held assumptions about restrictive covenants but also uncovers some surprises.

We begin by discussing why employers use restrictive covenants and examining how the courts have treated them. We then analyze an …

The Repeat Player Effect In Child Protection Mediation: Dangers Of And Protections Against Second-Class Justice For Marginalized Parties, Donna Erez-Navot

Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution

This Article will be structured as follows: Part I of this Article will introduce some of the basic and problematic phenomenon including the repeat player effect, cooptation and others that arise in the legal system. In Part II, there will be specific attention to these phenomenon applied in various well-researched dispute resolution areas including criminal, child protection, employment and arbitration contexts. Part III of this Article gives a broad introduction into court annexed mediation and child protection mediation in general. Part IV of this Article will focus on the specific effects of repeat player, cooptation, and others in Family Court …

Work Made For Hire – Analyzing The Multifactor Balancing Test, Ryan G. Vacca

Akron Law Faculty Publications

Authorship, and hence, initial ownership of copyrighted works is oftentimes controlled by the 1976 Copyright Act’s work made for hire doctrine. This doctrine states that works created by employees within the scope of their employment result in the employer owning the copyright. One key determination in this analysis is whether the hired party is an employee or independent contractor. In 1989, the U.S. Supreme Court, in CCNV v. Reid, answered the question of how employees are distinguished from independent contractors by setting forth a list of factors courts should consider. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court did not give further guidance on …

A Contract Theory Of Academic Freedom, Philip Lee

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Academic freedom is central to the core role of professors in a free society. Yet, current First Amendment protections exist to protect academic institutions, not the academics themselves. For example, in Urofsky v. Gilmore, six professors employed by various public colleges and universities in Virginia challenged a law restricting state employees from accessing sexually explicit material on computers owned or leased by the state. The professors claimed, in part, that such a restriction was in violation of their First Amendment academic freedom rights to conduct scholarly research. The Fourth Circuit upheld the law and noted that “to the …

Involved, Empowered And Inspired: How Mediating Halakhic Prenuptial Agreements Honors Jewish And American Law And Builds Happy Families, Lara Traum

Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution

This Note discusses the pitfalls of existing halakhic prenuptial protocols and advances the use of mediation in the prenuptial drafting process. Section II of this Note provides a history of Jewish marital and divorce law, explaining the significance of halakhic legal documents and religious arbitration units. Section III examines the unresolved relationship between Jewish and American systems, discusses the advent of American prenuptial agreements, and highlights the shortcomings of existing prenuptial agreements in the Orthodox Jewish community. Section IV proposes that prenuptial mediation best honors halakha, American law, and individual interests.

Liquidity, Systemic Risk, And The Bankruptcy Treatment Of Financial Contracts, Rizwaan J. Mokal

Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law

No abstract provided.

An Empirical Analysis Of Noncompetition Clauses And Other Restrictive Postemployment Covenants, Randall S. Thomas, Norman Bishara, Kenneth Martin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Employment contracts for most employees are not publicly available, leaving researchers to speculate about whether they contain postemployment restrictions on employee mobility, and if so, what those provisions look like. Using a large sample of publicly available CEO employment contracts, we are able to examine these noncompetition covenants, including postemployment covenants not to compete ("CNCs" or "noncompetes'), nonsolicitation agreements ("NSAs"), and nondisclosure agreements ("NDAs'). What we found confirms some long-held assumptions about restrictive covenants but also uncovers some surprises.

We begin by discussing why employers use restrictive covenants and examining how the courts have treated them. We then analyze an …

Robots In The Home: What Will We Have Agreed To?, Margot E. Kaminski

Publications

A new technology can expose the cracks in legal doctrine. Sometimes a technology resists analogy. Sometimes, through analogies, it reveals inconsistencies in the law, or basic flaws in framing, or in the fit between different parts of the legal system. This Essay addresses robots in the home, and what they reveal about U.S. privacy law. Household robots might not themselves uproot U.S. privacy law, but they will reveal its inconsistencies, and show where it is most likely to fracture. Just as drones are serving as a legislative “privacy catalyst” — encouraging the enactment of new privacy laws as people realize …

The Hague Principles, The Cisg, And The 'Battle Of Forms', Peter Winship

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This paper considers the relation of the Hague Principles on Choice of Law in International Commercial Contracts to the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG) when parties to an international contract of sales refer during negotiations to their standard terms and these standard terms include choice-of-law terms that conflict.

Seeing The Whole Elephant: A Comprehensive Framework For Analyzing Resource-For-Infrastructure Contracts As Intended By The Parties, Dunia P. Zongwe

Southern African Journal of Policy and Development

The current state of scientific knowledge on resource-for-infrastructure (R4I) contracting is unclear and based on inadequate empirical grounds. As a result, it is not easy to tell a R4I contract apart from other forms of international business transactions, let alone describe it in a comprehensive, accurate and meaningful way. Such state of affairs is concerning given the dramatic transformative impact of R4I contracts. This article sheds light on R4I contracts and proposes a broad framework for analyzing these multibillion-dollar deals. It looks to the contracting parties’ intentions – as expressly set out in the texts of contractual and official documents …

The Sisyphean Course Of Combating Gender Discrimination In The Federal Marketplace For Prime Contracts: Rolling The Boulder Of Small Business Size, Anna S. Molina

Cardozo Journal of Equal Rights & Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Individualized Injunctions And No-Modification Terms: Challenging "Anti-Reform" Provisions In Arbitration Clauses, Myriam E. Gilles

Articles

The Supreme Court’s recent decisions in AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion and American Express v. Italian Colors have considered only whether class actions for monetary damages may be barred by arbitration clauses requiring individual adjudication. The Justices have not examined the enforceability of arbitration clauses or arbitral rules which explicitly prohibit claimants from seeking or arbitrators from granting broad injunctive relief in an individual dispute. I term these "anti-reform" provisions because they broadly prohibit an individual arbitral claimant from seeking to end a practice, change a rule, or enjoin an act that causes injury to itself and to similarly-situated non-parties. This …

Catalyzing Fans, Howard Wasserman, Dan Markel, Michael Mccann

Faculty Publications

This paper proposes the development of Fan Action Committees (“FACs”), which, like their political counterpart ("PACs"), could mobilize and empower fans to play a larger role in the decision-making associated with which “production teams” the talent will work.

We outline two institutional options: FACs could directly compensate talent by crowdfunding, or they could make donations to charities favored by talent. We then discuss both obstacles and objections from a variety of policy and legal perspectives ranging from competitive balance to distributive justice. Finally, we consider possible extensions of the FAC model as well as offer some ruminations on why FACs …

An Experiment On The Role Of Penalty Clauses And The Level Of Legal Remedies For Breach Of Contract On The Prevention Of The Hold-Up Problem In Colombian Contract Law, Juan Antonio Gaviria

Richmond Journal of Global Law & Business

This article analyzes the results of an experiment with Colombian students testing the theories thatpenalty clauses and a high level of legal remedies for breach of contract prevent the hold-up problem. While the results of this experiment failed to statistically confirm the predictions of the theory, they did not reject them. Furthermore,the results show that held-up parties were better off after the parties renegotiated the contract when either a penalty clause was provided or the law increased the level of legal remedies in comparison with a benchmark scenario. On the other hand, the results are a contribution to the field …

The Problem With Frand: How The Licensing Commitments Of Standard-Setting Organizations Result In The Misvaluing Of Patents, David Arsego

Brooklyn Journal of International Law

Standard-setting organizations (SSOs) are bodies that oversee the development of technical standards. Technical standards are common technological designs that are used across a variety of platforms, for instance LTE, which is utilized throughout the mobile phone industry. Members of SSOs contribute different pieces of technology to an ultimate design, and if a patent covers the technology, it is called a standard-essential patent (SEP). SSOs require their members to license these patents to each other on fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory (FRAND) terms. This Note analyzes the FRAND requirement and the different ways that courts and private parties interpret it. The ambiguity …

Reservations And The Cisg: The Borderland Of Uniform International Sales Law And Treaty Law After Thirty-Five Years, Ulrich G. Schroeter

Brooklyn Journal of International Law

No abstract provided.

Rethinking Jacob & Youngs V. Kent, Victor P. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

Most living lawyers have run into Jacob & Youngs, Inc. v. Kent in their legal education. It has long been a staple in Contracts casebooks. While the result has been widely applauded, in recent years there has been some push-back. Professor Kenneth Ching has recently criticized both Cardozo’s argument and the result. Professor Robert Scott in a number of papers, some coauthored, has also concluded that the result was wrong. Yet given the state of New York law at the time Cardozo’s result was correct. Moreover, I will argue, the outcome is one that parties would adopt today. Ironically, despite …

A Crib Sheet For Contracts Profs, Victor P. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

Over the last two decades I have been digging into the facts on a number of contracts cases, many of them featured in casebooks. I have collected the material in two books; one appeared in 2006 and the other is hot off the presses. This brief paper provides a roadmap for professors who might want more depth on the cases than is provided in the decisions or the casebooks. A recurring theme in the two books is that parties designing their contractual relationships must deal with change. This shows up in the manner in which they price the option to …

Third-Party Beneficiaries And Contractual Networks, Alan Schwartz, Robert E. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

An increasing trend of economic agents is to form productive associations such as networks, platforms, and other hybrids. Subsets of these agents contract with each other to further their network project and these contracts can create benefits for, or impose costs on, agents who are not contract parties. Contract law regulates third party claims against contract parties with the third-party beneficiary doctrine, which directs courts to ask whether the contracting parties "intended" to benefit a particular third party. We show here what courts do with third party claims when network members fail to perform for third parties and what the …