Restraints of trade: The legal practice

This article assesses the impact of legal practice upon the enforceability of employment restraints of trade. Post-employment restraints range from those prohibiting use of confidential information acquired through employment (non-disclosure clauses), or the solicitation of previous customers (non-solicitation clauses), to wider clauses imposing an obligation on the employee not to compete with the employer for a defined period after the termination of the employment (non-compete clauses). The empirical research reported in this article demonstrates that there is much uncertainty in the operation of the law around the use of restraint of trade clauses in employment contracts. While most usefully nuanced, the evidence suggests that to a significant extent, this uncertainty weighs more heavily on the side of any dispute that is least able to bear it – the employee. In light of our findings, we have introduced a limited number of reform options (ranging from the radical to the limited, and from the substantive to the procedural) that would assist in reducing the over-enforcement, or over-observance, of restraint clauses

Understanding Antiferromagnetic and Ligand Field Effects on Spin Crossover in a Triple-decker Dimeric Cr(II) Complex

Two possible explanations for the temperature-dependence of spin crossover (SCO) behavior in the dimeric triple-decker Cr(II) complex ([(C5Me5)Cr(P5)Cr(C5Me5)]+) have been offered. One invokes variations in antiferromagnetic interactions between the two Cr(II) ions, while the other posits the development of a strong ligand-field effect favoring the low-spin ground state. We perform multireference electronic structure calculations based on multiconfiguration pair-density functional theory to resolve these effects. We find quintet, triplet, and singlet electronic ground states, respectively, for the experimental geometries at high, intermediate, and low temperatures. The ground-state transition from quintet to triplet at intermediate temperature derives from increased antiferromagnetic interactions between the two Cr(II) ions. By contrast, the ground-state transition from triplet to singlet at low temperature is attributable to increased ligand-field effects, which dominate with continued variations in antiferromagnetic coupling. This study provides quantitative detail for the degree to which these two effects can act in concert for the observed SCO behavior in this complex and others subject to temperature dependent variations in geometry