Bargaining rationale for cooperative generic advertising

The beggar-thy-neighbour aspect of commodity advertising means that benefits to one commodity from advertising come at the expense of other commodities. The effect can be mitigated by cooperation among groups as shown by Alston, Freebairn and James (AFJ). A drawback to AFJ’s analysis is that some cooperative outcomes require side payments from one producer group to another. This paper offers a bargaining solution as an alternative to cooperation in the case where cooperative side payments would be needed. We show that while bargaining without side payments is not as effective as cooperation at reducing beggar-thy-neighbour effects, it is a welfare improving alternative to non-cooperation and is likely more practical in many situations.Marketing,

Rethinking Corporate Fiduciary Duties: The Inefficiency of the Shareholder Primacy Norm

Current judicial practice regards the fiduciary duties of corporate officials as running exclusively to the common shareholders, and not to the bondholders or preferred shareholders, or to the corporation as a whole. In this article, the author addresses the question of whether defining the corporation as a whole as the subject of these fiduciary duties would better promote economic efficiency. Ultimately, the author concludes that economic efficiency would be enhanced if the locus of corporate officials\u27 fiduciary duties was redefined as running to the corporation, both for larger corporations with publicly-held securities and smaller corporations whose securities may be more closely held

Who is Liable for Attorney\u27s Fees under Texas Civil Practice & Remedies Code Section 38.001 in breach of Contract Litigation

This article examines the question of who qualifies as an individual or corporation who may be held liable for attorney\u27s fees in a breach of contract action pursuant to section 38.001 of the Texas Civil Practice & Remedies Code. After a discussion of the relevant legislative commentary regarding section 38.001, the author reviews a series of cases in which courts have applied the “individual or corporation” clause to governmental entities, partnerships, limited liability companies, and private associations and assesses whether the courts have correctly interpreted the statute as to the classes of defendants that it covers. The article concludes with suggestions for how the Texas Supreme Court might clarify the scope of application of section 38.001, as well as some possible amendments to the statute that the Texas legislature could enact to make its intended scope clearer

Microeconomics Made (Too) Easy: A Casebook Approach to Teaching Law and Economics

A Review of Cases and Materials on Law and Economics by David W. Barnes and Lynn A. Stou

Mutual Mistake or Excuse: Which Approach to Pursue When Seeking Judicial Relief From Contractual Obligations on the Basis of Supervening Knowledge?

When a person seeks to be relieved from their contractual obligations on the basis of supervening knowledge of a fact existing at the time of contracting that has rendered their performance impracticable or even impossible, and/or has frustrated their purpose in entering into the contract, they would appear to have choice between asserting a mutual mistake enforce-ability defense, or instead asserting one or more of the impossibility, impracticability, or frustration of purpose excuse defenses. Do they in fact have this choice, or does each of these approaches for obtaining relief have its own distinct scope of application, with little if any overlap? If there are circumstances where a person does have this choice, which approach is likely to be more promising as the primary means of seeking relief? There is unfortunately a relative absence of clarifying case law on this question, and this brief article considers the guidance provided by Sections 152 and 266 of the Restatement (Second) of Contracts and the associated Official Comments. The article concludes that where there is a choice available between the two approaches the question as to which one to most aggressively pursue, rather than only plead secondarily in the alternative, turns upon the definition of “materiality” that will be applied by the court with regard to the mutual mistake defense. The mutual mistake defense approach is likely to be the more promising tact in all instances, although perhaps only marginally so if the court applies the most stringent materiality criterion suggested by the Official Comment to Restatement (Second) Section 152

Will the Income-Based Repayment Program Enable Law Schools to Continue to Provide Harvard-Style Legal Education

Legal education provided in the prevailing “Harvard-style” now costs students on average between $160,000 and$250,000 for their three years of study, the precise amount depending on the law school attended, the alternative employment opportunities foregone, and the amount of scholarship assistance provided. However, the median starting salary for full-time, entry-level legal positions has declined in recent years to only $60,000/year, and upwards of 45In this article I conduct several different detailed analyses of the IBR program under the liberalized PAYE rules, and of the related and even more generous Public Service Loan Forgiveness (“PSLF”) program. My conclusion is that the IBR loan repayment and debt forgiveness provisions are sufficiently attractive so that Harvard-style legal education is now again a financially viable proposition for many law students, not only for those students attending the most elite law schools but also for many students attending non-elite law schools, specifically those students who will graduate in the upper half of their class or better at the 40 or so upper- or mid-tier non-elite law schools, and also for those students who will graduate in the upper quarter of their class or better from one of the more than 150 lower-tier law schools. For most other law students, however, who in the current employment market have only a slim chance of obtaining a full-time entry-level legal position paying even$60,000/year, and who have very slim chances of obtaining a qualifying public service legal position under the PSLF program, attending law school is no longer economically justified even with the IBR and PSLF loan repayment options. The continuation of Harvard-style legal education at the non-elite law schools will depend to a large extent upon the willingness of their students to continue to borrow the large sums needed to pay for this expensive education and then enroll in the IBR or PSLF programs to reduce the burden of repaying those debts. My analysis leads me to somewhat optimistically conclude that many, perhaps most prospective law students considering attending upper- or mid-tier non-elite law schools should go ahead and matriculate, taking out the needed student loans and then enrolling in either the IBR or PSLF programs to contractually lock in these favorable repayment and loan forgiveness terms. If they choose to do so then these schools should be able to continue to offer Harvard-style education, albeit probably with significantly smaller enrollments and in a moderately more financially stringent manner. Whether these prospective students will in fact be willing to attend and enroll in the IBR or PSLF programs on a large scale in the coming years, however, is for several reasons yet uncertain. On the other hand, I conclude more pessimistically that attending lower-tier law schools can no longer be financially justified even under the IBR or PSLF programs for any but the best of their students, and consequently the longer-term prospects for the survival of those many law schools is not very promising. Finally, one should not assume that the IBR and PSLF programs will necessarily continue to be available for law students indefinitely. The regressive taxpayer subsidies of uncertain but possibly substantial size that these programs provide to law students, a group of people that are drawn disproportionately from upper-income socioeconomic groups, and indirectly to law schools, generally relatively affluent institutions, and to relatively very affluent law faculty makes these programs an attractive target for political leaders who are looking for opportunities to reduce federal deficits, particularly at a time when there is a pronounced oversupply of new lawyers relative to the employment opportunities. The elite law schools will surely survive in any case, but law school deans and other legal education leaders may only have a relatively short period of time to take proactive steps that will significantly reduce law school costs and tuitions for the upper- and mid-tier non-elite schools so that those schools can survive should the IBR program be substantially curtailed or even eliminated for law students. The substantial curtailment of the IBR program for law students would, however, probably lead to the closing of many if not most of the lower-tier law schools no matter what efforts they may undertake to try to avoid this fate

Teaching Contract Law through Common Law Analysis: The UCI Law Experiment

The new law school at the University of California, Irvine, is attempting to implement an innovative vision of top-tier legal education that emphasizes skills-based and experiential training. As part of that effort, the school has restructured the traditional first-year law school curriculum so that several of these courses each focus on a particular analytical method-specifically, common law analysis, statutory analysis, procedural analysis, constitutional analysis, or international legal analysis-rather than on a particular doctrinal subject matter such as contract law or torts. There are no doubt some pedagogical advantages to taking such an analytical methods-oriented instructional approach. However, I have some concerns regarding the efficacy of its first-year course, Common Law Analysis: Contracts, which most directly addresses contract law. That course focuses in a Langdellian manner upon common law analysis and common-law-derived legal doctrines, to the virtual exclusion of statutory analysis. I question whether that course will be as effective in teaching students how to apply basic contract law principles in the modern age of statutes as is the more conventional approach that presents to students both the common law and statutory aspects of the subject in a more holistic and integrated fashion