A Question of Costs: Considering Pressure on White-Collar Criminal Defendants

Because of the expense of defending white-collar criminal cases, individual corporate defendants can rarely fund their own defenses and often rely on their employers to pay their legal costs. Employers, however, often feel pressure to refuse to pay their employees\u27 attorneys\u27 fees. When employers decline to pay their employees\u27 defense costs, defendants can be, in effect, coerced into pleading guilty because they do not have the financial resources to defend themselves at trial. Commentators have discussed the problem of pressure on white-collar defendants but have not traced the cause of the pressure back to one of its most basic roots: criminalizing conduct that is prohibitively expensive for an individual to defend. Others have addressed the question of whether corporate behavior has been overcriminalized but have not focused on the high cost of defending these crimes as one of the key arguments against criminalizing the behavior in the first place. This Note intertwines the two strands of the debate over corporate crime: the strand evaluating the existence of and solutions to pressure on individual white-collar defendants and the strand questioning the overcriminalization of corporate law. This Note adds to both strands by focusing on one aspect, high defense costs, that contributes to the pressure, makes it unique to corporate crime as opposed to street crime, and puts it out of the reach of commonly suggested procedural fixes. The Note concludes that white-collar criminal prosecutions inherently place financial pressure on defendants, and legislatures should consider this pressure when deciding what behavior to criminalize

Directors\u27 Duties in Failing Firms

Despite many cases with seemingly contrary dicta, corporate directors of failing firms do not have special duties to creditors. This follows from the nature of fiduciary duties and the business judgment rule. Under the business judgment rule, the directors have broad discretion to decide what to do and in whose interests to act. There is some authority for a limited creditor right to sue on behalf of the corporation to enforce this duty. However, any such right does not make the duty one owed to creditors. The creditors individually may sue the corporation for breach of specific contractual, tort, and statutory duties, particularly on account of fraudulent conveyances. But the creditors are not owed general fiduciary protection even if they are subject to a special risk of abuse in failing firms

Estimation des caractéristiques de la crue décennale pour les petits bassins versants du Sahel couvrant de 1 à 10 km2

A partir des données de 29 bassins représentatifs, les auteurs ont mis au point des règles pratiques pour l'estimation du débit maximum d'une crue de fréquence décennale sur des bassins non jaugés de moins de 10 km2. Après un rappel des problèmes liés à la prédétermination de crue au Sahel, cet article souligne les points originaux de la méthode proposée : le calcul des caractéristiques hydrologiques des bassins observés : coefficient de ruissellement, paramètres de l'hydrogramme type; l'utilisation du concept de bassins fictifs pour étudier l'ensemble des variations possibles des facteurs explicatifs de la crue prédéterminée; l'élaboration d'un questionnaire pour tenir compte de valeurs extrêmes de certains facteurs non pris en compte dans la méthode proposée. (Résumé d'auteur

Glaciers et évolution climatique dans les Andes boliviennes : glacier de Zongo et glacier de Chacaltaya, Cordillère Royale, 16°S

Par sa sensibilité et son délai de réponse bref, le glacier est d'un grand intérêt pour analyser l'évolution et la variabilité actuelles du climat entre les tropiques. Les méthodes de détermination des bilans de masse et des bilans hydrologiques, avec un pas de temps mensuel, sont présentées. Les résultats obtenus sur trois années hydrologiques (1991-1994) montrent une grande variabilité. Celle-ci est contrôlée surtout par l'extension de la période des précipitations au sein de la région chaude qui dure environ six mois. Les évènements ENSO (El Nino Southern Oscillation) sont associés à des bilans nettement négatifs, ce qui est démontré par la réponse du glacier à l'épisode ENSO de 1991-1992 et dans la reconstruction des bilans effectuée sur la base de données hydrologiques pour les deux dernières décennies. Le recul accéléré des glaciers tropicaux depuis les années 1980 est lié à la fois à une sucession d'évènements ENSO et au réchauffement athmosphérique. (Résumé d'auteur

From Bricks to Pajamas: The Law and Economics of Amateur Journalism

Weblogs have proliferated rapidly in recent years, attracting significant attention and generating important legal issues. Yet so far no coherent economic framework for addressing these issues exists. This Article begins to develop such a framework. It views blogs as the vanguard of what might be called amateur journalism. Because the Web and related technology have enabled low entry barriers, blogs can be an important source of specialized knowledge. However, bloggers do not work within a monitoring structure as in large news organizations, and individual blogs may be less accurate than conventional news sources. On the other hand, blogs as a whole are subject to strong self-correction mechanisms, including rapid feedback through comments on posts and by other blogs. Also, because most bloggers have low-powered incentives, regulation can easily deter them and thereby reduce the value of these self-correction and market mechanisms. The Article applies these insights to a variety of legal issues, including the journalist\u27s privilege, election laws, defamation and licensing laws, media ownership restrictions, copyright laws, and vicarious liability