Restrictions on Forum-Selection Clauses in Franchise Agreements and the Federal Arbitration Act: Is State Law Preempted?

The use of forum-selection clauses in contracts continues to increase. Emboldened by the Supreme Court\u27s endorsement of forum- selection clauses, large companies now frequently use these clauses in a variety of contracts. Contracting parties use these clauses in part to ensure that the parties can resolve any dispute in a convenient forum. Often, however, a party inserts a forum-selection clause to limit liability by increasing the barriers to litigation or arbitration. Typically, the party inserting the forum-selection clause has superior bargaining power and inserts into the contract a clause designating a forum remote to the other party, where any dispute over the contract will be heard. In this scenario, the other party to the contract, if seeking redress for a breach of the contract, must travel to a distant and unfamiliar jurisdiction to have the claim heard, often before the opposing party\u27s home court. When the party seeking redress is unsophisticated and has no wealth of resources, the costs associated with bringing a suit can be prohibitive. Thus, the party inserting the forum-selection clause is less likely to be sued or held liable for a breach. In recent years, businesses have begun using a special kind of forum-selection clause: an arbitration clause which provides that any dispute will be resolved in binding arbitration. Sometimes parties use these clauses to ensure that an expert will decide the dispute or to avoid the cost and inconvenience of litigation. Again, however, parties often use arbitration clauses to force a weaker party to seek redress in a remote, unfamiliar forum. Forum-selection clauses and arbitration clauses are common in franchise contracts. In the typical franchise contract, the franchisor is a large, national corporation, represented by sophisticated legal counsel. The franchisee is an individual, often unsophisticated, and almost always unrepresented by legal counsel at the time of contracting. The contract is presented to the franchisee on a take-it- or-leave-it basis. If the franchisee objects to the terms the franchisor can usually find another willing franchisee. The contract is several pages long, with the arbitration/forum-selection clause hidden beneath boilerplate legalese. These circumstances provide a great incentive for franchisors to use the forum-selection clause as a weapon to limit the franchisee\u27s legal recourse. The franchisees, often unsophisticated and not represented by legal counsel, are likely not to read the clause or to understand fully its implications. Even if the franchisee does recognize the clause\u27s significance, little or no opportunity to change it will exist. In response to this type of overreaching by franchisors, several states have adopted laws that require arbitration or litigation over a franchise contract to occur in the franchisee\u27s home state and which void contractual provisions that provide otherwise. These laws are often enacted as part of a state\u27s franchise laws, which generally are designed to protect franchisees from unfair contracts and unfair treatment by franchisors who have superior bargaining power. The statutes restricting forum-selection clauses are specifically aimed at protecting the franchisee from having to pursue redress of a breach of contract in a remote forum.\u270 Many states have recently passed these laws (or have promulgated them in state courts), and commentators predict that this trend will continue

The Efficient Implementation of Correction Procedure via Reconstruction with GPU Computing

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has long been a useful tool to model fluid flow problems across many engineering disciplines, and while problem size, complexity, and difficulty continue to expand, the demands for robustness and accuracy grow. Furthermore, generating high-order accurate solutions has escalated the required computational resources, and as problems continue to increase in complexity, so will computational needs such as memory requirements and calculation time for accurate flow field prediction. To improve upon computational time, vast amounts of computational power and resources are employed, but even over dozens to hundreds of central processing units (CPUs), the required computational time to formulate solutions can be weeks, months, or longer, which is particularly true when generating high-order accurate solutions over large computational domains. One response to lower the computational time for CFD problems is to implement graphical processing units (GPUs) with current CFD solvers. GPUs have illustrated the ability to solve problems orders of magnitude faster than their CPU counterparts with identical accuracy. The goal of the presented work is to combine a CFD solver and GPU computing with the intent to solve complex problems at a high-order of accuracy while lowering the computational time required to generate the solution. The CFD solver should have high-order spacial capabilities to evaluate small fluctuations and fluid structures not generally captured by lower-order methods and be efficient for the GPU architecture. This research combines the high-order Correction Procedure via Reconstruction (CPR) method with compute unified device architecture (CUDA) from NVIDIA to reach these goals. In addition, the study demonstrates accuracy of the developed solver by comparing results with other solvers and exact solutions. Solving CFD problems accurately and quickly are two factors to consider for the next generation of solvers. GPU computing is a step forward for the CFD community in solving both current and up-coming problems fast and with high accuracy

Sulfur in West Texas, its geology and economics

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