Some Economic Insights into Application of Payments Doctrine: \u3cem\u3eWalker-Thomas\u3c/em\u3e Revisited

Contractual relations frequently involve multiple transactions, which might give rise either to a single aggregate debt, or else to multiple differing obligations. This conflict creates the application of payments problem. Unsurprisingly, the common law developed long-standing rules for the application of partial payments to multiple, but remedially distinguishable debts. The subject is made timely again by the recent enactments of the 1999 revision of Article 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code. Article 9 instructs courts how to solve the application of payments problem when some partial payments might satisfy “purchase money” security interests. The enactments repealed the common law application of payment rules for consumer purchase money transactions, and invited courts to reinvent consumer payment application rules from scratch. This article uses Williams v. Walker Thomas Furniture Company, a classic aberrant consumer contract case, to provide the first rough economic cut at the impact of the new enactments to Article 9 and to illuminate the challenges the courts will face as they approach the new task of developing consumer payment application rules

Rehabilitation, Redistribution or Dissipation: The Evidence for Choosing Among Bankruptcy Hypotheses

This Article addresses that new redistributive view of bankruptcy in its two most typical versions-which I denominate the Rehabilitative and Pure Redistribution hypotheses, respectively-and argues that neither is consistent with the existing empirical data concerning corporate reorganizations. It then proposes a new thesis about bankruptcy which is inspired not only by the existing data, but also by new theoretical insights: that measures which avoid some kinds of market failures, such as externalities, entail their own kinds of costs, e.g., by fostering holdout behavior. The new thesis-that bankruptcy law tends to waste resources- I denominate the Dissipative thesis

Some Economic Insights into Application of Payments Doctrine: \u3cem\u3eWalker-Thomas\u3c/em\u3e Revisited

Contractual relations frequently involve multiple transactions, which might give rise either to a single aggregate debt, or else to multiple differing obligations. This conflict creates the application of payments problem. Unsurprisingly, the common law developed long-standing rules for the application of partial payments to multiple, but remedially distinguishable debts. The subject is made timely again by the recent enactments of the 1999 revision of Article 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code. Article 9 instructs courts how to solve the application of payments problem when some partial payments might satisfy “purchase money” security interests. The enactments repealed the common law application of payment rules for consumer purchase money transactions, and invited courts to reinvent consumer payment application rules from scratch. This article uses Williams v. Walker Thomas Furniture Company, a classic aberrant consumer contract case, to provide the first rough economic cut at the impact of the new enactments to Article 9 and to illuminate the challenges the courts will face as they approach the new task of developing consumer payment application rules

The Fantastic Wisconsylvania Zero-Bureaucratic-Cost School of Bankruptcy Theory: A Comment

In two recently published articles, Wisconsin Law Professor Lynn LoPucki and Pennsylvania Law Professor Elizabeth Warren, nearly simultaneously, fired the latest shots in one of academia\u27s hottest ongoing debates: whether any good reason for having bankruptcy law exists. Justice Holmes once opined that the future belonged to the lawyer skilled in statistics and economics. LoPucki and Warren apparently agree about statistics but argue that, in a world with positive transaction costs, economic theory has little to contribute to our understanding about the justifications for bankruptcy law. I write to highlight what one might easily overlook in LoPucki\u27s and Warren\u27s pieces. As they assail the usefulness of economic analysis, particularly analysis that begins by assuming zero transaction costs, they simultaneously inaugurate a new analytic tradition: the Fantastic Wisconsylvania School of Zero-Bureaucratic-Costs. They use their new theory to argue that markets are costly and thus are of limited or no use to people who want to take businesses apart or to reconfigure them. Corporate reorganizations, they urge, require the costless and perfectly functioning political appointee, the bankruptcy judge. The birth of this jurisprudential school is too significant to be permitted to pass unheralded

Groping and Coping in the Shadow of Murphy\u27s Law: Bankruptcy Theory and the Elementary Economics of Failure

Part I briefly examines the conventional explanation for bankruptcy\u27s defining characteristic, its default distributional rule. It concludes that the conventional explanation is insufficiently informative for us to tell whether the Bankruptcy Code (Code) is actually working or not. Part II argues that the only existing systematic attempt to explain bankruptcy law, the so-called Creditors\u27 Bargain Theory, is inadequate for two reasons. First, the predictions it generates are belied by real-world events. Second, it is mistaken on theoretical grounds, primarily because it ignores how debtors are likely to manage their assets. Part III presents the Murphian theory of failing behavior, the hypothesis that the debtors are efficient liquidators of their own declining affairs. This Part shows how both solvent and insolvent debtors faced with losses can be expected to manage their assets in optimal ways without bankruptcy legislation. Part IV summarizes the conclusions drawn from elementary Murphian theory and suggests another weakness in the Creditors\u27 Bargain model: it disregards the benefits of having debtors distribute their own assets. From the existing theory, it projects reasons for believing that optimal distributions are likely to occur without the intervention of bankruptcy. It ends by speculating on why we are tempted to adopt and then tinker with bankruptcy law, even in the face of the O\u27Conner Construct ( You can\u27t fine-tune a mess )

Poke Your Nose into Your Clients\u27 Businesses (If You Want to Understand their Contracts)

Thirty years ago Grant Gilmore argued that “Contract” was dead. This lecture, delivered as 2004 Godfrey Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Maine School of Law, considers the cause of death. Since the expired doctrines arose in a common law process, the lecture argues their demise resulted from the failings of lawyers, especially lawyers\u27 commitment to wooden, formalist legal methods. I explore some of the reasons why lawyers became committed to these methods, and argue that even were nineteenth-century formalistic practices resurrected, modern lawyers must still be prepared to understand the potential effects business contexts might have in contract disputes and negotiations. To prepare themselves, lawyers must give up legalistic, formal method and become willing to learn something about their clients\u27 businesses. The lecture concludes by suggesting that sensitivity to social context is a likely requirement of effective lawyering, not merely when dealing with contracts, but in practice involving construction of legal texts generally

Telescope to Observe Planetary Systems (TOPS): a high throughput 1.2-m visible telescope with a small inner working angle

The Telescope to Observe Planetary Systems (TOPS) is a proposed space mission to image in the visible (0.4-0.9 micron) planetary systems of nearby stars simultaneously in 16 spectral bands (resolution R~20). For the ~10 most favorable stars, it will have the sensitivity to discover 2 R_E rocky planets within habitable zones and characterize their surfaces or atmospheres through spectrophotometry. Many more massive planets and debris discs will be imaged and characterized for the first time. With a 1.2m visible telescope, the proposed mission achieves its power by exploiting the most efficient and robust coronagraphic and wavefront control techniques. The Phase-Induced Amplitude Apodization (PIAA) coronagraph used by TOPS allows planet detection at 2 lambda/d with nearly 100% throughput and preserves the telescope angular resolution. An efficient focal plane wavefront sensing scheme accurately measures wavefront aberrations which are fed back to the telescope active primary mirror. Fine wavefront control is also performed independently in each of 4 spectral channels, resulting in a system that is robust to wavefront chromaticity.Comment: 12 pages, SPIE conference proceeding, May 2006, Orlando, Florid

James Webb Space Telescope Optical Telescope Element Mirror Coatings

James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Optical Telescope Element (OTE) mirror coating program has been completed. The science goals of the JWST mission require a uniform, low stress, durable optical coating with high reflectivity over the JWST spectral region. The coating has to be environmentally stable, radiation resistant and compatible with the cryogenic operating environment. The large size, 1.52 m point to point, light weight, beryllium primary mirror (PM) segments and flawless coating process during the flight mirror coating program that consisted coating of 21 flight mirrors were among many technical challenges. This paper provides an overview of the JWST telescope mirror coating program. The paper summarizes the coating development program and performance of the flight mirrors