The decision to request a preliminary injunction—a court order that bans a party from certain actions until their lawfulness are ascertained in a final court ruling at trial—is an important litigation instrument in many areas of the law including antitrust, copyright, patents, trademarks,...

Consumer advocates won a victory with the passage of the Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act of 2009. (Credit Card Act). The Credit Card Act bans certain pricing practices that were confusing to credit card users. Ironically, the seeds of this legislative victory may...

Notwithstanding the considerable media and regulatory attention private equity receives, there continues to be substantial confusion about what private equity does and whether this creates value. Calls for more aggressive regulation of the industry reflect a skeptical view of private equity as...

In the early models of incomplete contract neither party used to invest in the subject matter of the contract; those models primarily kept their focus on analyzing the effect of legal rules on parties' incentives to trade or to breach. The modern models stretched beyond that to include value...

This paper provides risk/reward evaluation and legal analysis of foreign investing under Cuban Law No. 118 (2014). Section I addresses dynamic changes in Cuba since 2008. Section II examines reforms of Cuban foreign investment laws. Section III explores investment options such as import/export,...

M&A transactions are governed by contracts that exhibit constrained variation – they are negotiated, yet full of boilerplate, tailored, yet full of patterns and regularities. This paper (a chapter of the Research Handbook on Mergers and Acquisitions, forthcoming) reviews the suite of contracts...

In standard models of contracts, efficient incentives require the promisor to pay damages for non-performance and the promisee to receive no damages. To give efficient incentives to both parties, we propose a novel contract requiring the promisor to pay damages for nonperformance to a third...

Although the pure economic loss rule has been remarkably durable in the common law, it suffers from a theoretical deficit. The rule has not been properly framed within the broader context of Anglo-American political economy. Any theory must recognize that the rule fundamentally deals with...

We examine commission splits between listing and selling agents in real estate transactions. We construct a theoretical model to show that agency problems arise when a listing agent attempts to maximize his or her payoff while setting the commission split. Mitigation to these agency problems can...

Property rights provide incentives to create information but also incentives to hoard it before award of protection. Even after award, others who might supplement that idea lack bargaining power until they too secure property rights. An unintended consequence is to slow, not hasten, progress...