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Clery Act fines adjusted for inflation
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From the Editor-in-Chief Doroghazi, John M
Franchise law journal,
04/2024, Letnik:
43, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
First up is an article from Jeffrey Mandell, Isaac Brodkey, and James Egle entitled Understanding the Grantors Burden: Good Cause Under the Wisconsin Fair Dealership Law. ...Thomas Telesca, Rachel ...Morgenstern, and Briana A. Enck-Smith have catalogued common contractual provisions that have outsized effects in franchise disputes and provide advice on best practices for these provisions in Contract Provisions That Can Make or Break Your Case. ...new authors Tyler Hartney and Silar Petersen provide readers with some uncommon strategies for recovering attorneys' fees in franchise disputes in the aptly titled article Attorney Fees in Franchise Disputes: Atypical Mechanisms for Obtaining a Fee Award Finally, we end with a discussion of every defendant's greatest fear: punitive damages.
We predict that firms’ attempts to reduce litigation risk can inadvertently worsen financial report readability by increasing reports’ size, complexity, and altering their linguistic characteristics. ...We find that litigation risk reduces report readability. Readability worsens after firms experience a securities class action. This persists for several years after lawsuit resolution. To alleviate endogeneity concerns, we show that the litigation experience of a firm's managers and directors at other firms impacts readability. We also find that firms adjust readability around litigation flashpoints. Using an SEC rule change as an exogenous shock, we show that adjustments to readability can moderate firm litigation risk.
Enforcing a firm's patents is crucial for defending its competitive advantage. CEOs are central for making these strategic decisions but we know little about how their individual incentives shape ...their decision-making. We integrate theory from outcome-based CEO compensation designs into models explaining firms' decisions to become plaintiffs in patent litigation. Based on how compensation shapes time horizons and risk-taking of CEOs, we predict that CEO compensation tied to stock increases the firm's likelihood to enforce patents, while bonuses and stock options reduce it. Further, we reason that the tenacity of patent disputes in an industry creates a boundary condition for the effects of CEO compensation because they curtail the degree of agency that CEOs have for incorporating their personal incentives when making litigation decisions for the firm. We test these hypotheses for 2302 US firms with 4420 different CEOs and 3451 patent litigation cases between 1997 and 2015 and find support for all hypotheses with the exception of the boundary condition for stocks as CEO compensation. These findings advance existing theory on firms' decision-making on patent litigation by explicating how firm and CEO incentives can diverge with direct consequences for the likelihood of litigation to occur.
•The patent litigation of firms is not merely a legal or organizational decision but substantially influenced by the individual incentives of their CEOs.•Firms are less likely to file for patent litigation when the compensation packages of their CEOs incentivize short-term results and risk-taking.•Bonuses and stock options as part of CEO compensation packages decrease their firms’ likelihood to become plaintiffs in patent litigation while compensation in stocks increases it.•The tenacity of patent disputes in a firm’s industry dampens the effects of bonuses and stock options in CEO compensation.
•We examine the effects of a judicial reform that separated the origin and adjudication of administrative cases.•Local governments are more likely to lose after the reform.•The reform leads to ...increased case filings, prolonged trial time, and enhanced judicial quality.•It also impacts governments and citizens’ legal awareness, firm entry, and public attitudes toward governments.
There is a long-standing debate in the literature about the effectiveness of strengthening judicial independence in developing countries with weak rule of law. This paper exploits a recent Chinese judicial reform in administrative litigation, which changed the jurisdiction rule from intra-regional to trans-regional, to estimate the effects of improved judicial independence on protecting private entities against potential abuses of public authority. We find a significant increase in the probability of successfully suing local governments after the reform, especially when the defendants are more powerful government departments and when the plaintiffs are individual citizens with fewer legal resources than firms. But this effect is more limited for higher-level governments. The reform also results in increased case filings, prolonged trial time, and enhanced judicial quality. In addition, it raises the awareness of both governments and citizens about the rule of law, increases firm entry, and worsens general public attitudes toward local governments, at least in the short term. Our study highlights trans-regional jurisdiction as a new source of judicial independence in a party state and its potential limitations.
On March 13, 1956, ninety-nine members of the United States Congress promulgated the Declaration of Constitutional Principles, popularly known as the Southern Manifesto. Reprinted here, the Southern ...Manifesto formally stated opposition to the landmark United State Supreme Court decisionBrown v. Board of Education, and the emergent civil rights movement. This statement allowed the white South to preventBrown'simmediate full-scale implementation and, for nearly two decades, set the slothful timetable and glacial pace of public school desegregation. The Southern Manifesto also provided the Southern Congressional Delegation with the means to stymie federal voting rights legislation, so that the dismantling of Jim Crow could be managed largely on white southern terms.
In the wake of theBrowndecision that declared public school segregation unconstitutional, seminal events in the early stages of the civil rights movement--like the Emmett Till lynching, the Montgomery bus boycott, and the Autherine Lucy riots at the University of Alabama brought the struggle for black freedom to national attention. Orchestrated by United States Senator Richard Brevard Russell Jr. of Georgia, the Southern Congressional Delegation in general, and the United States Senate's Southern Caucus in particular, fought vigorously and successfully to counter the initial successes of civil rights workers and maintain Jim Crow. The South's defense of white supremacy culminated with this most notorious statement of opposition to desegregation.The Southern Manifesto: Massive Resistance and the Fight to Preserve Segregationnarrates this single worst episode of racial demagoguery in modern American political history and considers the statement's impact upon both the struggle for black freedom and the larger racial dynamics of postwar America.
The licensing of university technologies to private firms has become an important part of the technology transfer mission of many universities. An inherent challenge for the technology licensing of ...universities is that potential licensees find it difficult to judge the early stage technologies and their ultimate commercial value. We reason that patent litigation against universities can have unintended signaling effects about the commercial value of its technologies and results in increased licensing income for the university. We ground this hypothesis in theory integrating signaling mechanisms from patent enforcement research into theoretical models explaining university technology licensing. Within our logic, the public and costly nature of patent litigation against universities creates strong, credible signals to potential licensees about the technologies of a university even if the signal was not created for that specific purpose. We isolate the signaling mechanism that is central to our theorizing by exploring two moderation factors that reveal additional information to potential licensees, i.e. the licensing track-record of the university and whether the lawsuit involves private firms as co-defendants. We test our theory with a unique dataset of 157 US universities and the 1408 patent infringement cases in which they were involved as defendants over the period 2005–2016. Results show that defending against claims of patent infringement enhances technology licensing revenues, particularly when universities are already adept at licensing technology and when they are co-defendants with private firms.
•Universities defending versus patent infringement claims signal the value of their IP.•The unintended signaling effect leads to higher licensing income for universities.•Signaling effect is stronger for Universities with a better licensing track record.•The signaling effect is stronger when Universities co-defend with private firms.•Defending versus patent infringement claims can boost university technology licensing.
This study examines the impact of geographical proximity to government agencies on corporate litigation activities. Utilizing an extensive dataset comprising corporate lawsuits and government ...relocations spanning two decades (1998–2018), a difference-in-differences approach was implemented to explore the causal nexus between the distance of local governments from firm headquarters and judicial engagement. The empirical evidence reveals that closer proximity to local governments significantly reduces the judicial participation of firms. Moreover, the effect is spatially attenuated, with a stronger impact on firms located nearer to local governments. Our mechanism analysis suggests that geographical proximity strengthens the value of information communication between the government and enterprises, increasing the attention of companies towards government actions and reducing the impact of policy uncertainty, thereby making it possible to adopt dispute resolution mechanisms other than litigation. Meanwhile, the political favoritism exhibited by the government after becoming closer also to some extent suppresses the enthusiasm of companies to participate in judicial proceedings.
•Examines the impact of geographical proximity to government agencies on corporate litigation activities.•Closer proximity to local governments significantly reduced corporate litigation.•The impact on state-owned enterprise is limited.•Government proximity reduces corporate lawsuits by making firms more aware of government actions and policy risks.•Political favoritism, as firms get closer to the government, suppresses the participation in judicial proceedings.
We challenge the prevalent claim that courts can only influence policy by adjudicating disputes. Instead, we theorize the shadow effect of courts: policy makers preemptively altering policies in ...anticipation of possible judicial review. While American studies imply that preemptive reforms hinge on litigious interest groups pressuring policy makers who support judicial review, we advance a comparative theory that flips these presumptions. In less litigious and more hostile political contexts, policy makers may instead weaponize preemptive reforms to preclude bureaucratic conflicts from triggering judicial oversight and starve courts of the cases they need to build their authority. By allowing some preemptive judicial influence to resist direct judicial interference, recalcitrant policy makers demonstrate that shadow effects are not an unqualified good for courts. We illustrate our theory by tracing how a major welfare reform in Norway was triggered by a conflict within its Ministry of Labor and a government resistance campaign targeting a little-known international court.
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