Commercial Law

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The University of Idaho College of Law seeks to fill a tenure-track or tenured faculty position beginning in the Fall of 2020 in the area of Commercial Law for its Moscow location. Both entry-level and lateral candidates are encouraged to apply. In addition to courses in Sales and Property Security, the faculty member will be expected to teach two additional courses – which may include Bankruptcy, Payment Systems, Real Estate Transactions, and/or State Debtor-Creditor Law – according to the interest of the faculty member and the needs of the College of Law. Candidates must have (1) a J.D. from an ABA-accredited school or the equivalent; (2) a distinguished academic record; (3) a record or the promise of teaching excellence; (4) a record or the promise of scholarly productivity; and (5) a record or the promise of expertise in the area of Commercial Law. Preference will be given to candidates with (1) post-J.D. practice, clerking, or teaching experience; and (2) post-J.D. experience related to Commercial Law and other courses listed above. Situated in the beautiful Pacific Northwest, the University of Idaho is a comprehensive research institution. Information about the College of Law is available on its website at https://www.uidaho.edu/law. Interested…

We’re a month away from our second annual Business Law Professor Blog CLE, hosted at the University of Tennessee on Friday, September 14, 2018. We’ll discuss our latest research and receive comments from UT faculty and students. I’ve entitled my talk Beyond Bitcoin: Leveraging Blockchain for Corporate Governance, Corporate Social Responsibility, and Enterprise Risk Management, and will blog more about that after I finish the article. This is a really long post, but it’s chock full of helpful links for novices and experts alike and highlights some really interesting work from our colleagues at other law schools.

Two weeks ago, I posted some resources to help familiarize you with blockchain. Here’s a relatively simple definition from John Giordani at Forbes:

Blockchain is a public register in which transactions between two users belonging to the same network are stored in a secure, verifiable and permanent way. The data relating to the exchanges are saved inside cryptographic blocks, connected in a hierarchical manner to each other. This creates an endless chain of data blocks — hence the name blockchain — that allows you to trace and verify all the transactions you have ever made. The primary function of a…

[Please keep in mind as you read this post that my daughter is a Starbucks partner.  Any pro-Starbucks bias in this post is unintended.  But you should factor in my affiliation accordingly.]

Maybe it’s just me, but the publicity around the recent suit against Starbucks for putting too much ice in their iced beverages made me think of Goldilocks and her reactions to that porridge, those chairs, and those beds.  First it was McDonald’s, where the coffee was too hot.  Now it’s Starbucks, where the coffee is too cold–or, more truthfully, is too watered down from frozen water . . . .  (And apparently I missed a Starbucks suit earlier this year on under-filing lattes . . . .)  

Different types of tort suits, I know.  I always felt bad about the injury to the woman in the McDonald’s case, although the fault issue was truly questionable.  The recent Starbucks case just seems wrong in so many ways, however.  This is a consumer dispute that is best addressed by other means.  I admit to believing this most recent suit is actually an abuse of our court system.

How might a customer who is truly concerned about a substandard beverage attempt to remedy the wrong?

Today I will present on a panel with colleagues that spent a week with me this summer in Guatemala meeting with indigenous peoples, village elders, NGOs, union leaders, the local arm of the Chamber of Commerce, a major law firm, government officials, human rights defenders, and those who had been victimized by mining companies. My talk concerns the role of corporate social responsibility in Guatemala, but I will also discuss the complex symbiotic relationship between state and non-state actors in weak states that are rich in resources but poor in governance. I plan to use two companies as case studies. 

The first corporate citizen, REPSA (part of the Olmeca firm), is a Guatemalan company that produces African palm oil. This oil is used in health and beauty products, ice cream, and biofuels, and because it causes massive deforestation and displacement of indigenous peoples it is also itself the subject of labeling legislation in the EU. REPSA is a signatory of the UN Global Compact, the world’s largest CSR initiative. Despite its CSR credentials, some have linked REPSA with the assassination last month of a professor and activist who had publicly protested against the company’s alleged pollution of rivers with…

Has Wal-Mart reformed? Last week I blogged about whether conscious consumers or class actions can really change corporate behavior, especially in the areas of corporate social responsibility or human rights. I ended that post by asking whether Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest gun dealer, had bowed down to pressure from activist groups when it announced that it would stop selling assault rifles despite the fact that gun sales are rising (not falling as Wal-Mart claims). Fellow blogger Ann Lipton did a great post about the company’s victory over shareholder Trinity over a proposal related to the sale of dangerous products (guns with high capacity magazines). There doesn’t appear to be anything in the 2015 proxy that would necessitate even the consideration of a change that Wal-Mart fought through the Third Circuit to avoid.

So why the change? Is it due to the growing public weariness over mass shootings? Did they feel the sting after Senator Chris Murphy praised them for ceasing the sale of Confederate flags but called them out on their gun sales? Even the demands of a Senator won’t overcome the apparent lack of political will to enact more strict gun control, so fear of legislation is not…