Rhetoric versus Reality in Arbitration Jurisprudence: How the Supreme Court Flaunts and Flunks Contracts (and Why Contracts Teachers Need Not Teach the Cases)

Supreme Court rhetoric about the role of contracts and contract law in arbitration jurisprudence differs sharply from the reality of its applications. In the name of contracts, the Court administers a self-declared national policy favoring arbitration, a policy directly benefiting the judicial branch of government. This often puts the Court’s preferences ahead of those of contracting parties while declaring its mission as solely to enforce contracts in accordance with contract law. The Court thus cloaks in the rhetoric of volition a policy in tension with constitutionally-pedigreed access to justice and venerable principles of federalism. This Article documents the rhetoric-reality gap and explores why it exists and why it matters. The rhetoric-reality gap is attributable in part to a dilemma the Court created for itself: its national policy favoring arbitration is constitutionally-suspect unless people assent, yet letting people make what contracts they wish would prevent implementing the national policy. The jurisprudence diminishes the Court’s legitimacy, tempts defiance, creates doctrinal incoherence, and poses other costs. This Article calls for reconciling these conflicting positions rather than sustaining the status quo: the Court should either give up its national policy favoring arbitration and truly respect freedom of contract or come clean about its national policy’s real implications and acknowledge its narrow conception of contract and contract law.

Choosing Justices: How Presidents Decide

Presidents play the critical role in determining who will serve as justices on the Supreme Court and their decisions inevitably influence constitutional doctrine and judicial behavior long after their terms have ended. Notwithstanding the impact of these selections, scholars have focused relatively little attention on how presidents decide who to nominate. This article contributes to the literature in the area by advancing three arguments. First, it adopts an intermediate course between the works which tend to treat the subject historically without identifying recurring patterns and those which try to reduce the process to empirical formulas which inevitably obscure considerations shaping decision. The article argues that a more analytically useful approach views the selection as turning upon the interaction of three variables - pool, context and presidential idiosyncrasy - each of which consists of a variety of other factors. This article examines Supreme Court nominations since 1900 to develop these points. Use of that period illustrates the taxonomy described above yet it also exposes the dynamic nature of the process which leads to the article’s second mission. It explains how larger changes in other governmental institutions and in society have transformed the process by which presidents choose Court nominees. Those changes occurred independent of any formal constitutional amendment, thereby offering a case study in how constitutional institutions evolve in response to informal developments. Finally, the article argues that the changes in the process have increased the likelihood that presidents will nominate competent justices but lessens the prospects that they will choose potentially great jurists.

A Sense of Mission: The Alfred P. Sloan and Russell Sage Foundations’ Behavioral Economics Program, 1984-1992

The major catalyst of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s work in economics was the behavioral economics program of the Sloan and Russell Sage Foundations, which ran from 1984 to 1992. The paper first introduces the Sloan and Sage foundations and the background of the main protagnists involved. Subsequently, it explores the behavioral economics program from start to finish.

Disclosure – An Unappreciated Tool in the CFPB’s Arsenal

Title X of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (“Dodd-Frank”) establishes the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (“the Bureau”). Dodd-Frank defines a broad mission for the Bureau. According to the legislation, the Bureau will “implement and, where applicable, enforce federal consumer financial law consistently for the purpose of ensuring that all consumers have access to markets for consumer financial products and services and that markets for consumer financial products and services are fair, transparent, and competitive.” The Bureau has produced considerable anxiety in the consumer finance industry. Most of the anxiety has focused on two issues – who will head the Bureau and what will the Bureau do with the newly created power to ban “abusive” products. This article suggests that the financial services industry should be focused on a third question – what will the Bureau do with its power to regulate the disclosure of consumer financial services.

Strategic Research Planning in a Law School Setting

Strategic planning processes are by now familiar in many Universities and law faculties. Most often these operate at the highest level of generality and are aimed at articulating an institution’s overall strengths, direction and priorities for growth or improvement. The tools of strategic planning can also be deployed to focus attention on a specific dimension of a law school’s profile such as its research mission. This short paper will describe the effort to develop a strategic research plan at Osgoode Hall Law School, and will share experience about the challenges and potential benefits of such an enterprise.

Aligning Corporate Social Responsibility with Government Social Mission in Creating Sustainability Development

Practicing Medicine and Studying Law”: How Medical Schools Used to Have the Same Problems We Do and What We Can Learn from Their Efforts to Solve Them

This article seeks to help law schools develop their skills programs by highlighting the research medical schools have conducted in discovering the most effective methods of turning incoming students into practicing physicians. It also cautions that existing status inequalities at law schools between faculty who possess and can teach legal skills and those without such skills will make the task difficult and that these inequalities need to be appreciated in order to achieve effective results. On 10 December of 2010 the American Society of Law Teachers (“SALT”) held its biannual conference in Honolulu, Hawaii. The title of the conference was Teaching in a Transformative Era: The Law School of the Future It was my honor to give a presentation on a panel devoted to teaching skills within the legal curriculum. My co-panelists ably and expertly presented information on how skills training was currently marginalized in law schools in that it was taught through the low status legal, writing, and research faculty rather than the more prestigious and scholarly doctrinal or casebook faculty. Through citation to literature and independent research they themselves had conducted they showed how the task of teaching skills had been delegated to primarily female faculty members who held non-tenured positions and were almost always paid considerably less. My talk presented the steps medical schools have taken over the past ten years when faced with similar pressure to teach skills directly in the undergraduate portion of medical training, while they are in medical school, rather than rely on students picking-them up through observation when during the last two years of medical school when they are doing clinical rotations or after they begin their residencies. This article contributes to the conversation by expanding on how medical schools faced the curricular challenge of moving direct skills training into the undergraduate years and what they are doing now to meet that challenge. In so doing, it builds and expands on observations I made in a 2008 column for the Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics based on my experience as a full time faculty member at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston’s medical school and as an adjunct faculty member at Texas Tech University’s Medical School. Its goal is to provide a useful framework for legal educators as they work to integrate direct skills training throughout the law school curriculum. In so doing it not only gives examples of what medical schools are doing to teach skills but also how they developed these programs and what about their efforts are useful in the context of legal academe. Before embarking on this project, however, it is important for those advocating change in the legal curriculum to understand that while the task facing medical educators was, and is, strikingly similar to that now faced by legal academe, there are important differences which must be understood before making effective use of their experiences. Medical training has substantial subsidization by the Federal Government through the Medicare program which allows it the luxury of time not available in legal education. Also, it has always designed the curriculum around one core value: patient care. Any addition to or subtraction from the medical school curriculum is judged by the standard of whether it will make a student a better or worse doctor. It is my contention, and not necessarily criticism, that the main difference between medical and legal education is that law schools do not embrace client service as their core value and instead see themselves as places where students come to learn the law - not represent clients. Compare the mission statements of Yale Law School, my alma mater, with that of Yale Medical School. The Law School does not find room for the word “client” in 170 words of text. The primary educational purpose of Yale Law School is to train lawyers and to prepare its students for leadership positions in the public and private sectors both in the U.S. and globally. The primary scholarly role of Yale Law School is to encourage research in law and in interdisciplinary approaches to law and public policy. Throughout the school’s history, its teachers, students, and deans have taken a broad view of the role of law and lawyers in society. The school long has trained lawyers for public service and teaching as well as for private practice. Our students are expected to advance our knowledge and understanding of the law, to expand the reach of the law, and to inculcate knowledge about the central role that the rule of law plays in a free society. The professional orientation of the Law School is deeply enriched by an intellectual environment that embraces a wide variety of intellectual currents and is designed to produce lawyers who are creative, sensitive, and open to new ideas. While the Medical School does not put patient care first, they are at least present. “The primary educational purpose of Yale Law School is to train lawyers and to prepare its students for leadership positions in the public and private sectors both in the U.S. and globally. The primary scholarly role of Yale Law School is to encourage research in law and in interdisciplinary approaches to law and public policy” with that of Yale Medical School, “As a preeminent academic medical center that supports the highest-quality education, research, and patient care, the Yale School of Medicine will (1) educate and inspire scholars and future leaders who will advance the practice of medicine and the biomedical sciences; (2) advance medical knowledge to sustain and improve health and to alleviate suffering caused by illness and disease; and (3) provide outstanding care and service for patients in a compassionate and respectful manner.” These fundamental differences make it much harder for law schools to fully integrate skills training with the existing curriculum and it is not this article’s intent to minimize or evade the difficult of this task. The article will start with a brief overview of why it is necessary for law schools to integrate skills training and then, after a brief overview of the structure of medical education, will discuss how medical schools came to the decision of moving schools training into the undergraduate curriculum and what actions they have taken to do so. It will then compare the effort in medical schools to that of law schools with the intent of making it easier for those interested in using the experience of medical schools to integrate skills training into the law school curriculum. The purpose of this article was to provide resources for law school faculty members who want to integrate the skills of the practicing lawyer into today’s law school classroom by providing information about how medical schools have approached a similar task. In the last ten years, medical schools have been working to change a culture where skills were learned by observation and modeling into one where skills are taught intentionally and consistently starting in the first two years of medical school. This represents a significant change because even as medical school curriculum has evolved and changed over the past twenty-five years these pre-clinical years had focused on the acquisition of knowledge about the human body, not clinical skills. It has tried to present this information in the context of some significant differences between the resources available to medical schools which make the task of teaching skills earlier in the curriculum easier than the task will be for law schools. These advantages include a faculty which possesses current clinical skills and an extended period of subsidized apprenticeship.

Rural Entrepreneurship: A Conceptual Understanding with Special Reference to Small Business in Rural India

Many Indian companies including MNCs and other large players started developing business strategies to taped the untapped market like rural market in case of India but ultimately the winner would be the one with the required resources like man, money, machine, material, market, methods, mission and motivation also with the much needed innovative and creative ideas to tap the untapped market like Indian rural market. The findings of the secondary data review will help the stakeholders to know various positive aspects and the need of rural entrepreneurship. It may be helpful for the various agencies to formulate plans and policies to boost the rural entrepreneurship in India which may help to make the Indian rural market as a critical force in global economy.

Korea Investment Corporation: Its Origin and Evolution

In this paper, I give a detailed account of the creation and the evolution of Korea Investment Corporation(KIC) – a sovereign wealth fund established in 2005 by the Korean government. In doing so, I highlightthree of its unique features. First, the case of KIC effectively shows the problem of having an unclearmission statement, which allows the mission to evolve over time and multiple missions to coexist thatmay contradict each other. Second, it effectively reveals the typical conflicts that may arise between thecentral bank and the ministry involved when setting up a reserve-based sovereign wealth fund. Third, iteffectively shows how a sovereign wealth fund can be operated in a way that favors the bureaucrats andthe politicians.

Korea Investment Corporation: Its Origin and Evolution

In this paper, I give a detailed account of the creation and the evolution of Korea Investment Corporation (KIC) – a sovereign wealth fund established in 2005 by the Korean government. In doing so, I highlight three of its unique features. First, the case of KIC effectively shows the problem of having an unclear mission statement, which allows the mission to evolve over time and multiple missions to coexist that may contradict each other. Second, it effectively reveals the typical conflicts that may arise between the central bank and the ministry involved when setting up a reserve-based sovereign wealth fund. Third, it effectively shows how a sovereign wealth fund can be operated in a way that favors the bureaucrats and the politicians.