From public lands to beaches and to data, our society is rich with resources purposefully kept in the public domain. Common resources provide profound economic, social, and democratic value to individuals, communities, and society as a whole. These, however, depend on the public’s ability to...

This Article offers a theory of secured credit that aims to answer fundamental questions that have long percolated in the bankruptcy and secured transactions literatures. Are security interests property rights, contract rights, or something else? Why do secured creditors enjoy a priority right...

This introduction to Methodology in Private Law Theory: Between New Private Law and Rechtsdogmatik (Thilo Kuntz and Paul B. Miller, eds., Oxford University Press, forthcoming) provides a thematic overview methodological questions and positions taken in contemporary American and German private...

In this article, I develop the concept of "ownership piercing." I use the expression to suggest that courts engage in a process of evaluative reasoning to clarify who owns property rights and controls the limited liability company. I show under what circumstances courts should pierce ownership....

In this Article, we propose legal reforms to empower shareholders in public corporations. Most shareholders participate in corporate governance in three ways: they vote, they sell, and they sue. We would expand the menu for shareholders in public corporations by enabling them to contract using...

Corporate law has embraced private ordering -- tailoring a firm’s corporate governance to meet its individual needs. Firms are increasingly adopting firm-specific governance through dual-class voting structures, forum selection provisions and tailored limitations on the duty of loyalty. Courts...

In this comment on Professors Gilson's and Schwartz' paper “Constraints on private benefits of control: Ex ante control mechanisms versus ex post transaction review,” I consider their proposal to permit contractual arrangements over private benefits of control (PBC) obtained by controlling...

It will be some time before we can fully appreciate the radical nature of the socio-economic effects produced by the global crisis of the end of the first decade of the twenty first century. However, it is already evident that the two leading market economic systems of the Western world – that...