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Principal (commercial law)

About: Principal (commercial law) is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 1579 publications have been published within this topic receiving 35379 citations. The topic is also known as: Principal (commercial law).


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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The previous literature has shown that if the agent has limited assets, the vicarious liability law under a strict liability rule can effectively make the principal monitor her agent, and induce the agent to take more care, which thereby reduces the social cost.

47 citations

Posted Content
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors propose a test of "foreseeable copying" to limit copyright's grant of exclusivity to situations where a copier's use was reasonably foreseeable to the creator at the time of creation.
Abstract: Copyright law's principal justification has for long been the theory of creator incentives. Creators are presumed to be rational utility-maximizers and therefore induced to create by the mere prospect of controlling a future market for their yet-to-be-created works. Yet, current copyright doctrine does surprisingly little to give effect to this theory. None of its current doctrines enable courts to circumscribe a creator's entitlement by reference to the idea of incentives and the limitations inherent therein. As a consequence, copyright's grant of exclusivity is presumed to extend to all markets and uses for a work, whether or not they were capable of forming any part of a creator's incentive. Through its allocation of costs and benefits, the common law too relies on providing actors with incentives to behave in certain ways. Unlike copyright law however, the common law recognizes the existence of a clear outer limit to its incentive structure and attempts to give effect to this limit through the concept of 'foreseeability'. Premised on the idea that individuals do not process consequences that are temporally or causally far removed from their actions, foreseeability requires courts to eliminate from the liability calculus certain low-probability occurrences when they are unlikely to have influenced an individual's decision at the time of action. Foreseeability thus represents a cognition-based doctrinal limit to the behavioral modification that the common law attempts to induce. This Article argues that if copyright law is to remain true to its theory of incentives, it needs to pay closer attention to the way in which incentives actually influence creative decision-making and internalize the idea that creators, like actors elsewhere, are incapable of fully anticipating all future contingencies associated with their actions, that in turn limits the effectiveness of incentives. To this end, it proposes a test of 'foreseeable copying' to limit copyright's grant of exclusivity to situations where a copier's use was reasonably foreseeable to the creator at the time of creation --the point when the incentive is meant to operate. Adopting a test of foreseeability is thus likely to better align copyright law with its underlying purpose and provide courts with a mechanism by which to give effect to copyright's theory of incentives in individual cases --thereby according it more than just rhetorical significance.

45 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Analysis of principal-agent contracts when the risk-averse agent's action generates information that is not directly verifiable but is used to make a risky decision in a formulation more general than previously studied focuses on the impact on the decision made and the contract used.
Abstract: This paper analyses principal-agent contracts when the agent's action generates information not directly verifiable but used by the agent to make a risky decision. It considers a more general formulation than those studied previously, focusing on the impact on the decision made and the contract between principal and agent. It establishes a precise sense in which distorting decisions reduces the risk borne by a risk-averse agent and conditions under which implementing an optimal decision rule imposes no substantive restrictions on the contract. The paper also uses an application to bidding to supply a good or service to illustrate those results and derive additional ones. A risk-neutral agent with limited liability may optimally choose lower, less risky bids or higher, more risky bids, according to which relaxes the limited liability constraint. There are also natural conditions under which optimal contracts are monotone, possibly with flat sections, like stock option rewards.

45 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors locate and describe the principal users of the civil court system and the matters these users want adjudicated, and describe their demands on the civil courts to settle their disputes, enforce the performance of obligations and direct the redistribution of resources.
Abstract: People and organi.ations make demands on the civil courts to settle their disputes, enforce the performance of obligations, and direct the redistribution of resources. Although the potential number of users of civil court proceedings would seem to be as numerous as individuals and organi7ations in a society, only some individuals and some groups use the civil courts. Furthermore, from the entire catalogue of remedies provided by law, users differentially present matters for litigation. Not all types of legal actions are demanded. Nor are the most frequent plaintiffs the most frequent defendants; some litigants predominate as plaintiffs, while others appear most often as defendants. Because of this nonrandom appearance of litigants and subjects of litigation, civil courts of first instance are daily exposed to claims of some, but not all of the people. The object of this paper is to locate and describe the principal users of the civil court system and the matters these users want adjudicated.

44 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors question whether those outside law should take law seriously as an intellectual discipline capable of contributing to the development of epistemological thinking in the natural and social sciences.
Abstract: This article questions whether those outside law should take law seriously as an intellectual discipline capable of contributing to the development of epistemological thinking in the natural and social sciences. The discipline is approached from a diachronic and synchronic position with emphasis on the civil law tradition. It will be shown that the governing paradigm in legal studies has always been the ‘authority paradigm’, which results in law being closer to theology than to the social sciences. Its principal actors (judges) make assertions free from the normal constraints of scientific method; accordingly, the idea of a ‘legal science’ (imported into the common law tradition after 1846) must be treated with great caution. It is not a science dedicated to enquiring about the nature of the physical world, society or social relations. Its epistemological development remains trapped in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: thus, as a discipline, law has little to offer other social sciences.

44 citations


Performance
Metrics
No. of papers in the topic in previous years
YearPapers
20222
202130
202037
201953
201839
201755