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).

The agency challenge: How Woolley, Woodley, and other cases rearranged the hotel-management landscape

Abstract: A series of court cases have redefined the relationship between hotel owners and their management companies and their frachisors. Beginning with a 1991 California decision, courts have determined that hotel-management firms are agents for the owners with whom they contract—even if the management contract says otherwise. In part, a key indication of agency is when one party provides services to the other for a fee—which is the nearly universal arrangement in a management contract. Two key aspects of agency have tripped up such industry giants as Embassy Suites, Hyatts, Marriott, Radisson, and Sheraton. The first element of agency is that the principal (i.e, the owner) can dismits the agent at any time, despite what the parties' contract says. Second, the management company as agent is required to act in the principal's best interest. So, when a Washington, D.C., jury determined that some practices common in the hotel industry are not in the owner's best interest, that jury ordered Sheraton to pay compensatory and punitive damages to the hotel's owners. Franchisors may also be considered as “agents” when they services to their licenses—as occurs, for instance, when hotel chains provide reservation services for a franchise. Following the logic of the management-contract cases, a New York court determined that Radisson was an agent for a hotel in that city, even though it did not operate the hotel itself, because it did provide a serve (the reservation system) for a fee. Taken together, the lesson to be learned from the cases reviewed in this article is that, no matter what the owner-manager contract states on paper, it is the characteristics of the relationship and existing legal precedent that will dictate the terms during any dispute.

Agency Problems and Political Institutions

Abstract: To a very large extent, politics is agency. Indeed, agent-principal relationships pervade public and public-private behavior. This paper reviews the extensive but not yet integrated literature applying agency concepts to political settings. This includes agency in definitions of politics or political science; the state as agent and as consisting of agents; agents in the state, i.e., representatives and officials; agency in the relation between constituencies and government; bureaucrats as agents; agency in implementation and compliance; and agency in one functional area of government that has recently seen a great deal of scholarly attention, regulation. An "agency problems" approach to studying political and other agency institutions is proposed. A typology of core agency problems is presented that (unlike the majority of the economics literature) clearly defines the key dimensions of moral hazard and adverse selection. "Principal side" and "agent side" functional problems of agency are identified and discussed; the functional analysis produces another typology that may be employed to develop both theory and prescription in agency settings. Particular problems are displayed almost like games (e.g., the "Major General's problem"), reflecting their syndrome-like features. Three examples of the explicit application of the agency approach to political institutions are presented: diplomacy, policy and other advocacy, and the case of lawyer-legislators.

Conflict of interest in Victorian rural and regional legal practice

Abstract: This research report was based on 163 survey responses and 29 interviews with Victorian rural and regional legal practitioners, as well as 8 human service organisation representatives Peak law profession organisations including the Legal Services Board, Law Institute of Victoria, the Federation of Community Legal Centres and Victoria Legal Aid were also interviewed for the research The principal objective of the research was to examine how conflict of interested is manifested in rural and regional settings and how effectively the current conflict of interest rules are applied within those settings The report includes a number of recommendations for better responding to issues of conflict of interest within a rural and regional context

Legal Ethics and the Separation of Law and Morals

Abstract: This paper explores the jurisprudential question of the relationship between moral values and legal norms in legal advising and counseling in the context of an analysis of the so-called torture memos prepared by lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel in 2002. The principal claim of the paper is that the torture memos are morally bankrupt because they are legally bankrupt. The lawyers' actions were wrong from a moral point of view because the lawyers failed with respect to their obligation to treat the law with respect, not simply as an inconvenient obstacle to be planned around. The morality of torture plays no direct role in this analysis. Although it is easy to say at a high level of generality that torture is immoral, it is possible for reasonable people to disagree in good faith over application questions, such as whether a particular interrogation technique should be deemed torture, or whether there may be some moral justification for torture in a particular case. In order for citizens and law enforcement officials to cooperate in the project of defending national security while also respecting human rights, it is necessary to reach some provisional settlement of these normative debates. Because the law enables social action in the face of disagreement, it is entitled to respect by affected individuals and also lawyers acting in a representative capacity. The position defended in this paper contrasts with two widely accepted views. The first, which I call the standard lawyers' defense of the torture memos, maintains that moral values are excluded from legal reasoning. This position rests on a misunderstanding of legal positivism or, in its more sophisticated versions, on an argument for the exclusive or hard strand of positivism. The more plausible version of inclusive positivism permits moral values to become incorporated into conventional practices of legal reasoning. The second view, which is more common within the academic legal ethics literature than among practicing lawyers, holds that the role of lawyer is directly moralized, in the sense that a lawyer acting in a professional capacity is bound by the same moral principles as an ordinary moral agent would be in the same situation. In order to defend this position, it is necessary to briefly set out the argument for the authority of law that I have defended at length elsewhere. This paper further fleshes out that argument by providing a hypothetical narrative suggesting how law derives its authority from its capacity to enable coordinated social activity in the face of persistent moral disagreement, specifically regarding the morality of torture.

Constraining a principal's choice: Outcome versus behavior contingent agency contracts in representative negotiations

Abstract: Agency theory describes the viability of outcome and behavior contingent contracts in principal–agent transactions. This article proposes that a principal's choice between the two contract forms in a representative negotiation is constrained by the conditions that led a principal to employ an agent. Six of these conditions — expertise, emotional strain, the principal's preferred engagement strategy, zone of possible agreement, communal relationship norms, and repeated interactions between principals — are reviewed and summarized in testable propositions. Specifically, the six conditions are proposed to underscore the viability of behavior versus outcome contingent contracts in serving the principal's substantive and relationship-based interests.