Oct 5, 2021 Christine AbelyCorporate Law
Peter Molk and D. Daniel Sokol’s recent article The Challenges of Nonprofit Governance addresses a less-examined area of the governance literature: namely, the governance of nonprofit organizations. As the authors note, nonprofit governance failures have made the news in the past few years, as with, for example, the allegations against the National Rifle Association for self-dealing and fraud, or those against the University of Southern California related to sexual assault, discrimination, and corrupt admissions dealings. This article fills a notable gap in the governance literature by addressing important differences between corporate and nonprofit governance mechanisms; discussing currently available methods to monitor nonprofit activities, as well as the shortcomings of those approaches; and proposing solutions to promote more robust oversight and to better safeguard the interests of the nonprofit stakeholders and beneficiaries, as well as those of the general public.
Molk and Sokol identify several issues inherent in and unique to nonprofit governance. State attorneys general are usually tasked with nonprofit oversight. The authors note that such monitoring is often hampered by a lack of resources, as well as a dearth of required financial disclosures that could be used to evaluate nonprofits’ fiscal health. The authors attribute these shortcomings to the structural flaw that nonprofits may operate in numerous states, but that the mission of an individual state attorney general centers primarily around the protection of citizens of only its own state. As such, a problem of the commons arises whereby the resulting observed level of enforcement is less than would be optimal, but no one state attorney general has sufficient incentive to increase enforcement to detect wrongdoing outside of its own jurisdiction. Continue reading "The Governance of Nonprofit Organizations"
Oct 4, 2021 Shawn BayernContracts
Babette Boliek,
Upgrading Unconscionability: A Common Law Ally for a Digital World, __
Md. L. Rev. __ (forthcoming, 2021), available at
SSRN.
Professor Babette Boliek makes two important contributions in Upgrading Unconscionability: A Common Law Ally for a Digital World before even reaching the article’s normative argument.
First, the article challenges what has become a surprisingly prevalent bit of supposed wisdom among commentators on contract law: that the doctrine of unconscionability barely exists and that nobody should take it seriously—or, as Professor Boliek puts it, that “the application of unconscionability is so rare that it is the last refuge of fools.” The pessimistic view of unconscionability’s role may confuse a paucity of rules about unconscionability with a paucity of cases (or more generally with a lack of importance of the doctrine). It is true that unconscionability is a vague doctrine. Even its statutory formulations in US law tend not to supply clear definitions; for example, the Uniform Commercial Code provides general rules that let courts respond to “unconscionable” contracts (see U.C.C. § 2-302), but never defines the term. But while that may make it hard to apply unconscionability on a Contracts exam, it doesn’t mean the doctrine of unconscionability isn’t important. Indeed, if the purpose of the rule is simply to give courts flexibility to prevent the worst abuses of contract-related processes or the most oppressive contracting outcomes, the doctrine needn’t be specific, and pinning it down too tightly may limit the doctrine’s ability to respond flexibly to abuses. Continue reading "The Exaggerated Rumors of the Death of Unconscionability"
Oct 1, 2021 Wendy Anne BachLexPoverty Law
Just a quick warning—Armando Lara-Millán’s Redistributing the Poor: Jails, Hospitals, and the Crisis of Law and Fiscal Austerity is a depressing read, particularly, for those of us who have, at some time in our poverty law careers, litigated class actions. It’s not as if we did not know, when, for example, negotiating compliance benchmarks for institutional defendants (jails, public housing agencies, welfare departments, public hospitals…), either that the purpose of those benchmarks could be easily evaded or that our lawsuit might result in pulling resources away from another need. But knowing this abstractly, and earnestly planning against it, is one thing and reading a book that exquisitely describes how legal pressure often does little more than redistribute pain, is an entirely another.
Lara-Millán is a sociologist. In Redistributing the Poor, he challenges fundamental narratives at the heart of a significant branch of socio-legal scholarship. He suggests that the overarching recent U.S. historical narrative that many of us assume is true–that we are seeing the results of “overinvestment in criminal justice and underinvestment in public health”—fundamentally misunderstands the way the United States governs the poor. “In short, the idea of redistributing the poor draws attention to how states agencies circulate people between different institutional spaces in such a way that generates revenue for some agencies, cuts costs for others, and projects illusions that services have been legally rendered.” (P. vii.) Continue reading "Legal Compliance, Categorization and the Disappearing of Suffering"
