My colleague, Matt Jennejohn, has just posted to SSRN an excellent paper on innovation and contract design. The Private Order of Innovation Networks (forthcoming in the Stanford Law Review) takes aim at the theory of braided contracts described by Ron Gilson, Chuck Sabel, and Bob Scott. According to Gilson et al., formal contracts "braid" with informal norms to mitigate the potential for opportunism. Jennejohn suggests that the weakness of this approach is that it "conceives of the exchange problem only in terms of opportunism." As a result, braiding theory cannot explain many prominent features of strategic alliances, especially the diversity one perceives in alliance agreements. Jennejohn argues instead that "exchange hazards in innovation networks are multidimensional," and he proposes a new conceptual tool for contract analysis, which he calls "multivalent contracting."

Multivalent contracting is the notion that alliance contracts respond to a number of exchange hazards at once. In Jennejohn's words, "The argument is that expanding the menu of exchange hazards from a singular focus on holdup problems to also include 'spillover' and 'entropy' issues explains alliance diversity by illuminating the interdependencies between collaborators’ governance strategies." Jennejohn illustrates the promise of this approach with a preliminary empirical analysis of management committees in alliance contracts.

The paper also includes some ideas that will be of special interest to scholars interested in contract interpretation. Braided contracting is "largely a self-enforcement theory of contract [in which] the focus of much of the analysis is on how parties can solve their own problems without recourse to the courts." By contrast, the theory of multivalent contracting seems to better explain what courts actually do in many cases, namely, using multiple adjacent doctrines to resolve disputes. Thus, according to Jennejohn, "the choice before the enforcement court is not simply whether it will hew to a more formalist or contextualist mode of contract interpretation, but also how it will efficiently intermix a number of available doctrines."

Highly recommended!

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For our last guest post, Robert and I would like to share our experiences using the five pathways in the classroom to teach legal strategy to business students. Overall, applying this research in the classroom has been a rewarding experience that has challenged us to improve the framework’s conceptual foundation and demonstrate its relevance in the business world.

When we first experimented using the five pathways in our respective graduate business courses three years ago, we were unsure about how well it might be received. To our relief, the framework was well received from the start. In a recent end of year survey that I give to my MBA students, several of them mentioned that the framework was one of the learning highlights in their required business law course. Various students mentioned that the framework allowed them to view the law in a different way and also helped them appreciate the opportunities and benefits of engaging attorneys to help solve business problems. This is in contrast to the viewpoint, held by some managers, that law is an external, dense and static force that constrains business behavior as opposed to enabling value creation.

Robert and I introduce the framework early in our courses, and then apply it to examples and cases throughout the term. To drive home the framework’s applicability, we created a specific team-based homework assignment (Download HW 1) that asks students to choose a recent news story involving a business law issue that follows the prevention, value or transformation pathway, and to analyze the issue from a law and strategy perspective. The articles that students recently have chosen to analyze include stories about NFL contract negotiations, the FCC’s review of the Comcast Time Warner merger, and Airbnb’s legal fight against the New York Attorney General. These cases provide plenty of material for discussion in class, and serve as potential research topics.

Although the framework has yet to be applied in the context of a law course, we think it could potentially engage law students and attorneys who seek to understand how the law strategically relates to their clients’ business.

Ultimately, we’d like to see the framework applied in diverse learning environments, so we encourage you to make use of the framework and contact us if you have any questions or ideas about how to apply it. If you decide to use the five pathways in your classroom or company, we’d love to hear about your experiences.

We’d like to conclude by extending a warm thanks to The Conglomerate and its readers for allowing us this opportunity to share our ideas related to law and strategy. We’ve greatly enjoyed participating as guest bloggers in such a distinguished collaborative space.

Sincerely,

David and Robert

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In this post, which follows our earlier discussion of legal strategy, we’ll offer examples of companies situated within each of the five pathways. As Robert and I mentioned in our article, most companies follow the compliance pathway. Such companies insource legal compliance through their in-house legal department, or they may choose to partner with an external compliance verification service. A firm such as ISN, for example, has built a business handling compliance issues for corporations and their subcontractors. According to the Society of Compliance and Corporate Ethics, compliance is a thriving industry due to the increased legal penalties and regulations that companies face in today’s heightened legal environment.

The avoidance pathway is less frequent, given the high stakes and liability attached to this type of strategy. General Motors may have engaged in avoidance if it misled regulators about its faulty ignition switches. Avoidance issues tend to be costly to deal with, given the loss of trust and enhanced penalties that arise from this behavior.

The more interesting and rare pathways involve prevention, value, and transformation. An interesting and controversial prevention legal strategy involves trademark policing, which, in its most egregious form, devolves into the unethical and legally dubious practice of trademark bullying. For example, Chik-fil-A employs an aggressive strategy that targets large and small companies alike and uses the threat of trademark litigation to prevent anyone from encroaching upon its trademarked brands and brand equity. Setting aside the overreaching and legally dubious aspects of this approach, some companies legitimately use a preventive legal strategy that involves cease and desist letters, litigation, and U.S. Patent and Trademark Office administrative oppositions to protect the value of their brands and advertising. The Chik-fil-A case serves as a useful reminder, however, that aggressive legal strategies may push the boundaries of ethical behavior, sound legal argument, and public opinion. 

Two recent examples illustrate how employing a legal strategy in the value pathway can generate positive and tangible financial returns. The first instance involves hedge funds investing in a corporate acquisition target and then filing suit in Delaware to challenge the valuation and seek an appraisal from the court. This legal strategy is referred to as appraisal arbitrage. Many of these cases either settle or result in substantially higher prices for the party seeking the appraisal.

Another value strategy that has been in the headlines recently involves tax inversions. Burger King’s recent decision to acquire Canada’s Tim Horton’s will yield business synergies, but it also exploits a legal maneuver allowed under current tax law permitting a company acquiring a foreign entity to reincorporate in the foreign jurisdiction. By reincorporating in Canada, Burger King will effectively lower its tax rate from 35% to 15%.

The last and rarest of legal strategies is transformation. This occurs when the top executives in a corporation integrate law as a core aspect of the firm’s business model to achieve sustainable competitive advantage. Few companies are able to achieve this strategic pathway, and it’s certainly not for everyone. One company that notoriously used law to achieve abnormally large market share and margins in the ticket processing industry was Ticketmaster. The ticket service provider used venue ticket licensing contracts that included several key provisions such as long term renewable exclusivity terms (up to 5 years), and more infamously, fee sharing provisions. Ticketmaster’s business model was, essentially, to take the bad rap for charging exorbitant convenience fees and sharing those fees with the venue, thus contractually locking them into a highly profitable and exclusive business system. It didn’t hurt that Ticketmaster’s pioneering CEO Fred Rosen was a Wall Street attorney turned impresario.

Another company that is showing signs of attempting to pursue a transformative legal strategy is Tesla Motors. Tesla’s recent announcement to offer open licensing terms for its battery and charging station patents illustrates a pioneering mentality that seeks to build a business ecosystem with other auto manufacturers. By doing so, Tesla has made a major legal bet that giving up patent exclusivity rights in the short term will yield long-term competitive advantage by helping to diffuse electric battery and recharging technology. The other legal strategy Tesla has pursued relates to its pioneering distribution model of direct sales to the consumer, bypassing the traditional dealership model established for conventional automobiles. To achieve this direct-to-customer model, Tesla has engaged state regulators to achieve exemptions from state dealership franchise laws. Tesla is clearly strategizing and innovating along many fronts that involve business, technology and law. It remains to be seen, however, whether these legal strategies will offer Tesla a long-term sustainable competitive advantage.

In our next and last post, we’ll discuss our experience teaching the five pathways of legal strategy to business students and how it has been a valuable resource in the classroom. 

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In Good Faith and Fair Dealing as an Underenforced Legal Norm, Paul MacMahon of the London School of Economics explores the divide between "the rhetoric of good faith and fair dealing and the reality of judicial enforcement." MacMahon relies in part on Meir Dan-Cohen’s distinction between conduct rules and decision rules, which corporate law scholars should recognize from discussions of the business judgment rule by Mel Eisenberg, Julian Velasco, and others. MacMahon also references the substantial literature on underenforcement in constitutional law. And, of course, the vast discussion of the duty of good faith and faith dealing, which contract scholars know well. The thesis is elegant: "the underenforcement idea allows courts to lend their expressive support to the broader norm while avoiding the negative side effects that attempted full enforcement would entail."

This is a great paper, but the most intriguing comes near the end and I hope MacMahon plans to develop this idea in a future paper. The idea emanates from a fairly simple extension of the idea of underenforcement: if underenforcement of the legal norm of good faith and fair dealing is the right strategy, what is the optimal level of enforcement? To MacMahon's credit, he recognizes that the optimal level may vary by circumstance: 

There is no a priori reason why the choice of decision rule should be made at the wholesale level. In different contexts, the relative strengths of judicial enforcement and alternative mechanisms for inducing compliance with good faith and fair dealing will wax and wane. Accordingly, it probably makes sense for scholars and courts to develop differing levels of scrutiny for good faith and fair dealing claims. A single doctrinal test has the merit of simplicity, but a one-size-fits-all approach is unlikely to be optimal.

My sense is that Delaware courts are doing something like this with fiduciary law (indeed, I am writing a paper on this topic), and I suspect that other common law courts are calibrating the duty of good faith and fair dealing.

This is a well-researched, well-written, thought-provoking article, and I recommend it highly.

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The saga of Argentina v. NML Capital, Ltd. (known by the anti-hedge fund camp as “Argentina v. Vulture Funds”) continues. And it’s getting pretty heated. Argentina published a two-page ad in the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal last Thursday, calling the judgment of the original U.S. court finding against Argentina (Judge Griesa of the federal district court of Manhattan) “erroneous and improper” and maintaining that Argentina had not defaulted on its debt obligations because the country deposited the money necessary for an interest payment due to the restructured bondholders on June 30. (Note: Every default has a 30 day grace period.) Argentina’s action is contemporaneous with its filing of a case against the U.S. in the International Court of Justice, contending that the U.S. court judgments violated its sovereignty. In response to the ad, Judge Griesa issued a summons to Argentina’s lawyers to appear in his court last Friday.  Judge Griesa told Argentina to cease making “false and misleading” statements about its debt obligations (i.e., that it did not default); also, if Argentina defies his orders, he would have to consider finding Argentina in contempt of court. Perhaps Griesa is annoyed with reports that Argentina is waging a social media campaign against the court rulings:

“Argentina recently sought to vilify not just the hedge funds [holding out from Argentina’s restructuring] but also Judge Griesa, resulting in a social media campaign under the name #GrieFault. In Argentina, posters have been mounted around the capital of Buenos Aires with images of Judge Griesa’s head imposed on the body of a vulture.” [NY Times]

The NY Times’ story can be found here. Parts I and II of this blogpost can be found here and here.

***

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Thanks to Gordon Smith for inviting me to guest blog on The Conglomerate. Having long been a big fan of Gordon’s work, I was gratified to finally meet him at the April 2014 conference/micro-symposium on Competing Theories of Corporate Governance, hosted by my friend and wonderful colleague Stephen Bainbridge and the Lowell Milken Institute for Business Law and Policy, UCLA School of Law. (The conference was a wonderful opportunity to debate and discuss the competing models of corporate governance with the leading proponents of those models. Streaming links to the conference panels can be found here.)

Although most of my work has been devoted to federal insider trading, the role of in-house counsel, and gatekeeping, what I’d like to write about this week is . . . sovereign debt. If you’ve been paying attention to the international financial news lately, you may have noticed that on Wednesday, July 30, Argentina missed its regular bond payment and defaulted for the second time in 13 years. This second default occurred after mediated talks between Argentina and a group of hedge funds broke down. The first default occurred in 2001 after which Argentina proceeded to restructure its debt by offering a take-it-or-leave-it exchange of new discounted bonds for old ones. At the end of the day, almost 93 per cent of Argentine bond investors consented to taking writedowns in two Argentine debt restructurings. But a group of hedge funds refused to participate in the restructuring and demanded full repayment, suing Argentina in NML Capital, Ltd. v. Republic of Argentina in New York. Because it’s notoriously difficult to enforce debt collection against a sovereign state, Argentina believed that it could simply exclude these defiant holdouts from the repayments. 

Not so. In 2012, Argentina’s expectations were upended, when—in a highly controversial decision—Judge Thomas P. Griesa of the federal district court in Manhattan ruled that Argentina could not continue to pay the restructured bondholders without also paying the hedge fund holdouts in full. Moreover, any bank that aided the payment to holders of restructured bonds without also paying the old bonds held by the holdouts would be in violation of the court order. Judge Griesa’s ruling was affirmed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and in June 2014 the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Argentina’s appeal.

Whether you side with the hedge fund holdouts or Argentina, commentators generally agree that these rulings against Argentina have at minimum a (short-term) destabilizing impact on the sovereign debt markets. For example, Floyd Norris (NY Times), notes that by rejecting Argentina’s appeal, the Supreme Court “most likely damaged the status of New York as the world’s financial capital. It made it far less likely that genuinely troubled countries will be able to restructure their debts. And it increased the power of investors — often but not solely hedge funds that buy distressed bonds at deep discounts to face value — to prevent needed restructurings.”

Professor Tim Samples (UGA) opines in a recently released article that the current state of affairs is “… a radical departure from the traditional unenforceability of sovereign debt in favor of the opposite extreme: enforcement through potent injunctive remedies applicable to third parties” and that these decisions “create[] major uncertainties for sovereign debt markets.”

Professor Joseph Stiglitz (Columbia, former chief economist of the World Bank) warned: “Unable to restructure, governments that default would be permanently shut out from the debt market, with consequential adverse effects on development and economic growth prospects.”

Professor Mitu Gulati (Duke): “The decision has very significant implications . . . . The world has changed.” And Professor Mark Weidemaier (UNC) warns about the expansive coverage of Griesa’s injunction: “The injunction by its terms extends to virtually the entire global financial system.”

So how did we get into this mess and what’s the long-term impact of these judicial decisions? To answer both questions, we need to focus on the particular clause in the Argentinian bonds that has been the subject of a growing body of scholarship and that has served as the legal hook for these judicial rulings: the pari passu (equal footing) clause. Now that we’re up to speed on the general factual background of the Argentinian debt litigation, in a follow-up post, I will discuss recent scholarship on the history and disputed meaning of the troublesome pari passu clause.

***

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The ugly Donald Sterling episode seems to be moving to resolution with a pending sale of the L.A. Clippers to Steve Ballmer.  The sordid story makes for a great case study in a Contracts course, not least because of the wealth of material that is publicly available, particularly one of the central contacts – the NBA “Constitution and Bylaws.”  Often the key contracts in the most notorious disputes are kept confidential, with only snippets of the agreements available even via court dockets.

Under the terms of the Constitution and Bylaws, the NBA Commissioner position that Sterling could be forced to sell his team was strong but not (pardon the pun) a slam dunk (see Michael McCann’s early analysis here and an analysis of Sterling’s response here).

The Commissioner and Sterling each were aiming to persuade a motley group of NBA owners, who may have been concerned with, among other things, the outrage of players and fans towards Sterling, the damage to their league of having Sterling continue as owner, and the precedent of forcing an owner to sell.

Layered on top of this were the family law and tax considerations of Sterling transferring ownership whether to his estranged wife or to a buyer.

In the end, economics pushed Sterling to sell.  He was faced with a stark choice of trying to hang on to an asset that was damaged goods just by remaining in his hands versus over a billion dollar profit from selling. 

In teaching this episode, students should be cautioned against jumping immediately to the “of course he will sell” conclusion.  The hard work of analyzing the contracts helps explain the negotiating positions of the NBA commissioner, the various NBA owners, Sterling, and his wife as they bargained in the shadow of the law.  The contractual language also will help prepare for any post-sale litigation;Sterling has already initiated one suit and threatened more . Sterling's wife apparently agreed to indemnify the NBA against legal challenges by her husband, which adds yet another teaching wrinkle. One puzzle for students: what was the strategy behind declaring Sterling incompetent?  

Too bad I am not teaching Contracts in the fall.

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Image: Flickr

In my last post—also a shameless plug for my recent article, “Boilerplate Shock”—I argued that boilerplate terms governing securities could serve as a trigger that transforms an isolated credit event into the risk of a broader systemic failure. I’ll now briefly explain why I see this danger—which I call “boilerplate shock”—as a general problem in securities regulation, not just some quirky feature of Eurozone sovereign debt (the focus of the paper and post). Any market where securities are governed by uniform boilerplate terms is vulnerable to boilerplate shock.

The nature of this phenomenon—systemic risk—is of course familiar, but its source in contract language is a little unintuitive. How could private contracts unravel an entire securities market or the world economy?

Coordination around uniform standards. 

In the back of our mind most of us probably still conceive of contracting as an activity that occurs among two, or perhaps a few, individuals or firms. But when standard terms are used by virtually all actors within a given market, it’s worth considering the collective impact of those terms as a distinct phenomenon.

Coordination’s benefits are well known. Consider uniform traffic signals. But coordination can also compound the effects of bad individual decisions.

As Charles Whitehead has argued, widespread “destructive coordination” among banks during the precrisis days helped generate systemic risks. When the credit markets froze, for example, firms using the same risk management formulas reacted in the same way at the same time. This helped transform isolated events into systemic ones—e.g., Lehman, the canonical example of a failure that triggered a de facto coordinated panic.

A similar risk, I argue, is present where participants in a securities market rely on the same standardized contract terms. Whether they were intended to or not, these terms will often control what happens in the event of certain legal emergencies, like a country departing the euro or Lehman declaring bankruptcy.

For example, if an effort by Greece to pay its bonds in “new drachmas” is rejected because of Boilerplate Contract Terms A and B, the market will surely be concerned that Terms A and B also govern the bonds of similarly situated borrowers, like Spain, Italy, etc. You’ll see that the borrowing premium the “peripheral” euro countries (the uppermost five lines: Ireland, Italy, Greece (biggest spike), Portugal, Spain) paid versus richer euro countries (Germany, France, the Netherlands, the three lowest lines) zoomed higher as worry over a Greece exit gripped markets in late 2011/early 2012, and again (to a lesser extent) because of Cyprus exit talk in early 2013:

Bloomberg. Click to enlarge.

Moreover, this panic occurred against a backdrop of unduly rosy assumptions (namely, that a departing euro country could convert its bonds into a new currency and thereby avoid default, a likely contagion trigger). I argue that the uniformity of boilerplate across these bonds would intensify these problems significantly since it’s likely to result in a declaration of default.

To my mind, this demonstrates that boilerplate securities contracts, in the aggregate, can be systemically significant. “Boilerplate Shock” introduces this concept and offers a modest proposal to mitigate its dangers in the Eurozone.

Beyond the euro, what about the risks of boilerplate shock in general?

Boilerplate shock is probably an inherent and permanent risk in any securities market.

Securities contracts are quintessential candidates for boilerplate. They are used by sophisticated parties for repeat or similar transactions and are drafted quickly—sometimes in three and a half minutes. The (correct) assumption is that they are more efficient for the parties that use them.

I’d like to begin thinking about how contracts can be drafted with a view to systemic risk mitigation, or at least to avoid exacerbating existing risks. But I think this is a hard problem that lacks an off-the-shelf solution:

• The nature of the risk is that it is a byproduct, not the result of intentional choices about risk allocation. This is the reason for the information-forcing default rule I propose in the Eurozone.

• The risk is also an externality: it is severe because of its collective impact. The parties do not bear the primary risk that uniform contracts will result in a meltdown, and in the unlikely event a crash happens (1) no individual party will be to blame and (2) at least one party to the initial transaction (the initial purchaser of a bond, for example) will probably no longer hold the asset, because most systemically significant securities are actively traded on the secondary market.

But banning or discouraging boilerplate is not the answer:

• The risk that a bunch of assets governed by the same terms will plummet in value is not only an externality. Risk allocation among parties might improve if scrutiny of existing securities boilerplate improves. The terms can evolve.
  
  
• A requirement to craft unique, artisanal terms—disclosures, subordination provisions ("flip clauses"), choice of governing law—for each individual securities transaction would be criminally inefficient.
  
  
• A requirement to craft unique contract terms might even be unjustified on risk-management terms alone, because it would increase drafting errors.

It's tricky to mitigate the risks of securities boilerplate.

Some options for places to start:

1. Validation by third parties: perhaps issuers could use risk-rated contract templates. For example, see credit ratings…but see credit ratings.
2. Culture: inculcate systemic risk mitigation as a professional norm among private sector lawyers? In principle, this could work. The number of lawyers who draft these contracts is pretty small. In practice, one could envision many complications.
3. Insurance: encourage the development of derivatives to account for the possibility of boilerplate shock? Like some of the other solutions, this one presumes some agreement on what terms create the risk of boilerplate shock. It could also encourage new forms of moral hazard.
4. Mandatory regulation: some public entity could be tasked with the mission of proactively identifying and combating the risk of boilerplate shock in contract practices. Arguably a natural choice given that the risk is an externality. Nevertheless, I’m a little skeptical. First of all, who would do it? A domestic regulator, like the SEC or CFTC, that might be dodged on jurisdictional grounds? An international institution, which is arguably more subject to capture? More generally, regulation seems like a heavy-handed first choice.

In sum, when standardized and aggregated, choices that determine legal risks—e.g., contract terms designating governing law, payment priority—can create the same hazards as choices about business risks. This suggests that contract terms should be taken seriously as possible sources of systemic risk alongside more familiar sources, like leverage and credit quality.

Securities contracts as a source of systemic risk—what do you think?

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© Disney, “Duck Tales”

I expressed concern in my last post that uniform contract terms could destabilize securities markets in unexpected ways. In a recent paper, I dub this risk “Boilerplate Shock.” The paper uses boilerplate terms in Eurozone sovereign bonds as a case study, but I argue that any market in which a lot of securities are governed by uniform contract terms is vulnerable to boilerplate shock. In this post, I will focus on the Eurozone and my proposed solution to the risk of boilerplate shock there.

One major problem is that no one really knows how to deal with sovereign debt obligations denominated in a currency that still exists but is no longer used by the debtor. A partial breakup of the European Monetary Union would trigger some question marks in commercial law and private international law (among other things).

In the Eurozone sovereign lending market, bond contracts typically contain standardized language specifying:

(a)  choice of governing law (often foreign), and
(b)  currency of payment (euros).

The combined effect of these clauses, I argue, is to render any country that departs the euro more likely to default on its debt. Whatever the impact of the departure itself, a forced default would make things much worse for Europe and the world economy.

Leading scholars have concluded or strongly suggested that a sovereign that changes currencies can redenominate (convert) its bonds to its new currency even where the contract is governed by foreign law (e.g., Philip Wood (p. 177), Michael Gruson (p. 456), Arthur Nussbaum (pp. 353-59), Robert Hockett (passim)). As a descriptive matter, I believe this to be a mistaken interpretation of New York (and probably English) private international law and commercial law (see “Boilerplate Shock” pp. 47-67). But normatively, I agree: a sovereign should be able to redenominate its bonds under certain circumstances. Among other things, the alternative would make currency union breakups far more dangerous than they already are.

In brief:

• The prevailing consensus underestimates the risk that a departing Eurozone member’s attempt to redenominate its sovereign bonds into a new currency will be ruled a default.
  
  
• Since the bonds of other struggling euro countries are largely governed by the same boilerplate terms ((a) and (b) above), this misapprehension has the potential to be particularly damaging. In addition to surprising the market (which appears to incorporate this consensus), it is likely to spread beyond the immediate debtor to the bonds of similarly situated countries that have issued under the same terms.
  
  
• Same for CDSs (which are likewise often governed by foreign law, usually New York).
  
  
• Thus, given the widespread use of terms (a) and (b), a ruling that a departing country cannot pay its euro-denominated contracts in a new currency could cause the market to demand unsustainable premiums from other weak debtors.
  
  
• This could cause Eurozone countries to lose market access. Greece is not TBTF in any sense, but some of its neighbors are—and are also too big for the EU (including the ECB) and IMF to bail out. Italy (the world’s 9th largest economy) and Spain (13th) come to mind.

Thus, if my commercial law/private international law analysis is right, these boilerplate contracts could end up playing quite a big role in the event of any euro breakup. 

To mitigate this risk of boilerplate shock, I suggest a new rule of contract interpretation. The proposal is detailed at pp. 67-71 of the article. I suggest commercially significant jurisdictions adopt it by statute. Here is a quick summary.

Any sovereign that:

1. Belongs to an international monetary union, and
2. Issues bonds in the currency of that monetary union subsequent to the adoption of this rule, and
3. Leaves the monetary union and introduces its own currency,

shall retain the right to redenominate its bond obligations into its new currency, UNLESS the sovereign has affirmatively waived the right to redenominate its bonds.

You’ll notice this is a default rule—merely a presumption of the right to redenominate—not a mandatory rule. It is also prospective-only: it does not apply to existing issuances. It also does not protect sovereigns that issue in foreign currency (e.g., Argentina), only those that are monetary union members and issue in the common currency (e.g., France).

The reason for these limitations is to minimize unintended consequences and near-term disruption to the market, but also to embody the relatively modest objectives of the rule. It is an information-forcing default rule that is intended to facilitate better risk management by parties. It is not a “save the world” rule.

The challenge, as I’ll discuss in my next post on the paper, is not that redenomination would be ruled impermissible when it ought to be available (otherwise, that might suggest a mandatory “pro-redenomination” rule). It is that the likely effect of these boilerplate terms—to prohibit redenomination—was almost certainly not bargained for and is largely unknown to parties. This market failure has, in turn, created latent risks to the broader financial system and the existing legal tools are poorly suited to address them.

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By now, the risk that a distressed European nation such as Greece might leave the Eurozone and thereby spark global economic calamity is well known. Regular readers of this blog may even privately relish the prominence of the issue. Not since the days of the gold standard has international monetary policy come so close to being a socially acceptable topic of dinner conversation.

As I noted in my first post, observers rightly perceive the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis to be driven by political and economic forces. But many consequences of a euro breakup would be determined by law, including sources of American (specifically New York) private law.

This is a complex issue. I try to address it more fully in a new article, "Boilerplate Shock," which I've just posted on SSRN.

In brief, and to continue picking on Greece, one key question in the event of a euro breakup would be: would a court recognize an attempt by Greece to convert its euro-denominated debt into its new currency, or would it instead insist that Greece pay in euros, the currency of contract? The answer is important because, as a practical matter, requiring payment in euro would be tantamount to forcing a default.

That's the familiar narrative, anyway. And I agree. But I believe that the ubiquity of boilerplate terms in these bonds—specifically, clauses selecting governing law (usually foreign) and currency of payment (euro)—is likely to make any dispute over redenomination even more damaging than this suggests.

In the article, I argue that the sparse literature on the question of redenominating sovereign bonds overlooks some sources—especially cases interpreting New York contract law and private international law—that, if extended to Eurozone sovereign bonds, could surprise the market and cause serious global repercussions. I argue that the reason for this is not only that the dominant view overlooks what are likely controlling sources of law. It is that standardization of contract terms across the Eurozone sovereign lending market makes the stakes of surprise that much higher.

If Greece's attempt to redenominate its bonds is declared a default, then the fact that the operative terms in Italian, Spanish, Irish, etc. sovereign bonds are the same or similar makes markets likely to demand unsustainable premiums from those countries. Capital and investor flight could be very rapid. We have seen several previews of this movie over the past few years in the Eurozone, and each time official-sector bailout institutions have saved the day. But the European Union/European Central Bank and IMF probably do not have the resources to stop a broad-based bank run of this nature, to say nothing of the political support necessary to attempt it.

Maybe none of that will happen. Nevertheless, the potential for uniform contract terms to create risk not just to individual third parties but to securities markets seems likely to grow at least as fast as those markets. Using Eurozone sovereign bonds as a case study, I introduce the term "boilerplate shock" to describe the potential for standardized contract terms—when they come to govern the entire market for a given security—to transform an isolated default on a single contract into a threat to the market of which it is a part, and, possibly, to the economy in general. My larger objective here is to foster a discussion of the potential for securities law and private-sector securities lawyers to manage (or alternatively, to contribute to) systemic risk.

I've posted an abstract below and will be returning to the subject. I look forward your comments.

Boilerplate Shock abstract:

No nation was spared in the recent global downturn, but several Eurozone countries arguably took the hardest punch, and they are still down. Doubts about the solvency of Greece, Spain, and some of their neighbors are making it more likely that the euro will break up. Observers fear a single departure and sovereign debt default might set off a “bank run” on the common European currency, with devastating regional and global consequences.

What mechanisms are available to address—or ideally, to prevent—such a disaster?

One unlikely candidate is boilerplate language in the contracts that govern sovereign bonds. As suggested by the term “boilerplate,” these are provisions that have not been given a great deal of thought. And yet they have the potential to be a powerful tool in confronting the threat of a global economic conflagration—or in fanning the flames.

Scholars currently believe that a country departing the Eurozone could convert its debt obligations to a new currency, thereby rendering its debt burden manageable and staving off default. However, this Article argues that these boilerplate terms—specifically, clauses specifying the law that governs the bond and the currency in which it will be paid—would likely prevent such a result. Instead, the courts most likely to interpret these terms would probably declare a departing country’s effort to repay a sovereign bond in its new currency a default.

A default would inflict damage far beyond the immediate parties. Not only would it surprise the market, it would be taken to predict the future of other struggling European countries’ debt obligations, because they are largely governed by the same boilerplate terms.  The possibility of such a result therefore increases the risk that a single nation’s departure from the euro will bring down the currency and trigger a global meltdown.

To mitigate this risk, this Article proposes a new rule of contract interpretation that would allow a sovereign bond to be paid in the borrower’s new currency under certain circumstances. It also introduces the phrase “boilerplate shock” to describe the potential for standardized contract terms drafted by lawyers—when they come to dominate the entire market for a given security—to transform an isolated default on a single contract into a threat to the broader economy. Beyond the immediate crisis in the Eurozone, the Article urges scholars, policymakers, and practitioners to address the potential for boilerplate shock in securities markets to damage the global economy.

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Before returning to the legal boundaries of monetary policy, I wanted to briefly highlight some interesting contract and regulatory issues lurking just beneath the surface of an unusual Kansas state court order declaring a sperm donor to be the legal father of a child, against the wishes of all persons involved.

The facts of the case, decided last month and covered nationally (news account, order (PDF)), are straightforward and undisputed:

In 2009, a Topeka man answered a Craigslist ad soliciting sperm donations. The ad was placed by a lesbian couple, Jennifer Schreiner and Angela Bauer. The man supplied a donation. Schreiner became pregnant and delivered a baby. Schreiner began receiving Kansas welfare benefits for the child. Seeking child support payments, the state sued the sperm donor to establish paternity. The state argued that the donor—who lacks any relationship with the child or the couple (now estranged) beyond supplying the donation—was the child’s legal father, and therefore must pay child support.

This is where the case gets interesting as a matter of private ordering and trade regulation.

Prior to the donation, all persons involved—the donor and both members of the couple—signed a non-paternity agreement in which the donor waived his parental rights and was released from his parental obligations.

Both mothers opposed the state’s campaign to declare the donor the child's legal father.

Nevertheless, the court granted the state’s paternity petition, which means it can now seek to compel the donor to provide child support. The paternity finding also appears to give the donor a good shot at asserting parental rights (though he seems unlikely to try).

Justifying its decision to ignore the wishes of both parents and the donor, the court intoned:

A parent may not terminate parental rights by contract, however, even when the parties have consented.

Well, maybe this case is a morality tale about those who would seek a father for their child on Craigslist. A warning from a heartland state to those who would selfishly try to contract around their sacred parental obligations. A sign that courts place the welfare of the child above all else. Right?

Haha, of course not!

Kansas law makes it easy to conclusively terminate the parental rights and obligations of sperm donors by contract. Care to guess what you need to do, besides sign a contract?

Pay a doctor.

The court explained:

Through K.S.A. 23-2208(f) [PDF], the Kansas legislature has afforded a woman a statutory vehicle for obtaining semen for [artificial insemination] in a manner that protects her and her child from a later claim of paternity by the donor. Similarly, the legislature has provided a man with a statutory vehicle for donating semen to a woman in a manner that precludes later liability for child support. The limitation on the application of these statutory vehicles, however, is that the semen must be “provided to a licensed physician." [FN1] (emphasis added)

The parties failed to do this.

So, the upshot is that you are free to find a father for your child on Craigslist—and you can even count on the State of Kansas to keep him out of your child’s life in the future—so long as you hire a doctor to do the procedure. Similarly, you can spend your free time fathering children on Craigslist without losing sleep over child support suits—as long as you kick some of the action upstairs to an M.D.

It’s not just Kansas; California, Illinois, and as many as 10 other states [FN2] follow the same law, the Uniform Parentage Act of 1973.

I’m not a family law expert, but it seems to me that a complete list of legitimate and unique public policy concerns that are implicated when a couple and a third-party sperm donor settle their parental obligations by contract looks something like this:

1. Ensuring that the state can identify who can be held legally responsible for supporting the child.

Nevertheless, let’s assume there are also truly compelling public health reasons to involve a physician in artificial insemination. After speaking with a few doctors, I’m skeptical that this is the case, but even if it were here are ten points that I think are worth considering:

1. Should a mother who became pregnant by artificial insemination be forced to share parental rights with a stranger who donated sperm simply because she decided not to hire a doctor for the procedure?
   
   
2. Conversely, should the scope of a sperm donor’s rights and responsibilities as a father turn on the decision whether to enlist a doctor to oversee the procedure?
   
   
3. Should the adequacy of a child support scheme turn on whether couples using sperm donors choose to hire a doctor?
   
   
4. There are sound public policy reasons to be concerned about voluntariness in agreements that waive paternity. But if this case is really about ensuring voluntariness, why is enlisting doctors the solution? Establishing consent during contract formation is not some novel problem. Hiring a doctor is a novel solution, but as an evidentiary device it is not very probative.
   
   
5. Hiring doctors for artificial insemination is not cheap. A single attempt through a physician’s office costs about $3,000, and sometimes multiple attempts are necessary. Unsurprisingly, the American Fertility Association (a trade group for the fertility industry) applauded the court’s decision.
   
   
6. This rule looks even more like an attempt to extract rents when you consider that for many people, the price of artificial insemination without physician assistance may be zero.
   
   
7. If the state interest in the use of doctor-assisted artificial insemination is so compelling, maybe the law should simply require it on penalty of criminal sanction. I have never even heard this idea floated, probably because it would be perceived (rightly) as an excessive intrusion on various important freedoms…
   
   
8. …yet while they do not provide criminal sanctions, about 13 states are willing to provide unbelievably harsh "family-law sanctions." If a woman declines to hire a doctor, she is placing herself and her child in eternal jeopardy; at any time, the donor or the state can move to declare the donor to be the legal father, which would put the donor in a position to seek full parental rights—even if he is a stranger. (The same is true in reverse re: child support.) It is unsurprising that both mothers opposed the state’s petition.
   
   
9. Although facially neutral, this rule is almost certainly discriminatory in practice. It means that lesbian couples must either hire a doctor or adopt—there is no other way they can safely preclude the donor from being granted parental rights. And of course this is just one of many unofficial taxes gays and lesbians must pay, especially in states like Kansas that do not allow them to marry. It seems to me that there’s a good argument the law should fail rational basis or equal protection review, but I will leave that brief to the con law scholars.
   
   
10. Finally, beyond any constitutional infirmity, this law should serve as a reminder that protectionist regulations—which often take the form of onerous occupational licensing restrictions and NIMBY zoning rules—frequently have regressive distributional consequences, because they tend to favor powerful incumbents. And although probably not the case here, such laws can harm the broader economy as well by stifling innovation.

I welcome your comments. And I hope my doctor friends still talk to me.

* * * *

[FN1] It should be noted that under the letter of the statute as well as a 2007 Kansas Supreme Court decision (PDF) on this issue, the court did not have an obvious alternative to finding for the state. The problem, such as there is one, is with the statute.

[FN2] An accurate count is not possible without doing a full 50-state survey. As I have written about previously, the Uniform Law Commission’s Enactment Status Maps are often unreliable or imprecise (see FNs 163 & 188).

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The Chancery Daily flagged a pending case in the Delaware Court of Chancery, NAMA Holdings, LLC v. Related WMC, LLC, et al., involving a claim for "tortious interference with the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing." A Westlaw search reveals that this is not an entirely novel claim. The earliest instance of such a claim appears to be Haynal v. Target Stores, 1996 WL 806706 (S.D.Cal.,1996), and the federal court drop-kicked the claim: "Plaintiff's attempt to convert a contract action into a tort action is not supported by law." Two other courts note the claim, but neither addresses its merits. No law review articles discuss the claim, and even Google shows no results ... well, until this post gets included in the search results.

Of course, lots of cases involve claims of "tortious interference with contract" and "breach of the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing." The arguments against recognizing tortious interference with contract would seem to apply to a claim of "tortious interference with the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing," but if you are willing to recognize the one, is there a reason not to recognize the other?

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Just before Christmas the Washington Law Review published a symposium issue honoring Larry Cunningham's new book, Contracts in the Real World.  The issue is a good read for Contracts teachers.  You can read my contribution, "Contracts as Pattern Language" here.  The abstract for this essay is below:

Christopher Alexander’s architectural theory of a "pattern language" influenced the development of object-oriented computer programming. This pattern language framework also explains the design of legal contracts. Moreover, the pattern language rubric explains how legal agreements interlock to create complex transactions and how transactions interconnect to create markets. This pattern language framework helps account for evidence, including from the global financial crisis, of failures in modern contract design.

A pattern represents an encapsulated conceptual solution to a recurring design problem. Patterns save architects and designers from having to reinvent the wheel; they can use solutions that evolved over time to address similar problems. Contract patterns represent encapsulated solutions within a legal agreement (or set of agreements) to a specific legal problem. This problem might consist of a need to match the particular objectives of counterparties in a discrete part of a bargain or to address certain legal rules. A contract pattern interlocks, nests, and works together with other contract patterns to solve more complex problems and create more elaborate bargains. Interlocking patterns enable scalability. Just as Alexander’s architectural patterns for rooms create patterns for buildings, which create patterns for neighborhoods and cities, patterns of individual contract provisions form legal agreement patterns, which interlock to create patterns for transactions, which, mesh to create patterns for markets. For example, contract patterns help lawyers draft real estate contracts. These contracts interlock in sophisticated real estate transactions, which mesh with other contract patterns to form securitization transactions. Securitization patterns create markets for asset-backed securities, which, form part of the larger shadow banking system.

This scalability differentiates contract patterns from boilerplate. However, legal scholarship on boilerplate – including Henry Smith’s work on the modularity of contract boilerplate – patterns allow certain debt contracts to become what Gary Gorton calls "informationally insensitive" and to enjoy many of the economic features of money.

The pattern language framework explains not only how sophisticated contracts function, but also how they fail. The pattern language framework provides a lens for examining recent contracts law scholarship on the failures of sophisticated contract design, including "sticky" contract provisions in sovereign bond agreements, "Frankenstein" contracts in mortgage-backed securitizations, and the "flash crash." If modularity and contract design patterns foster the development of new financial instruments and markets, then their features can also contribute to the unraveling of these markets. For example, by restricting the information content of contracts, patterns and modularity not only midwifed the creation of liquid markets for those contracts, they also played a role in "shadow bank runs" and the catastrophic freezing of these markets. The failure of contracts can have systemic effects for entire markets when a particular contract enjoys widespread use or when it is so connected to other critical contracts that cascading failures occur.

This essay was a contribution to a symposium for Larry Cunningham’s book, Contracts in the Real World.

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One of my colleagues said that my latest article (written with one of my excellent students, Jordan Lee) sounds like an R-rated movie. The title is Discretion, and here is the abstract:

Discretion is an important feature of all contractual relationships. In this Article, we rely on incomplete contract theory to motivate our study of discretion, with particular attention to fiduciary relationships. We make two contributions to the substantial literature on fiduciary law. First, we describe the role of fiduciary law as “boundary enforcement,” and we urge courts to honor the appropriate exercise of discretion by fiduciaries, even when the beneficiary or the judge might perceive a preferable action after the fact. Second, we answer the question, how should a court define the boundaries of fiduciary discretion? We observe that courts often define these boundaries by reference to industry customs and social norms. We also defend this as the most sensible and coherent approach to boundary enforcement.

I wrote an article about a decade ago called "The Critical Resource Theory of Fiduciary Duty" that still gets downloaded and cited a fair amount, at least for a fiduciary duty article. It is about the structure of fiduciary relationships, and I wanted to do a follow on article about how courts know when someone has breached a fiduciary duty. I actually had a fairly long draft of an article that was just horrible, and I never published it, but I kept thinking about and teaching about this problem. Earlier this year, I had a brainstorm about the subject, and the result is this new article. 

By the way, interest in fiduciary law seems to have exploded in the past decade. Some of that interest stems from Tamar Frankel's book and the accompanying conference at Boston University. Some of the interest stems from the fact that fiduciary law is interesting in many countries outside the United States, where much of the best writing on this subject is found (see Paul Miller, for example). I look forward to a new surge in interest this summer, as Andrew Gold and Paul Miller have organized an excellent conference on The Philosophical Foundations of Fiduciary Law, to be held in Chicago. I am writing a paper entitled "True Loyalty" for that conference and very much looking forward to reading the other contributions.

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The Washington Law Review is devoting a symposium issue this fall to Larry Cunningham's new book  Contracts in the Real World: Stories of Popular Contracts and Why They Matter.  (I'll be contributing an essay/case study).  This follows an online discussion group on the book that took place last semester over at Concurring Opinions.

In connection with the symposium issues, the Washington Law Review is asking all Contracts professors to participate in a brief online survey (see this web page to access the survey).

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