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4 Penn St. J.L. & Int'l Aff. 445 (2015-2016)
Commercial Law and the Public Interest

handle is hein.journals/pensalfaw4 and id is 455 raw text is: Penn State Journal of Law & International Affairs 2015 VOLUME 4 No. 1 COMMERCIAL LAW AND THE PUBLIC INTEREST Jay Lawrence Westbrook* In commercial law policy debates in the United States, the consideration of public interests has been muted. The success of contractualist ideas (along with public choice theory) has forced to the background notions of broader social interests and the significant secondary effects of commercial law rules, leaving the policy debates focused largely on competing claims of efficiency and injustice to the immediate parties to an activity or transaction. In this essay, I want to explore this phenomenon in a preliminary way. My long-term objective is to understand the reasons for this move away from considerations of public interests and perhaps to find a way to return those interests to their proper place. * Benno Schmidt Chair of Business Law, The University of Texas School of Law. I am grateful to Patrick Wolfgang, Texas '15, and William Langley and Kelsi Stayart, Texas '16, for their help in research for my public-interest project, starting with this article. This paper was delivered in the summer of 2014. While its principal points continue to reflect my views and the nature of my current academic project, those views and the world have moved on in some respects. In particular, I have become more careful to say public interests (plural). I also note that the American Bankruptcy Institute Commission has now delivered recommendations about bankruptcy reform that provide a rich medium for critiques based on public interests. See AMERICAN BANKRUPTCY INSTITUTE COMMISSION TO STUDY THE REFORM OF CHAPTER 11 (2014).

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