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The article offers an overview of the nature of Alberta Public Charter Schools in the Canadian province of Alberta. Topics discussed include a sampling of findings from a study of The Association of Alberta Public Charter Schools (TAAPCS) to address two myths on the schools' freedom and autonomy and on the schools competing with the public school system. Also mentioned are public charter schools comprising less than one percent of the total school-aged population in Alberta.

Corporate self-dealing may be controlled either by legal rules or by the unconstrained forces of the market. The regulatory options include an absolute prohibition on self dealing, a prohibition on voting with conflicting interests (the "majority of the minority" requirement), and an imposition of fairness duties (the 'fairness tear'S). Using an economic analysis, this Article presents a unique theoretical framework for evaluating the relative efficiency of the attempts to control self-dealing adopted by five countries: The United States (Delaware in particular), the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, and Italy. The Article's analysis of the self-dealing problem is bowed on the novel theory that legal protections can be classified into "property rules" or "liability rules" not only in the context of individual rights but also in the context of group rights. Applying this theory to self-dealing transactions, in which the "group" is composed of the minority shareholders, the author demonstrates that each of the two most effective solutions to the self-dealing problem can be classified as either a property rule or a liability rule. The requirement of a majority-of-the-minority vote, which prevents any transaction from proceeding without the minority group's consent, can be defined as a property rule. The fairness test, which allows transactions to be imposed on an unwilling minority group but ensures that the minority receives adequate compensation in objective market-value terms, can be defined as a liability rule. The Article then analyzes the choice between these two solutions as a choice between a property rule and a liability rule. The author shows that the choice between the two types of rules--property or liability--is a function of the total transaction costs in a particular legal system. These transaction costs include the negotiation costs arising from a property rule, the adjudication costs associated with a liability rule, and several... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]