Digital Commons Network^™

Secondary Education In The United States: What Can Others Learn From Our Mistakes?, John H. Bishop , Ferran Mane, Michael Bishop

John H Bishop

Secondary schools are the least successful component of the U.S. education system. Students learn considerably less than in other industrialized nations and dropout rates are significantly higher. This paper provides an explanation for this failure, describes the standards based reforms strategies that many states are implementing to attack these problems, and evaluates the success of these efforts.

September 11th, John Maynard Keynes, Kenneth J. Arrow, And Me: The Nexus, David Randall Jenkins

David Randall Jenkins, Ph.D.

Tying, Price Discrimination And Antitrust Policy, Herbert Hovenkamp

Herbert Hovenkamp

ABSTRACT

A tying arrangement is a seller’s requirement that a customer may purchase its “tying” product only by taking its “tied” product. In a variable proportion tie the purchaser can vary her purchases of the tied product. For example, a customer might purchase a single printer, but either a contract or technological design requires her to purchase varying numbers of printer cartridges from the same manufacturer. Such arrangements are widely considered to be price discrimination devices, but their economic effects have been controversial.

Price discrimination comes in various “degrees.” In third degree price discrimination the seller isolates two or more …

The Unnatural Disaster: Who Will Pay For The Next Major Hurricane, Bradley Bodiford

Bradley G. Bodiford

Since Hurricane Katrina, most state’s hurricane insurance programs have become increasingly political in an effort to control rapidly rising insurance rates. These legislative efforts often create their desired short-term effects, but only at the expense of harming millions of insurance customers in the long-term. Florida provides a perfect laboratory for examining the current crisis with its heavy coastal population and high vulnerability to hurricanes. By using a case study of a state with a more conservative hurricane insurance system, the article attempts to bridge the gap between the current system and the self-sustaining system. Specifically, the article proposes a glide …

Law, Economics, And Religion, Vikas Kumar

Vikas Kumar

No abstract provided.

Close Enough For Government Work: The Committee Rulemaking Game, Paul J. Stancil

Paul J Stancil

Procedural rules in U.S. courts often have predictable and systemic substantive consequences. Yet the vast majority of procedural rules are drafted, debated, and ultimately enacted by a committee rulemaking process substantially removed from significant legislative or executive supervision. This Article explores the dynamics of the committee rulemaking process through a game-theoretical lens. The model reveals that inferior players in the committee rulemaking game—advisory committees, the Standing Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure, the Judicial Conference and the Supreme Court—are sometimes able to arbitrage Congressional transaction costs to obtain results at odds with the results Congress would prefer in a …

Alimony And Efficiency: The Gendered Costs And Benefits Of Economic Justification For Alimony, Jana B. Singer

Jana B. Singer

No abstract provided.

Review Of Richard Dien Winfield, The Just Economy (1988), Harry Van Der Linden

Harry van der Linden

Harry van der Linden's review of: Richard Dien Winfield, The Just Economy, New York/London: Routledge, 1988, 252 pp. Hardcover $35.00.

Waste Not, Want Not: Economic And Legal Challenges Of Regulation-Induced Innovation In Waste Technology And Management, Molly Macauley

Molly Macauley

Regulation to protect public health and the environment has transformed the “town dump” into large, regional state-of-the art waste disposal facilities managed by a nationwide industry with revenues of over $40 billion annually. Responsibility for waste regulation rests with state and local authorities, however, and their intervention in price, quantity, and location attributes of the market has prompted legal challenges under the dormant commerce clause. This article reviews the regulation-induced changes in the market, its subnational governmental oversight, and protection of interstate commerce when new technology restructures a local service into a national business.

The New Regulation: From Command To Coordination In The Modern Administrative State, Robert B. Ahdieh

Robert B. Ahdieh

The New Regulation: From Command To Coordination In The Modern Administrative State, Robert B. Ahdieh

Robert B. Ahdieh

The New Regulation: From Command To Coordination In The Modern Administrative State, Robert B. Ahdieh

Robert B. Ahdieh

The New Regulation: From Command To Coordination In The Modern Administrative State, Robert B. Ahdieh

Robert B. Ahdieh

The New Regulation: From Command To Coordination In The Modern Administrative State, Robert B. Ahdieh

Robert B. Ahdieh

The ‘Growth Budget’: Disciplined And Responsible Government Spending For Future Prosperity, Neil H. Buchanan

Neil H. Buchanan

This essay considers how spending by the federal government can improve long-term living standards. The familiar concept of “capital budgeting” separates government expenditures into two categories: purchases of goods and services for current consumption that provide no long-term payoff (“operating expenditures”), and purchases of productive capital goods that do generate long-term payoffs (“capital expenditures”). Within that framework, I advocate expanding the range of possible public investments that would count as capital expenditures to include those that do not produce physical infrastructure but that nevertheless provide long-term economic benefits. Adding these items – such as spending on basic research, health care, …

Behavioral Economic Issues In American And Islamic Marriage & Divorce Law, Ryan M. Riegg

Ryan M. Riegg

Opportunism, Uncertainty, And Relational Contracting - Antitrust Rules In The Film Industry, Ryan M. Riegg

Ryan M. Riegg

Beyond The Berle And Means Paradigm: Private Equity And The New Capitalist Order, Stephen Diamond

Stephen F. Diamond

The rise of private equity funds represents a new stage in capitalism. These funds combine financial resources and capital markets expertise with detailed operational knowledge of the operations of takeover targets to maximize the creation and expropriation of value on behalf of investors. Their significant size and aggressive buyout record suggests that we may be witnessing the confirmation of Michael Jensen's 1989 prediction, made in the midst of the first wave of leveraged buyouts, of the “eclipse of the public corporation.” Critics of private equity share a view of the corporation rooted in a decades old characterization by Berle and …

Neoclassicism And The Separation Of Ownership And Control, Herbert Hovenkamp

Herbert Hovenkamp

NEOCLASSICISM AND THE SEPARATION OF OWNERSHIP AND CONTROL Herbert Hovenkamp ABSTRACT The separation of ownership and control is a phrase that will forever be associated with Adolf A. Berle and Gardiner C. Means The Modern Corporation and Private Property (1932), as well as with Institutionalist economics, Legal Realism, and the New Deal. Neoclassical economists have generally been sharply critical, both of the historical facts that Berle and Means purported to describe and of the conclusions that they drew. In fact, however, the separation of ownership and control had already been an essential element of the neoclassical theory of corporate governance …

Opportunism, Uncertainty, And Relational Contracting - Antitrust Rules In The Film Industry, Ryan M. Riegg

Ryan M. Riegg

Behavioral Economic Issues In American & Islamic Marriage & Divorce Law, Ryan M. Riegg

Ryan M. Riegg

More Private Equity, Less Government Subsidy, And More Tax Efficiency In Urban Revitalization, Roger M. Groves

Roger M. Groves

MORE PRIVATE EQUITY, LESS GOVERNMENT SUBSIDY, AND MORE TAX EFFICIENCY IN URBAN REVITALIZATION: Modeling Profitable Philanthropy and Investment Incentives In hopes of revitalizing depressed urban areas, US tax policy has been to use tax credits as a major incentive to induce private equity re-investment. But those give away subsidies to private investors have failed to have transformative effects, and come at a price in the billions to the public treasury. This article seeks a shift in the tax policy paradigm to increase the private equity investment, while reducing tax subsidy dependence. For the philanthropic urban investor, the short term incentive …

Facebook 2 Blackberry And Database Trading Systems: Morphing Social Networking To Business Growth In A Global Recession, Roger M. Groves

Roger M. Groves

FACEBOOK 2 BLACKBERRY AND DATABASE TRADING SYSTEMS: MORPHING SOCIAL NETWORKING TO BUSINESS GROWTH IN A GLOBAL RECESSION Summary Facebook has now applications to the Blackberry Smartphone and IPhone. And Facebook has exploded internationally. If the Facebook social networking technology has applications to Blackberry, why not business? And as any business looks for growth, the market is not an existing heavily saturated United States, but a global market. Can the Facebook model of data sharing be customized to propel US technology firms into new international markets? This article claims the affirmative, through a multilateral clearing system, with credits and vouchers, as …

Biofuels, Subsidies, And Dispute Settlement In The Wto, Bryant Walker Smith

Bryant Walker Smith

The first WTO panels to tackle a biofuels dispute under the Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures will navigate a murky sea of conflict, gridlock, and uncertainty that the subsidies agreement did not contemplate and that the failed Doha round did not resolve. This article charts these waters. It identifies both the values that the panels will confront and the interpretive tools that they will wield. It further argues that dispute settlement may become the primary driver of an otherwise stagnant regime, and it sketches three competing visions for protecting the “legally binding security of expectations” that underscores that regime.

'Generational Theft'? Even With Stimulus And Bailout Spending, U.S. Fiscal Policy Does Not Cheat Future Generations, Neil H. Buchanan

Neil H. Buchanan

Despite the oft-heard claims that current generations are stealing from future generations by running fiscal deficits, both theory and evidence suggest that this is either not true or not knowable. Intergenerational justice is not an appropriate lens through which to analyze fiscal issues, because there is no obvious starting point from which to build a moral consensus about whether current generations owe anything at all to future generations - and even if we do believe that we owe something to future generations, no one has offered a useful method by which we can determine whether we are doing enough for …

What Do We Owe Future Generations?, Neil H. Buchanan

Neil H. Buchanan

In the United States, it is common for legal scholars, economists, politicians and others to claim that we are selfishly harming “our children and grandchildren” by (among many other things) running large government budget deficits. This article first asks two broad questions: (1) Do we owe future generations anything at all as a philosophical matter? and (2) If we do owe something to future generations, how should we balance their interests against our own? The short answers are “Probably” and “We really are not sure.”

Finding only general answers to these general questions, I then look specifically at U.S. fiscal …

Four Out Of Four Panelists Agree: U.S. Fiscal Policy Does Not Cheat Future Generations, Neil H. Buchanan

Neil H. Buchanan

As part of the George Washington Law Review's symposium "What Does Our Legal System Owe Future Generations? New Analyses of Intergenerational Justice for a New Century," participants discussed the nature of intergenerational obligations as they relate to fiscal policy. The panelists reached consensus that intergenerational justice is not an appropriate lens through which to analyze fiscal issues, because there is no obvious starting point from which to build a moral consensus about whether current generations owe anything at all to future generations, much less how to quantify any such obligation. In addition, even pessimistic forecasts indicate that future generations will …