Law Commons^™

Transition-Denial And Structural Adjustment: Causation And Culpability In The Cuban Economy Culpability In The Cuban Economy, Jose Gabilondo

Faculty Publications

In 2020, Cuba implemented the Tarea Ordenamiento (Tarea), the most significant economic reform since the construction of the socialist economy after the Revolution. Signaling an eclectic brand of Cuban socialism, the Tarea clears away three decades of tried and failed economic doctrines, drawing a new fiscal border around state enterprises, nodding to market realities, and preparing the island for greater insertion into the world economy. While the political economy of post-Castro Cuba has changed in this way, the United States continues to subject the island to an unprecedented program of unilateral sanctions, universally condemned as a breach of human rights, …

Unequal Investment: A Regulatory Case Study, Emily R. Winston

Faculty Publications

Growing economic inequality in the United States has reduced social mobility, placing financial security farther out of reach for a growing number of Americans. During the COVID-19 pandemic, U.S. stock prices have grown simultaneously with unemployment and food insecurity, highlighting the fact that prosperity is unequally distributed in the U.S. economy.

Many Americans do not benefit when the stock market soars because they do not have the means to invest. However, even ordinary American families who do have wealth to invest in the capital markets will face enormous obstacles in narrowing the wealth divide through investment. This is because ordinary …

Corporate Venture Capital, Darian M. Ibrahim

Faculty Publications

This Article makes the case for corporate venture capital as a potentially game-changing entrant into entrepreneurial finance. Part II begins by retracing the ancillary players in entrepreneurial finance and their roles in the startup ecosystem. After finding each of them incapable of denting the venture capitalist’s current dominance, Part III introduces the large corporation as venture capitalist. Part III discusses the growing scale of corporate venture capital and why it may be desirable for startups, innovation, and society as a whole. Part IV looks at legal differences that may become important for corporate venture capitalists to consider, including securities, antitrust, …

The Operation Of Supervisory Colleges In Eu Banking Supervision: A Case Study Of Soft Law Becoming Hard Law, Duncan E. Alford

Faculty Publications

In this paper, I consider the case of supervisory cooperation among bank regulators where voluntary cooperation (soft law) over a period of 50 years has become hard law (regulations and directives) within the European Union. Driven by major international bank failures or financial crises, international standards for prudential supervisory cooperation among bank regulators have steadily developed and become more precise and defined since the early 1970s.

Mphaea & Marble Cake: Parity & The Forgotten Frame Of Federalism, Taleed El-Sabawi

Faculty Publications

Federal parity laws, and their state equivalents, have been shown to increase access to substance use disorder (SUD) treatment, by decreasing the cost of SUD treatment borne by the insured, and has resulted in little increase in health plan costs. Despite these improvements, the effects of parity on access to SUD treatment have been lower than expected. Recent reports suggest that states have varied in their enforcement parity, failures which may explain why persons surveyed still report having inadequate insurance coverage for SUD treatment despite the parity legislation. While other articles have offered suggestions for improving parity, most have lumped …

Smart Contracts And The Limits Of Computerized Commerce, Eric D. Chason

Faculty Publications

Smart contracts and cryptocurrencies have sparked considerable interest among legal scholars in recent years, and a growing body of scholarship focuses on whether smart contracts and cryptocurrencies can sidestep law and regulation altogether. Bitcoin is famously decentralized, without any central actor controlling the system. Its users remain largely anonymous, using alphanumeric addresses instead of legal names. Ethereum shares these traits and also supports smart contracts that can automate the transfer of the Ethereum cryptocurrency (known as ether). Ethereum also supports specialized "tokens" that can be tied to the ownership of assets, goods, and services that exist completely outside of the …

Public Or Private Venture Capital?, Darian M. Ibrahim

Faculty Publications

The United States has an unparalled entrepreneurial ecosystem. Silicon Valley startups commercialize cutting-edge science, create plentiful jobs, and spur economic growth. Without angel investors and venture capital funds (VCs) willing to gamble on these high-risk, high-tech companies, none of this would be possible.

From a law-and-economics perspective, startup investing is incredibly risky. Information asymmetry and agency costs abound. In the United States, angels and VCs successfully mitigate these problems through private ordering and informal means. Countries without the robust private venture capital system that exists in the United States have attempted to fund startups publicly by creating junior stock exchanges …

Securities & Exchange Commission Vs. Elon Musk & The First Amendment, Jerry W. Markham

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Fintech Lending: A Study Of Expectations Versus Market Outcomes, Vincent Dilorenzo

Faculty Publications

This article explores expectations and outcomes. It documents the expectations for the fintech lending industry, which has emerged in this decade, and compares such expectations to market outcomes. It presents an evidence-based analysis for policy making decisions. Part one of the article documents expectations—possible benefits and risks of fintech lending—through large-scale surveys and interviews of industry, consumer and government stakeholders. Part two of the article examines market outcomes—benefits and risks that have been realized or failed to materialize as documented by studies of substantial data sets of various types of fintech loans. The benefits and risks explored include increased access …

How Bitcoin Functions As Property Law, Eric D. Chason

Faculty Publications

Bitcoin replicates many of the formal aspects of real estate transactions. Bitcoin transactions have features that closely resemble grantor names, grantee names, legal descriptions, and signatures found in real property deeds. While these “Bitcoin deeds” may be interesting, they are not profound. Bitcoin goes beyond creating simple digital deeds, however, and replicates important institutional aspects of real estate transactions, in particular recordation and title assurance. Deeds to real property are recorded in a central repository (e.g., the public records office), which the parties (and the public) can search to determine title. When one grantor executes more than one deed covering …

Community Development Finance And Economic Justice, Peter R. Pitegoff

Faculty Publications

This chapter reflects on the history of community economic development, community development financial institutions, and their relationship with law and legal scholarship. It describes the robust use of complex legal and financial tools in community development practice today and presents Maine-based Coastal Enterprises Inc. (CEI) as a window into the evolution of the field over the last four decades. Part II traces the wider history and context of community development finance and of the dramatic expansion in tax credit financing. Part III explores the implications of this trend for sustainability and local accountability, underscoring the distinction between community organizing and …

Crowdfunding Signals, Darian M. Ibrahim

Faculty Publications

Entrepreneurs can now “crowdfund,” or sell securities to unaccredited investors over the Internet, to raise capital. But will these companies be able to attract the follow-on investors (angels and venture capitalists) that are necessary for long-term success? Angels and VCs face extreme levels of information asymmetry when deciding whether to fund a company. Signals can reduce this asymmetry. Early commentary argues a company only crowdfunds as a last resort for fear of sending a negative signal about the company’s quality to follow-on investors. This Article argues the inverse. This Article argues a successful crowdfunding campaign can send a positive signal …

Regulating The “Too Big To Jail” Financial Institutions, Jerry W. Markham

Faculty Publications

This article addresses the “too big to jail” regulatory model in which large banks pay hundreds of billions of dollars to settle multiple and duplicative regulatory charges brought by a horde of state, federal, and even foreign regulators. The banks pay those massive settlements in order to keep their banking charters and to obtain immunity from prosecution for senior executives. In turn, regulators benefit from the headlines these fines generate. Much criticism has been directed at these settlements because the banks are allowed to continue business as usual and no senior executives are jailed. Other critics contend that these settlements …

Crowdfunding Without The Crowd, Darian M. Ibrahim

Faculty Publications

The final crowdfunding rules took three years for the Securites and Exchange Commission to pass, but crowdfunding—the offering of securities over the Internet—is now a reality. But now that crowdfunding is legal, will it be successful? Will crowdfunding be a regular means by which new companies raise money, or will it be relegated to a wasteland of the worst startups and foolish investors? This Article argues that crowdfunding has a greater chance of success if regulators abandon the idea that the practice does (and should) employ “crowd-based wisdom.” Instead, I argue that crowdfunding needs intermediation by experts that mirrors the …

Intrapreneurship, Darian M. Ibrahim

Faculty Publications

This Article on “intrapreneurship” has several goals. First, it points out that while much of the legal literature on innovation is concerned with startups (entrepreneurship), the innovation that takes place inside our largest corporations (intrapreneurship) is substantial, important, and understudied. Second, the Article observes that while large technology corporations that used to be startups may remain intrapreneurial in culture, intrapreneurship is less common in the aggregate than we might expect. Reasons include organizational bureaucracy, laws favoring entrepreneurship, and what Clayton Christensen (Harvard Business School) calls “the innovator’s dilemma.” The innovator’s dilemma is, put simply, that good management causes large corporations …

Corporate Wrongdoing: Interactions Of Legal Mandates And Corporate Culture, Vincent Dilorenzo

Faculty Publications

In recent years, enforcement officials have imposed billions of dollars in sanctions on all major U.S. financial institutions and many major financial institutions abroad. Similar sanctions have been imposed on nonfinancial institutions. The sanctions are the result of findings of recurrent violations of law, as well as recidivism. Why have existing regulatory standards and enforcement policies led to repeated violations of law? Will the recent billion dollar sanctions deter future wrongdoing?

This article explores these issues by examining the philosophy motivating regulatory policy and action in the United States and United Kingdom, using financial regulators as a case study. This …

Regulating The Moneychangers, Jerry W. Markham

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Regulating The U.S. Treasury Market, Jerry W. Markham

Faculty Publications

The market for U.S. Treasury securities is critical to our monetary policy and government funding. It also serves as a benchmark for pricing other investments and has provided a haven for investors seeking safety and stability. However, concern has recently arisen that “primary dealers” in that market might have manipulated prices. In addition, an unusual market volatility event that occurred in October 2014, and the growth of high-frequency trading have raised further questions over the adequacy of regulation in that market. This article addresses those concerns. It first describes the U.S. Treasury market and identifies efforts by traders over the …

Equity Crowdfunding: A Market For Lemons?, Darian M. Ibrahim

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

High-Speed Trading On Stock And Commodity Markets - From Courier Pigeons To Computers, Jerry W. Markham

Faculty Publications

A growing concern in the stock and commodity markets over the last several years has been the rise of high-frequency traders (HFTs). Those traders employ high-speed computer technology for the algorithmic origination, transmission and execution of their orders through fiber optic cables and microwave towers. That technology allows HFT orders to be executed in times measured in fractions of a second. As a result of this technological advance, HFTs are now dominating trading volumes. This phenomenon has, on the one hand, led to claims by proponents of highspeed trading that HFTs are an important source of market liquidity and should …

Revisiting The Causes Of The Financial Crisis, Antony Page

Faculty Publications

Much has been written on the legal causes of the financial crisis and its aftermath, often referred to as the Great Recession. Presumably the debate will continue for many years to come, much as scholars continue to debate the causes of the Great Depression. Lost, however, in the descriptions of arcane laws and complex derivative financial products, is a relatively brief and straightforward account of the crisis and its most likely causes for interested lawyers, law students, or graduate students who are not specialists and do not want to become specialists. This Essay, based on a presentation at the Indiana …

The Uneasy Case For Deferring Banker Pay, Eric D. Chason

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Extending The Taxation-Of-Risk Model To Timing Options And Marked-To-Market Taxes, Eric D. Chason

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Custodial Requirements For Customer Funds, Jerry W. Markham

Faculty Publications

A series of bankruptcies by large financial institutions in recent years resulted in massive shortages of customer funds. The first of those failures, Refco, Inc. (Refco), occurred in 2005 after the exposure of a massive fraud by its officers. That debacle was followed in 2007 by the failure of Sentinel Management Group, Inc. (Sentinel), which had used several hundred million dollars of customer assets to leverage the firm's trading position. The failure of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. (Lehman or Lehman Brothers) during the Financial Crisis in 2008 was the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history and resulted in extensive litigation over …

International Financial Reforms: Capital Standards, Resolution Regimes And Supervisory Colleges, And Their Effect On Emerging Markets, Duncan E. Alford

Faculty Publications

This paper focuses on the relevance to emerging economies of three major financial reforms following the global financial crisis of 2007–2009: (1) the improved capital requirements intended to reduce the risk of bank failure (“Basel III”), (2) the improved recovery and resolution regimes for global banks, and (3) the development of supervisory colleges of cross-border financial institutions to improve supervisory cooperation and convergence. The paper also addresses the implications of these regulatory reforms for Asian emerging markets.

Financial Hospitals: Defending The Fed’S Role As Market Maker Of Last Resort, Jose M. Gabilondo

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Improving The Lives Of Individuals In Financial Distress Using A Randomized Control Trial: A Research And Clinical Approach, Lois R. Lupica, Dalie´ Jimenez, D. James Greiner, Rebecca L. Sandefur

Faculty Publications

This Article describes an ambitious Randomized Control Trial (RCT) in the area of consumer debt collection. Randomized trials are the same kind of evaluation that the law requires (or at least strongly encourages) before new drugs and medical devices may be sold to the public. Although they have not yet gained widespread popularity in the evaluation of legal systems, randomized trials are uniquely effective ways of assessing whether any benefits observed after implementation of legal or educational assistance programs are really due to those programs as compared to other factors, such as unusual levels of competence or motivation of program …

The International Court Of Justice's Treatment Of Circumstantial Evidence And Adverse Inferences, Michael P. Scharf, Marqaux Day

Faculty Publications

This Article examines a vexing evidentiary question with which the International Court of Justice has struggled in several cases, namely: What should the Court do when one of the parties has exclusive access to critical evidence and refuses to produce it for security or other reasons? In its first case, Corfu Channel, the Court decided to apply liberal inferences of fact against the non-producing party, but in the more recent Crime of Genocide case, the Court declined to do so under seemingly similar circumstances. By carefully examining the treatment of evidence exclusively accessible by one party in these and other …

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission And The Politics Of Governmental Investigations, Michael A. Perino

Faculty Publications

In May 2009, Congress passed the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act which created the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, an independent, bipartisan panel tasked to examine the causes of the current financial and economic crisis in the United States.

Franklin Roosevelt never created an independent commission to investigate Wall Street, but the Pecora hearings, the eponymous investigation of Wall Street wrongdoing run by a former New York prosecutor, captivated the country. For sixteen months in the worst depths of the Great Depression, Ferdinand Pecora paraded a series of elite financiers before the Senate Banking and Currency Committee. In one hearing after …

The New Exit In Venture Capital, Darian M. Ibrahim

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.