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Full-Text Articles in Law

Through The Lens Of Innovation, Mirit Eyal-Cohen Feb 2015

Through The Lens Of Innovation, Mirit Eyal-Cohen

Mirit Eyal-Cohen

The legal system constantly follows the footsteps of innovation and attempts to discourage its migration overseas. Yet, present legal rules that inform and explain entrepreneurial circumstances lack a core understanding of the concept of innovation. By its nature, law imposes order. It provides rules, remedies, and classifications that direct behavior in a consistent manner. Innovation turns on the contrary. It entails making creative judgments about the unknown. It involves adapting to disarray. It thrives on deviations as opposed to traditional causation. This Article argues that these differences matter. It demonstrates that current laws lock entrepreneurs into inefficient legal routes. Using …


Negative Externalities And Subprime Auto Financing: Time To Let The Hanging Paragraph Go(2), Chunlin Leonhard Apr 2013

Negative Externalities And Subprime Auto Financing: Time To Let The Hanging Paragraph Go(2), Chunlin Leonhard

Chunlin Leonhard

Economists generally agree that when private transactions generate negative externalities (i.e. unintended harmful byproduct), government intervention is potentially necessary. Negative externalities are considered socially inefficient because they destroy market supply and demand equilibrium. The existence of negative externalities is therefore one of those rare occasions when government intervention in private transactions is justified. It follows that when the government does choose to intervene, its goal should be to remedy, not to encourage, negative externalities. This article identifies one bankruptcy rule, commonly known as the Hanging Paragraph in the Bankruptcy Code, 11 U.S.C. § 1325(a)(9), that violates the basic principle of …


Righting Others' Wrongs: A Critical Analysis Of Clawback Suits In The Wake Of Madoff-Type Ponzi Schemes And Other Financial Frauds, Amy Sepinwall Dec 2011

Righting Others' Wrongs: A Critical Analysis Of Clawback Suits In The Wake Of Madoff-Type Ponzi Schemes And Other Financial Frauds, Amy Sepinwall

Amy J. Sepinwall

In a typical Ponzi scheme, early investors earn “profits” not through any legitimate investment activity on the part of the Ponzi scheme operator; instead the operator simply transfers money that later investors deposit to the earlier investors who seek redemptions. As such, when the scheme goes bust, as it must, the Ponzi scheme operator will not have enough money to cover all of the investors’ deposits, let alone the earnings on those deposits that the investors thought they were owed. Should the scheme’s winners – i.e., those who withdrew more money than they deposited – be compelled to return their …


Making Debtor Remedies More Effective, Melissa B. Jacoby Apr 2010

Making Debtor Remedies More Effective, Melissa B. Jacoby

Melissa B. Jacoby

Commissioned for a conference on credit markets at Harvard Business School in February 2010, this paper explores functional system design and the role of lawyers and intermediaries in providing debtor remedies in a complex legal system. The thesis of this paper, which proceeds in the “law and society” tradition, is that the location of a remedial right within the debtor-creditor system substantially affects the costs and benefits of the remedy for debtors, creditors, the system, and society. In other words, merely adding specific substantive provisions does not directly translate into actual protection. Relatedly, policymakers must recognize that lawyers and other …


What Determines Professionals’ Bankruptcy Fees: An Empirical Investigation, Gijs Van Dijk, Martin Gramatikov Jan 2010

What Determines Professionals’ Bankruptcy Fees: An Empirical Investigation, Gijs Van Dijk, Martin Gramatikov

Martin Gramatikov

Countries have adopted different approaches to compensate bankruptcy trustees for winding up the estate. The approaches vary from state trustees to funding mechanisms where bankruptcy trustees receive a fixed fee, to a system where their fees depend on the size of the assets. Few studies have addressed the cost-effectiveness of the different approaches. This study contributes to this topic by examining the fees of the winding up, including an analysis of the determinants of these fees. After analyzing 289 Dutch bankruptcies consisting of short-term and medium-term cases, we find substantial differences in the mean hourly remuneration fees of bankruptcy trustees. …


The Failure Of Adversary Process In The Administrative State, Bryan T. Camp Jan 2009

The Failure Of Adversary Process In The Administrative State, Bryan T. Camp

Bryan T Camp

In a series of hearings in 1997 and 1998, Congress heard allegations that the Internal Revenue Service (“IRS” or “Service”) was abusing taxpayers during the process of collecting taxes. The resulting distrust of the tax bureaucracy led Congress to create a special adversary proceeding providing for judicial review of IRS collection decisions. The proceeding is beguilingly titled “Collection Due Process” (and commonly referred to as “CDP”). My study of CDP’s structure, operation, and of 976 court decisions issued through the end of 2006 demonstrates that it has failed to fulfill its promise. Of the over 15 million collection decisions made …