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Articles 1 - 15 of 15
Full-Text Articles in Law
Uncertainty Revisited: Legal Prediction And Legal Postdiction, Ehud Guttel, Alon Harel
Uncertainty Revisited: Legal Prediction And Legal Postdiction, Ehud Guttel, Alon Harel
Michigan Law Review
Legal scholarship, following rational-choice theory, has traditionally treated uncertainty as a single category. A large body of experimental studies, however, has established that individuals treat guesses concerning the future differently than guesses concerning the past. Even where objective probabilities and payoffs are identical, individuals are much more willing to predict a future event (and are more confident in the accuracy of their predictions) than they are willing to postdict a past event (and are also less confident in the accuracy of their postdiction). For example, individuals are more willing to bet on the results of a future die toss than …
Optimal Political Control Of The Bureaucracy, Matthew C. Stephenson
Optimal Political Control Of The Bureaucracy, Matthew C. Stephenson
Michigan Law Review
It is widely believed that insulating an administrative agency from the influence of elected officials, whatever its other benefits orjustifications, reduces the agency's responsiveness to the preferences of political majorities. This Article argues, to the contrary, that a moderate degree of bureaucratic insulation from political control alleviates rather than exacerbates the countermajoritarian problems inherent in bureaucratic policymaking. An elected politician, though responsive to majoritarian preferences, will almost always deviate from the majority in one direction or the other Therefore, even if the average policy position of a given elected official tends to track the policy views of the median voter …
The Resilience Of Law, Joseph Vining
The Resilience Of Law, Joseph Vining
Law & Economics Working Papers Archive: 2003-2009
The development of "law and economics" over the last half-century has expanded and reinforced a perception among academic lawyers that law itself is a social science. During the same period social science has moved closer to the discipline of natural science and the presuppositions and methods of its thought and work. This essay explores why law is not and cannot be a social science, and why there are grounds for hope in a future for democracy grounded in the rule of law.
China, Business Law, And Finance -- Accession To The World Trade Organization, Joseph Vining
China, Business Law, And Finance -- Accession To The World Trade Organization, Joseph Vining
Law & Economics Working Papers Archive: 2003-2009
China's entry into the world economy will affect not just how we act but how we think. It will affect especially what "business," "business law," and "business corporation" come to mean both in a transnational setting and in American law. The nature of American business law today still stands in the way of a wholly profit-maximizing approach to law or the world in general. But there is strong pressure, consistent with a general tendency in Western thought, to make business and corporate decision-making entirely manipulative and calculating and to eliminate the force of human value from it. This Youde Lecture …
Property Rules, Liability Rules, And Uncertainty About Property Rights, Stewart E. Sterk
Property Rules, Liability Rules, And Uncertainty About Property Rights, Stewart E. Sterk
Michigan Law Review
Clarity can be a considerable virtue in property rights. But even when property rights are defined clearly in the abstract, ascertaining the scope of those rights in concrete situations often entails significant cost. In some instances, the cost of acquiring information about the scope of property rights will exceed the social value of that information. In those circumstances, further search for information about the scope of rights is inefficient; the social harm avoided by further search does not justify the costs of the search. Potential resource users, however make decisions based on private costs and benefits, not social costs and …
Rational Choice, Reputation, And Human Rights Treaties, Alex Geisinger, Michael Ashley Stein
Rational Choice, Reputation, And Human Rights Treaties, Alex Geisinger, Michael Ashley Stein
Michigan Law Review
Part I of this Review sets forth Guzman's general theory of international law with specific consideration of the way reputation influences state behavior. Part II then tests Guzman's overarching thesis by applying it to human rights treaties and concludes that explaining states' entry into human rights treaties requires a broader conception of reputation than Rational Choice allows.
Accredited Indians: Increasing The Flow Of Private Equity Into Indian Country As A Domestic Emerging Market, Gavin Clarkson
Accredited Indians: Increasing The Flow Of Private Equity Into Indian Country As A Domestic Emerging Market, Gavin Clarkson
Law & Economics Working Papers Archive: 2003-2009
Indian Country is America’s domestic emerging market, and as in a number of emerging markets, many successful businesses in Indian Country are starving for expansion capital. The US Treasury estimates that the private equity deficit in Indian Country is $44 billion. While the handful of wealthier tribes might be logical investors in private equity funds deploying capital in Indian Country, the existing securities laws present a significant impediment. In particular, Regulation D of the Securities Act of 1933 does not treat tribes as “accredited investors,” thus denying those tribes the ability to participate in the private equity market. Since there …
Federal Fairness To State Taxpayers: Irrationality, Unfunded Mandates, And The "Salt" Deduction, Brian Galle
Federal Fairness To State Taxpayers: Irrationality, Unfunded Mandates, And The "Salt" Deduction, Brian Galle
Michigan Law Review
By sheer dollars alone, the largest impact of the Alternative Minimum Tax is to deny many taxpayers the deduction for the taxes they paid to their state and local governments under § 164 of the Internal Revenue Code. This Article provides a fine-grained analysis of the overall fairness of the state-andlocal- tax deduction--and, by implication, the fairness of its partial repeal through the Alternative Minimum Tax. I offer for the first time a close examination of how newly understood limits on taxpayer mobility and rationality might affect individuals' choices of bundles of local taxes and localgovernment services, which in turn …
The Virtues Of Medicare, Jill R. Horwitz
The Virtues Of Medicare, Jill R. Horwitz
Reviews
Most of us look forward to a heaven where people don't get sick. But if they do, health care would be traded among fully informed patients and providers in perfectly competitive and frictionless markets. In that perfect world, sick citizens simply shop for doctors the way they shop for other consumer goods. The better doctors, like the most elegant hotel rooms and fanciest cars, would cost more than inferior doctors. Patients would consult their utility meters and, with appropriate attention to discounting over an infinite lifetime, choose accordingly. After each treatment, the patients would know the quality of their outcome …
E-Contract Doctrine 2.0: Standard Form Contracting In The Age Of Online User Participation , Shmuel I. Becher, Tal Z. Zarsky
E-Contract Doctrine 2.0: Standard Form Contracting In The Age Of Online User Participation , Shmuel I. Becher, Tal Z. Zarsky
Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review
The growing popularity of e-commerce transactions revives the perennial question of consumer contract law: should non-salient provisions of consumer standard form contracts be enforced? With the focus presently on an ex-ante analysis, scholars debate whether consumers can and should read standardized terms at the time of contracting. In today's information age, such a focus might be misguided. The online realm furnishes various tools, so-called "Web 2.0" applications, which encourage the flow of information from experienced to prospective consumers. This Article, therefore, reframes the analysis of online consumer contracts while taking into account this new flow of information. In doing so, …
Did Bankruptcy Reform Fail? An Empirical Study Of Consumer Debtors, Robert M. Lawless, Angela K. Littwin, Katherine M. Porter, John A. E. Pottow, Deborah K. Thorne, Elizabeth Warren
Did Bankruptcy Reform Fail? An Empirical Study Of Consumer Debtors, Robert M. Lawless, Angela K. Littwin, Katherine M. Porter, John A. E. Pottow, Deborah K. Thorne, Elizabeth Warren
Articles
Before 2005, many people went broke and many filed for bankruptcy. After 2005, many people still go broke, but not so many file for bankruptcy. Why has the number of bankruptcies declined? Surely it is not the economy. All throughout the 2000s, families have been under increasing economic pressure. Median family incomes have declined, basic expenses have risen, and families are shouldering unprecedented debt loads. Defaults remain high for credit cards and car loans, while mortgage foreclosures have soared. By 2008, over half of all Americans reported that their incomes were falling behind their cost of living. These data all …
Do Investors In Controlled Firms Value Insider Trading Laws? International Evidence, Laura Nyantung Beny
Do Investors In Controlled Firms Value Insider Trading Laws? International Evidence, Laura Nyantung Beny
Articles
This article characterizes insider trading as an agency problem in firms that have a controlling shareholder. Using a standard agency model of corporate value diversion through insider trading by the controlling shareholder, I derive testable hypotheses about the relationship between corporate value and insider trading laws among such firms. The article tests these hypotheses using firm-level cross-sectional data from twenty-seven developed countries. The results show that stringent insider trading laws and enforcement are associated with greater corporate valuation among the sample firms in common law countries, a result that is consistent with the claim that insider trading laws mitigate agency …
Operationalizing Deterrence Claims Management (In Hopsitals, A Large Retailer, And Jails And Prisons), Margo Schlanger
Operationalizing Deterrence Claims Management (In Hopsitals, A Large Retailer, And Jails And Prisons), Margo Schlanger
Articles
The theory that the prospect of liability for damages deters risky behavior has been developed in countless articles and books. The literature is far sparser, however, on how deterrence is operationalized. And prior work slights an equally important effect of damage actions, to incentivize claims management in addition to harm-reduction responses that are cost- rather than liabilityminimizing. This article works in the intersection of these two understudied areas, focusing on claims management steps taken by frequently sued organizations, and opening a window into the black box of deterrence to see how those steps may end up serving harm-reduction purposes as …
The Debt Dilemma, Katherine Porter
The Debt Dilemma, Katherine Porter
Michigan Law Review
Part I describes the nature of credit card spending and explores the usefulness of Mann's comparative approach to studying credit cards. Part II evaluates Mann's findings on the overall relationships between individual credit card transactions and aggregate levels of spending, borrowing, and bankruptcy. It also briefly analyzes the relationship between his findings and policy recommendations. Part III explores data on families who refrain from credit card use and struggle with serious financial distress. Part IV revisits Mann's policy recommendations in light of this new data. I conclude that implementing credit card reform would offer families only partial, albeit valuable, protection …
Foreign Income And Domestic Deductions, James R. Hines Jr.
Foreign Income And Domestic Deductions, James R. Hines Jr.
Articles
To what extent should taxpayers deduct expenses incurred domestically that contribute to foreign income production? It is widely believed that if the home country does not tax foreign income, then it also should not permit deductions for that portion of domestic expenses attributable to earning foreign income. This prescription is, however, inconsistent with the decision to exempt foreign income from taxation in the first place. The paper shows that, for any system of taxing foreign income, the consistent and efficient treatment is to permit domestic expense deductions for all expenses incurred domestically. This differs from the current U.S. regime, under …