Law Commons^™

When Truth Cannot Be Presumed: The Regulation Of Drug Promotion Under An Expanding First Amendment, Christopher Robertson

Faculty Scholarship

The Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FDCA) requires that, prior to marketing a drug, the manufacturer must prove that it is safe and effective for the manufacturer’s intended uses, as shown on the proposed label. Nonetheless, physicians may prescribe drugs for other “off-label” uses, and often do so. Still, manufacturers have not been allowed to promote the unproven uses in advertisements or sales pitches.

This regime is now precarious due to an onslaught of scholarly critiques, a series of Supreme Court decisions that enlarge the First Amendment, and a landmark court of appeals decision holding that the First Amendment precludes …

Three Proposals For Regulating The Distribution Of Home Equity, Ian Ayres, Joshua Mitts

Faculty Scholarship

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s recently-released “qualified mortgage” rules effectively discourage predatory lending but miss an equally important source of systemic risk: low-equity clustering. Specific “volatility-inducing” mortgage terms, when present in a substantial cluster of mortgage contracts, exacerbate macroeconomic risk by increasing the chance that the housing and lending markets will have to absorb a wave of simultaneous defaults after a downturn in housing prices. This Article shows that these terms became prevalent in a substantial proportion of residential mortgages in the years leading up to the home mortgage crisis. In contrast, during the earlier “amortization era” (when mortgagors were …