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Articles 1 - 8 of 8
Full-Text Articles in Law
Broker-Dealers And Investment Advisers: A Behaviorial-Economics Analysis Of Competing Suggestions For Reform, Polina Demina
Broker-Dealers And Investment Advisers: A Behaviorial-Economics Analysis Of Competing Suggestions For Reform, Polina Demina
Michigan Law Review
For the average investor trying to save for retirement or a child’s college fund, the world of investing has become increasingly complex. These retail investors must turn more frequently to financial intermediaries, such as broker-dealers and investment advisers, to get sound investment advice. Such intermediaries perform different duties for their clients, however. The investment adviser owes his client a fiduciary duty of care and therefore must provide financial advice that is in the client’s best interests, while the broker-dealer must merely provide advice that is suitable to the client’s interests—a lower standard than the fiduciary duty of care. And yet …
Reconciling Tax Law And Securities Regulation, Omri Marian
Reconciling Tax Law And Securities Regulation, Omri Marian
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform
Issuers in registered securities offerings must disclose the expected tax consequences to investors investing in the offered securities (“nonfinancial tax disclosure”). This Article advances three arguments regarding nonfinancial tax disclosures. First, nonfinancial tax disclosure practice, as the Securities and Exchange Commission (the SEC) has sanctioned it, does not fulfill its intended regulatory purposes. Currently, nonfinancial tax disclosures provide irrelevant information, sometimes fail to provide material information, create unnecessary transaction costs, and divert valuable administrative resources to the enforcement of largely-meaningless requirements. Second, the practical reason for this failure is the SEC and tax practitioners’ unsuccessful attempt to address investors’ heterogeneous …
Opening Schumer’S Box: The Empirical Foundations Of Modern Consumer Finance Disclosure Law, Hosea H. Harvey
Opening Schumer’S Box: The Empirical Foundations Of Modern Consumer Finance Disclosure Law, Hosea H. Harvey
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform
This Article explores the fundamental failure of Congress’ twenty-five-year quest to utilize disclosure as the primary tool to both regulate credit card issuers and educate consumers. From inception until present, reforms to this disclosure regime, even when premised on judgment and decision-making behavioralism, were nomothetic in orientation and ignored clear differences in population behavior and the heterogeniety of consumers. Current law prohibits credit card issuers from acquiring consumer socio-demographic data and prevents issuers and regulators from using market and policy experimentation to enhance disclosure’s efficacy. To explain why this regime was structured this way and why it must change, this …
Rationality's Reach, Adam B. Badawi
Rationality's Reach, Adam B. Badawi
Michigan Law Review
Economic analysis and the rational actor model have dominated contracts scholarship for at least a generation. In the past fifteen years or so, however, a group of behaviorists has challenged the ability of the rational choice model to account for consumer behavior. These behaviorists are not trying to dismantle the entire enterprise. They generally accept the fundamentals of economic analysis but argue that the rational actor model can be improved by incorporating evidence of decisionmaking flaws that people exhibit. Oren Bar-Gill has been one of the foremost and influential proponents of a behaviorist take on contracts, and his recent book, …
The 1 Percent Solution: Corporate Tax Returns Should Be Public (And How To Get There), Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, Ariel Siman
The 1 Percent Solution: Corporate Tax Returns Should Be Public (And How To Get There), Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, Ariel Siman
Articles
The justification for publishing corporate tax returns is that corporations are given immense benefits by the state that bestows upon them unlimited life and limited liability, and therefore they owe the public the information of how they treat the state that created them. Tax returns, like the financial disclosures that publicly traded corporations must file with the SEC, also provide useful information to shareholders, creditors, and the investing public.
Structure From Nothing And Claims For Free: Using A Whole-System View Of The Patent System To Improve Notice And Predictability For Software Patents, Holly K. Victorson
Structure From Nothing And Claims For Free: Using A Whole-System View Of The Patent System To Improve Notice And Predictability For Software Patents, Holly K. Victorson
Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review
No uniform or customary method of disclosure for software patents is currently employed by inventors. This Note examines the issues that develop from software patent claims disclosed at various levels of abstraction, and the difficulties encountered by courts and the public when investigating the contours of the software patent space. While the courts have placed some restrictions on the manner in which software inventions are claimed, they are easily bypassed by clever patent applicants who desire to claim the maximum scope of their inventions. In the long run, however, a large “patent thicket” of overlapping and potentially overbroad inventions will …
Personalizing Default Rules And Disclosure With Big Data, Ariel Porat, Lior Jacob Strahilevitz
Personalizing Default Rules And Disclosure With Big Data, Ariel Porat, Lior Jacob Strahilevitz
Michigan Law Review
This Article provides the first comprehensive account of personalized default rules and personalized disclosure in the law. Under a personalized approach to default rules, individuals are assigned default terms in contracts or wills that are tailored to their own personalities, characteristics, and past behaviors. Similarly, disclosures by firms or the state can be tailored so that only information likely to be relevant to an individual is disclosed and information likely to be irrelevant to her is omitted. The Article explains how the rise of Big Data makes the effective personalization of default rules and disclosure far easier than it would …
Private Control Over Access To Public Law: The Perplexing Federal Regulatory Use Of Private Standards, Nina A. Mendelson
Private Control Over Access To Public Law: The Perplexing Federal Regulatory Use Of Private Standards, Nina A. Mendelson
Articles
To save resources and build on private expertise, federal agencies have incorporated privately drafted standards into thousands of federal regulations — but only by “reference.” These standards range widely, subsuming safety, benefits, and testing standards. An individual who seeks access to this binding law generally cannot freely read it online or in a governmental depository library, as she can the U.S. Code or the Code of Federal Regulations. Instead, she generally must pay a significant fee to the drafting organization, or else she must travel to Washington, D.C., to the Office of the Federal Register’s reading room. This law, under …