Law Commons^™

Moving Forward With Regulatory Lookback, Cary Coglianese

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President Obama has rightly called on government agencies to establish ongoing routines for reviewing existing regulations to determine if they need modification or repeal. Over the last two years, the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) has overseen a signature regulatory “lookback” initiative that has prompted dozens of federal agencies to review hundreds of regulations. This regulatory initiative represents a good first step toward increasing the retrospective review of regulation, but by itself will do little to build a lasting culture of serious regulatory evaluation. After all, past administrations have made similar review efforts, but these ad …

Government Governance And The Need To Reconcile Government Regulation With Board Fiduciary Duties, Lisa Fairfax

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Corporate governance scandals inevitably raise concerns about the extent to which corporate directors failed in their responsibility to monitor the corporation and its managers, especially in terms of the latter's’ misdeeds. Corporate governance reforms strive to shore up directors' roles by seeking to ensure that boards have sufficient incentives to engage in effective oversight and to hold the boards more accountable. The current financial crisis has ushered in an era of significant government reform of the financial system and involvement in corporate governance matters. Such involvement has increased board of directors' responsibilities but has not reconciled those responsibilities with board …

Are Those Who Ignore History Doomed To Repeat It?, Peter Decherney, Nathan Ensmenger, Christopher S. Yoo

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In The Master Switch, Tim Wu argues that four leading communications industries have historically followed a single pattern that he calls “the Cycle.” Because Wu’s argument is almost entirely historical, the cogency of its claims and the force of its policy recommendations depends entirely on the accuracy and completeness of its treatment of the historical record. Specifically, he believes that industries begin as open, only to be transformed into closed systems by a great corporate mogul until some new form of ingenuity restarts the Cycle anew. Interestingly, even taken at face value, many of the episodes described in the …

Federalism, Variation, And State Regulation Of Franchise Termination, Jonathan Klick, Bruce Kobayashi, Larry Ribstein

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This article discusses and expands on our recent work examining the effects of franchise-termination laws. In a prior article, we examined empirically the effect of franchise-termination laws on the level of franchise activity. Our analysis improved upon the prior literature in two major ways. First, our work exploited two new sources of panel data to provide new empirical evidence on the effect of franchise termination laws. Second, our analysis examined variation in states’ restrictions on the ability of franchisors and franchisees to contract around a particular state’s regulation. We found that the effects of termination laws on the overall level …

Unentrapped, William W. Bratton

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No abstract provided.

The New Federal Regulation Of Corporate Governance, Jill E. Fisch

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No abstract provided.

Is There A Role For Lawyers In Preventing Future Enrons?, Jill E. Fisch, Kenneth M. Rosen

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Following the collapse of the Enron Corporation, the ethical obligations of corporate attorneys have received increased scrutiny. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, enacted in response to calls for corporate reform, specifically requires the Securities and Exchange Commission to address the lawyer’s role by requiring covered attorneys to “report up” evidence of corporate wrongdoing to key corporate officers, and, in some circumstances, to the board of directors. Failure to “report up” subjects a lawyer to liability under federal law.

This Article argues that the reporting up requirement reflects a second-best approach to corporate governance reform. Rather than focusing on the actors …

Bounded Evaluation: Cognition, Incoherence, And Regulatory Policy, Cary Coglianese

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Cass Sunstein, Daniel Kahneman, David Schkade, and Ilana Ritov have recently advanced a cognitive explanation for incoherence in legal decisionmaking, showing how decision makers tend to make micro-level judgments that make little sense when viewed from a broader perspective. Among other things, they claimed to have discovered striking incoherence in regulatory policy evidenced by varied penalty levels across different statutes, with less serious violations sometimes backed up with higher penalties than more serious violations. This paper comments on Sunstein et al.'s treatment of incoherence in regulatory policy, arguing that the same cognitive limitations that Sunstein et al. argue lead to …

Public Benefits And Federal Authorization For Alienage Discrimination By The States, Howard F. Chang

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No abstract provided.

Incentives To Settle Under Joint And Several Liability: An Empirical Analysis Of Superfund Litigation, Howard F. Chang, Hilary Sigman

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Congress may soon restrict joint and several liability for cleanup of contaminated sites under Superfund. We explore whether this change would discourage settlements and is therefore likely to increase the program 's already high litigation costs per site. Recent theoretical research by Kornhauser and Revesz finds that joint and several liability may either encourage or discourage settlement, depending on the correlation of outcomes at trial across defendants. We extend their two-defendant model to a richer framework with N defendants. This extension allows us to test the theoretical model empirically using data on Superfund litigation. We find that joint and several …

An Economic Analysis Of Trade Measures To Protect The Global Environment, Howard F. Chang

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In this article, Professor Howard Chang addresses the role of trade restrictions in supporting policies to protect the global environment and proposes a more liberal treatment of these environmental trade measures than that adopted by dispute-settlement panels of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The GATT Secretariat has recommended that countries like the United States rely on "carrots" rather than "sticks" in order to induce the participation of other countries in multilateral environmental agreements. Professor Chang defends the use of sticks on the ground that they encourage more restrained exploitation of the environment pending a multilateral agreement. First, …

Frankenstein's Monster Hits The Campaign Trail: An Approach To Regulation Of Corporate Political Expenditures, Jill E. Fisch

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No abstract provided.

Myths And Misunderstandings, Michael I. Meyerson

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This article explores the utility of the Holmsean marketplace of ideas when considering the regulation of different forms of communication technology.

Amending The Oversight: Legislative Drafting And The Cable Act, Michael I. Meyerson

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The Cable Communications Policy Act of 1984 ("Cable Act") represented the first comprehensive federal law governing the no-longer new communications technology of cable television. After years of confronting a "patchwork" of federal, state, and local regulation, the cable industry, government regulators, and the public were told that the Cable Act would create a "national policy concerning cable communications," and firmly "establish guidelines for the exercise of Federal, State, and local authority."

Unfortunately, the Cable Act failed to fulfill its numerous objectives. Advertised as a careful balance, the Cable Act was administratively and judicially converted to a lopsided grant of victory …

The Right To Speak, The Right To Hear, And The Right Not To Hear: The Technological Resolution To The Cable/Pornography Debate, Michael I. Meyerson

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The advent of cable television presented a new opportunity to consider the competing interests on each side of the free speech/pornography debate. This Article attempts to construct an analysis that will be consistent with Supreme Court teaching on how government, under the first amendment, may constitutionally regulate legal obscenity, particularly in the name of protecting those who wish to avoid exposure to such material.

The Article shows how, unlike earlier battles over technology and pornography, cable television presented the novel opportunity to have a technological rather than a censorial solution to this difficult problem.

Developments In Law - Toxic Waste Litigation, Howard F. Chang

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No abstract provided.