Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Discipline
-
- Law and Economics (7)
- Law and Society (3)
- Tax Law (3)
- Banking and Finance Law (2)
- Contracts (2)
-
- Food and Drug Law (2)
- Nonprofit Organizations Law (2)
- Public Law and Legal Theory (2)
- Torts (2)
- Administrative Law (1)
- Business Organizations Law (1)
- Commercial Law (1)
- Common Law (1)
- Environmental Law (1)
- Health Law and Policy (1)
- Insurance Law (1)
- International Trade Law (1)
- Medical Jurisprudence (1)
- Organizations Law (1)
- Property Law and Real Estate (1)
- Science and Technology Law (1)
- Social Welfare Law (1)
- Taxation-Federal (1)
- Transnational Law (1)
- Transportation Law (1)
Articles 1 - 14 of 14
Full-Text Articles in Law
Defeating The Empire Of Forms, David Hoffman
Defeating The Empire Of Forms, David Hoffman
Articles
For generations, contract scholars have waged a faint-hearted campaign against form contracts. It’s widely believed that adhesive forms are unread and chock full of terms that courts will not, or should not, enforce. Most think that the market for contract terms is broken, for both employees and consumer adherents. And yet forms are so embedded in our economy that it’s hard to imagine modern commercial life without them. Scholars thus push calibrated, careful solutions that walk a deeply rutted path. Notwithstanding hundreds of proposals calling for their retrenchment, the empire of forms has continued to advance into new areas of …
In Praise Of (Some) Ex Post Regulation: A Response To Professor Galle, Kyle D. Logue
In Praise Of (Some) Ex Post Regulation: A Response To Professor Galle, Kyle D. Logue
Articles
According to modern law-and-economics (“L&E”) orthodoxy, the primary—maybe even the only—legitimate justification for government regulation is to correct a market failure. This conclusion is based on two key assumptions. First, when markets are functioning reasonably well, they are better at achieving efficiency than the government is. Second, most markets function reasonably well most of the time. Although there is probably evidence to support these assumptions (for example, the relative prosperity of market-based economies in comparison with the relative poverty of centrally planned economies), both assumptions are usually taken as articles of faith by mainstream L&E scholars. This is why scholarly …
Taxing The Platypygous, James J. White
Taxing The Platypygous, James J. White
Articles
This Article maintains that obesity in the United States is an enormous public health issue that causes the health care costs of the obese Americans greatly to exceed those of citizens of normal weight. Recognizing that that much of that cost will be born by publicly financed programs and that the taxes supporting those programs will constitute an externality that the fat impose on the thin, the Article proposes a tax on high calorie food-but only when that food is purchased by the obese. The Article addresses many of the administrative, moral and other objections to a tax aimed at …
The Attack On Nonprofit Status: A Charitable Assessment, James R. Hines Jr., Jill R. Horwitz, Austin Nichols
The Attack On Nonprofit Status: A Charitable Assessment, James R. Hines Jr., Jill R. Horwitz, Austin Nichols
Articles
American nonprofit organizations receive favorable tax treatment, including tax exemptions and tax-deductibility of contributions, in return for their devotion to charitable purposes and restrictions not to distribute profits. Recent efforts to extend some or all of these tax benefits to for-profit companies making social investments, including the creation of the new hybrid nonprofit/for-profit company form known as the Low-Profit Limited Liability Company, threaten to undermine the vitality of the nonprofit sector and the integrity of the tax system. Reform advocates maintain that the ability to compensate executives based on performance and to distribute profits when attractive investment opportunities are scarce …
The Multiple Common Law Roots Of Charitable Immunity: An Essay In Honor Of Richard Epstein's Contributions To Tort Law, Jill R. Horwitz
The Multiple Common Law Roots Of Charitable Immunity: An Essay In Honor Of Richard Epstein's Contributions To Tort Law, Jill R. Horwitz
Articles
Professor Epstein has long promoted replacing tort-based malpractice law with a new regime based on contracts. In Mortal Peril, he grounded his normative arguments in favor of such a shift in the positive, doctrinal history of charitable immunity law. In this essay, in three parts, I critique Professor Epstein’s suggestion that a faulty set of interpretations in charitable immunity law led to our current reliance on tort for malpractice claims. First, I offer an alternative interpretation to Professor Epstein’s claim that one group of 19th and early 20th century cases demonstrates a misguided effort to protect donor wishes. Rather, I …
The Last Best Hope For Progressivity In Tax, E. J. Mccaffery, James R. Hines Jr.
The Last Best Hope For Progressivity In Tax, E. J. Mccaffery, James R. Hines Jr.
Articles
We argue that a spending tax, as opposed to an income or wage tax, is the “last best hope” for a return to significantly more progressive marginal tax rates than obtain today. The simple explanation for this central claim looks to incentive effects, especially for “rich people,” as both economists and commentators are inclined to focus. High marginal tax rates under an income tax fall on and hence deter the socially productive activities of work and savings. High marginal rates under a wage tax fall on and hence deter the socially productive activity of work alone. But high marginal rates …
Boilerplate And Economic Power In Auto Manufacturing Contracts, Omri Ben-Shahar, James J. White
Boilerplate And Economic Power In Auto Manufacturing Contracts, Omri Ben-Shahar, James J. White
Articles
This Article is structured as follows. Part I compares the terms and conditions in the purchase orders of the Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) and highlights important differences in the substance of these boilerplate provisions. It argues that these differences cannot be easily reconciled with the prediction that sophisticated parties draft the most efficient boilerplate terms. Part II examines how these forms are drafted, how their terms are negotiated, and how the OEMs guard their terms from erosion. It provides some insight on how tailoring occurs and how the internal organization of a party to a deal affects the terms that …
Banking The Poor, Michael S. Barr
Banking The Poor, Michael S. Barr
Articles
Low-income households often lack access to banking accounts and face high costs for transacting basic financial services through check cashers and other alternative financial service providers. These families find it more difficult to save and plan financially for the future. Living paycheck to paycheck leaves them vulnerable to medical or job emergencies that may endanger their financial stability, and lack of longer-term savings undermines their ability to improve skills, purchase a home, or send their children to college. Additionally, high cost financial services and inadequate access to bank accounts may undermine widely shared societal goals of reducing poverty, moving families …
Banking For The Unbanked, Michael S. Barr
Banking For The Unbanked, Michael S. Barr
Articles
The consequences of not having access to mainstream financial services can be severe. Fim, the "unbanked" face high costs for basic financial servies. For example, a 2000 Treasury [U.S. Treasury Department] study found that a worker eaming $12,000 a year would pay approximately $250 annually just to cash payroll checks at a check cashing outlet, in addition to fees for money orders, wire transfers, bill payments, and other common transactions. Regular payments with low credit risk that could be directly deposited into bank accounts, with significantly lower payment systems costs, form the bulk of checks cashed at these check cashing …
The Product/Process Distinction - An Illusory Basis For Disciplining 'Unilateralism' In Trade Policy, Robert L. Howse, Donald H. Regan
The Product/Process Distinction - An Illusory Basis For Disciplining 'Unilateralism' In Trade Policy, Robert L. Howse, Donald H. Regan
Articles
It has become conventional wisdom that internal regulations that distinguish between products on the basis of their production method are GATT-illegal, where applied to restrict imports (although possibly some such measures might be justified as 'exceptions' under Article XX). The aim of this article is to challenge this conventional wisdom, both from a jurisprudential and a policy perspective. First, we argue there is no real support in the text and jurisprudence of the GATT for the product/process distinction. The notion developed in the unadopted Tuna/Dolphin cases that processed-based measures are somehow excluded from the coverage of Article III (National Treatment) …
The Costs Of Cigarettes: The Economic Case For Ex Post Incentive-Based Regulation, Jon D. Hanson, Kyle D. Logue
The Costs Of Cigarettes: The Economic Case For Ex Post Incentive-Based Regulation, Jon D. Hanson, Kyle D. Logue
Articles
Cigarette smoking causes over 420,000 deaths annually in the United States, roughly twenty percent of all U.S. deaths, making cigarettes the single greatest preventable cause of death in this country. Indeed, tobacco kills more people every year than alcohol, illicit drugs, automobile accidents, violent crime, and AIDS combined. And not only are cigarettes deadly to smokers; they kill nonsmokers as well. According to a recent report from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the "sidestream" or "passive" smoke from cigarettes - so-called environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) - is responsible annually for approximately 3000 lung cancer deaths, between 150,000 and 300,000 lower …
The Tragedy Of The Commons, Part Two, James E. Krier
The Tragedy Of The Commons, Part Two, James E. Krier
Articles
This symposium is about the idea of "free market environmentalism" in general and the book Free Market Environmentalism, by Terry Anderson and Donald Leal,1 in particular. While I focus chiefly on Anderson and Leal's book, the discussion will necessarily involve the general idea of free market environmentalism as well. The conceit of my tide, which obviously derives from Garrett Hardin's celebrated essay on The Tragedy of the Commons,2 is this: Superficial differences aside, Hardin's essay and Anderson and Leal's book address the same fundamental problem of coordinating human behavior as it affects environmental quality. But both the essay and the …
Risk And Design, James E. Krier
Risk And Design, James E. Krier
Articles
Risk springs from uncertainty,' uncertainty invites error, and, since error can be costly, we would prefer to avoid it (provided, of course, that avoidance is not more costly yet). While there is much in the Noll and Krier article2 about judgmental error under conditions of risk and uncertainty, there is little about ways to avoid it. So avoidance-more accurately, minimization-of error costs is the topic I want to address very briefly and partially here.
The Problem Of Social Cost Revisited, Donald H. Regan
The Problem Of Social Cost Revisited, Donald H. Regan
Articles
SOME years ago, in a paper entitled "The Problem of Social Cost," Professor Ronald Coase asserted and argued for a proposition which has since acquired the convenient sobriquet "the Coase Theorem." The proposition is: That in a world of perfect competition, perfect information, and zero transaction costs, the allocation of resources in the economy will be efficient and will be unaffected by legal rules regarding the initial impact of costs resulting from externalities. Note that there are two claims being made, which it is well to separate for purposes of discussion. The first claim is that, under the conditions described, …