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Political Wine In A Judicial Bottle: Justice Sotomayor's Surprising Concurrence In Aurelius, Christina D. Ponsa-Kraus
Political Wine In A Judicial Bottle: Justice Sotomayor's Surprising Concurrence In Aurelius, Christina D. Ponsa-Kraus
Faculty Scholarship
For seventy years, Puerto Ricans have been bitterly divided over how to decolonize the island, a U.S. territory. Many favor Puerto Rico’s admission into statehood. But many others support a different kind of relationship with the United States: they believe that in 1952, Puerto Rico entered into a “compact” with the United States that transformed it from a territory into a “commonwealth,” and they insist that “commonwealth” status made Puerto Rico a separate sovereign in permanent union with the United States. Statehood supporters argue that there is no compact, nor should there be: it is neither constitutionally possible, nor desirable …
Pick A Card, Any Card, Ronald J. Mann
Pick A Card, Any Card, Ronald J. Mann
Faculty Scholarship
At the heart of all serious thought about consumer financial products is the difficulty of understanding the mental processes by which consumers evaluate, compare, and use those products. Usury proposals from scholars and policy makers depend on explicit or implicit assumptions about how interest-rate caps will affect the mix of products available in the marketplace and the choices that consumers make among them. Legislators and lobbyists that decry a torrent of consumer bankruptcy filings rely explicitly on the claim that consumers abuse credit products. Proposals to outlaw products like payday loans assume that those who use the products are so …
A Requiem For Sam's Bank, Ronald J. Mann
A Requiem For Sam's Bank, Ronald J. Mann
Faculty Scholarship
This paper situates Wal-Mart's failed application to form a banking subsidiary in the context of payments policy. Generally, I argue that permitting Wal-Mart to have a bank would have a salutary effect on the relatively uncompetitive market for payment networks. The dominant position of Visa and MasterCard, in which payments are priced above cost to subsidize credit, inevitably will give way to a world in which payment services are priced at cost, or even below cost as a loss-leader to attract customers to other goods and services. Entry into this market by Wal-Mart would be likely to spur more robust …
War And Uncertainty, Lori Fisler Damrosch
War And Uncertainty, Lori Fisler Damrosch
Faculty Scholarship
When the current phase of our conflict with Iraq began in March 2003, much was unknown. Our political leaders based the case for war on the conviction that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD) that had not been eliminated despite twelve years of grinding sanctions. Congress voted in October 2002 to authorize renewed use of military force against Iraq, acting on the basis of representations by the Bush Administration that Iraq had been actively concealing WMD stockpiles and programs from the United Nations inspectors who had a mandate to verify the complete destruction of Iraq's WMD capability. Facts were …