Law Commons^™

Regional Cooperative Federalism And The Us Electric Grid, Hannah Jacobs Wiseman

Journal Articles

The U.S. Constitution makes no direct mention of regional governing entities, yet they are an entrenched part of our federalist system. In the area of electric grid governance, the federal government enlists independent, private entities called regional transmission organizations (RTOs) to implement federal policy and achieve state energy goals. RTOs are the most prominent form of regional cooperative federalism, yet other policy spheres, such as opioid control, encompass a similar approach. This is a twist on the classic form of cooperative federalism, in which the federal government relies upon individual states to achieve federal mandates.

The regionally governed electric grid …

The Law And Economics Of Redistribution, Matthew Dimick

Journal Articles

Should legal rules be used to redistribute income? Or should income taxation be the exclusive means for reducing income inequality? This article reviews the legal scholarship on this question. First, it traces how the most widely cited argument in favor of using taxes exclusively--Kaplow & Shavell's (1994) double-distortion argument--evolved from previous debates about whether legal rules could even be redistributive and whether law and economics should be concerned exclusively with efficiency or with distribution as well. Next, it surveys the responses to the double-distortion argument. These responses appear to have had only limited success in challenging the sturdy reputation of …

Should The Law Do Anything About Economic Inequality?, Matthew Dimick

Journal Articles

What should be done about rising income and wealth inequality? Should the design and adoption of legal rules take into account their effects on the distribution of income and wealth? Or should the tax-and-transfer system be the exclusive means to address concerns about inequality? A widely-held view argues for the latter: only the tax system, and not the legal system, should be used to redistribute income. While this argument comes in a variety of normative arguments and has support across the political spectrum, there is also a well-known law-and-economics version. This argument, known as the “double-distortion” argument, is simply stated. …

The “Ensuing Loss” Clause In Insurance Policies: The Forgotten And Misunderstood Antidote To Anti-Concurrent Causation Exclusions, Chris French

Journal Articles

As a result of the 1906 earthquake and fire in San Francisco which destroyed the city, a clause known as the “ensuing loss” clause was created to address concurrent causation situations in which a loss follows both a covered peril and an excluded peril. Ensuing loss clauses appear in the exclusions section of such policies and in essence they provide that coverage for a loss caused by an excluded peril is nonetheless covered if the loss “ensues” from a covered peril. Today, ensuing loss clauses are found in “all risk” property and homeowners policies, which cover all losses except for …

On The Many Flavors Of Capitalism Or Reflections On Schumpeter's Ghost, John Henry Schlegel

Journal Articles

Most legal scholars treat capitalism as a genus with one species. The appearance of several books that argue to the contrary suggests that it is sensible to revisit this assumption. Discussion begins by considering the constructed nature of markets, the importance of market systems, and the role of financings as the factor distinguishing capitalism from other forms of a market economy. Thereafter, four articulations of the varieties of capitalism are reviewed: the classic Marxist one, one by a political economist, another by a pair of comparative political scientists, and third by a trio of economists. This review leads to a …

The Public Choice Of Driving Competence Regulations, Margaret F. Brinig

Journal Articles

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to describe and classify each state's driver's licensing laws and then test whether the licensing laws affect the percentages of over-64 persons licensed and the proportion of older drivers involved in accidents to determine an optimal level of driving.

Design and Methods: This paper evaluates state driving rules, obtained from laws, regulations, and driver's manuals, tests, based upon Department of Transportation data, whether the type of laws affects driving and accident rates for those over 64 and suggests a uniform scheme combining self-reporting of driving problems, on-the-road tests of drivers who fall below …

The Illusion Of Efficiency In Workers' Compensation "Reform", Martha T. Mccluskey

Journal Articles

From the late 1980s to 1990s, most states enacted major revisions to their workers' compensation systems. These law changes aim to restrict benefits for injured workers in response to perceptions that rising workers' compensation insurance costs had reached crisis levels by the late 1980s. This article analyzes the main features of these benefit reforms, and shows how these reforms reveal the problems of the predominant economic efficiency rationales underlying recent retrenchment of social welfare programs in general.

Using workers' compensation as an example, I argue that a premise central to much of contemporary law and policy - the distinction between …