Law Commons^™

A Financial Economic Theory Of Punitive Damages, Robert J. Rhee

Faculty Scholarship

This Article provides a financial economic theory of punitive damages. The core problem, as the Supreme Court acknowledged in Exxon Shipping Co. v. Baker, is not the systemic amount of punitive damages in the tort system; rather, it is the risk of outlier outcomes. Low frequency, high severity awards are unpredictable, cause financial distress, and beget social cost. By focusing only on offsetting escaped liability, the standard law and economics theory fails to account for the core problem of variance. This Article provides a risk arbitrage analysis of the relationship between variance, litigation valuation, and optimal deterrence. Starting with …

The Social Cost Of Financial Misrepresentations, Urska Velikonja

Faculty Scholarship

Policy makers, regulators, and academics have traditionally looked for the harm from securities fraud in the easy-to-study financial markets. However, by doing so, they have missed the significantly larger social welfare losses caused by securities fraud that fall outside financial markets. False financial disclosures, which are the most common variant of securities fraud, distort real economic decisions that firms, their rivals, suppliers, vendors, lenders, and workers make, thus distorting markets for inputs and outputs. When the fraud is revealed, every party affected makes costly adjustments. Many fraud-committing firms file for bankruptcy. Their rivals face doubts, called contagion. All firms must …

Direct (Anti-)Democracy, Maxwell L. Stearns

Faculty Scholarship

Legal scholars, economists, and political scientists are divided on whether voter initiatives and legislative referendums tend to produce outcomes that are more (or less) majoritarian, efficient, or solicitous of minority concerns than traditional legislation. Scholars also embrace opposing views on which law-making mechanism better promotes citizen engagement, registers preference intensities, encourages compromise, and prevents outcomes masking cycling voter preferences. Despite these disagreements, commentators generally assume that the voting mechanism itself renders plebiscites more democratic than legislative lawmaking. This assumption is mistaken.

Although it might seem unimaginable that a lawmaking process that directly engages voters possesses fundamentally antidemocratic features, this Article …