Law Commons^™

Insider Trading Laws And Stock Markets Around The World: An Empirical Contribution To The Theoretical Law And Economics Debate, Laura Nyantung Beny

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The primary goal of this Article is to bring empirical evidence to bear on the heretofore largely theoretical law and economics debate about insider trading. The Article first summarizes various agency, market, and contractual (or "Coasian") theories of insider trading propounded over the course of this longstanding debate. The Article then proposes three testable hypotheses regarding the relationship between insider trading laws and several measures of stock market performance. Exploiting the natural variation of international data, the Article finds that more stringent insider trading laws are generally associated with more dispersed equity ownership, greater stock price accuracy and greater stock …

Crawford And Davis: A Personal Reflection, Richard D. Friedman

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I have to say that when I stood up to argue Hammon I felt the wind at my back. I was basically a lawyer with an easy case, and there wasn't anything particularly unpredictable at the argument of Hammon. Now it got a little bit interesting, as I will explain later, because to a certain extent I was trying to argue the other case as well. But Hammon itself was sort of ordinary, normal law.

Crawford, Davis, And Way Beyond, Richard D. Friedman

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Until 1965, the Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution hardly mattered. It was not applicable against the states, and therefore had no role whatsoever in the vast majority of prosecutions. Moreover, if a federal court was inclined to exclude evidence of an out-of-court statement, it made little practical difference whether the court termed the statement hearsay or held that the evidence did not comply with the Confrontation Clause.

Creative Reading, Jessica D. Litman

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Let me begin with something that Jamie Boyle wrote ten years ago in Intellectual Property Policy Online: A Young Person's Guide:' Copyright marks the attempt to achieve for texts and other works a balance in which the assumption of the system is that widespread use is possible without copying. The relative bundles of rights of the user and the owner achieve their balance based on a set of economic and technical assumptions about the meaning of normal use. For our purposes, I would like to generalize this as something that Boyle might have written if he had not in that …

Nsf Fees, James J. White

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Overdraft fees now make up more than half of banks' earnings on consumer checking accounts. In the past century, overdrafts have gone from the banker's scourge to the banker's profit center as bankers have learned that there is much to be made on these short term loans at breathtaking interest rates. I note that the federal agencies have been complicit in the growth of this form of lending. I propose that the banks and the agencies recognize the reality and attempt to mitigate these rates by encouraging the development of a competitive market.

Dividend Policy Inside The Multinational Firm, Mihir A. Desai, C. Fritz Foley, James R. Hines Jr.

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This paper examines the determinants of profit repatriation policies for US multinational firms. Dividend repatriations are surprisingly persistent and resemble dividend payments to external shareholders. Tax considerations influence dividend repatriations, but not decisively, as differentially-taxed entities feature similar policies and some firms incur avoidable tax penalties. Parent companies requiring cash to fund domestic investments, or to pay dividends to common shareholders, draw on the resources of their foreign affiliates through repatriations. Incompletely controlled affiliates are more likely than others to make regular dividend payments and to trigger avoidable tax costs through repatriations. The results indicate that traditional corporate finance concerns …

Partially Odious Debts?, Omri Ben-Shahar, Mitu Gulati

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The despotic ruler of a poor nation borrows extensively from foreign creditors. He spends some of those funds on building statues of himself, others on buying arms for his brutal secret police, and he places the remainder in his personal bank accounts in Switzerland. The longer the despot stays in power, the poorer the nation becomes. Although the secret police are able to keep prodemocracy protests subdued by force for many years, eventually there is a popular revolt. The despot flees the scene with a few billion dollars of his illgotten gains. The populist regime that replaces the despot now …

Legal Commitments And Religious Commitments, Jospeh Vining

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In his elegant and accessible new book, Law's Quandary, Steven Smith groups our various senses of what is real for us into ontological families: the mundane; the scientific, including mathematics; and the religious. These supply "lumberyards," as it were, for thought and discussion about the world and action in it. Law itself is not one of them. Those involved in law, as citizens or professionals practicing law or speaking for or about law, are presented in the book as looking out from law to the ontological resources available in the lumberyards he describes.

Stapled Securities--"The Next Big Thing" For Income Trusts? Useful Lessons From The Us Experience With Stapled Shares, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, Tim Edgar, Fadi Shaheen

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The Department of Finance has introduced two separate sets of legislation that together attempt to limit demand in the income trust market (though with very different revenue consequences). However, neither the proposed legislation nor the existing Income Tax Act contains an equity recharacterization rule. Consequently, the tax results associated with the standard income trust and royalty trust structures can still be realized with direct holding structures, in which the use of a trust as a pooling mechanism is eliminated and investors hold directly a combination of high-yield junk debt and a specified number of shares of the issuer. Until now, …

Ennobling Direct Democracy, Sherman J. Clark

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In this essay, Professor Clark argues that we should be attentive to the effect that direct democracy might have on our public character. Building upon earlier work, Clark suggests that the initiative in particular threatens to debase us by undercutting a crucial character trait which might best be called "responsibility-taking." The bulk of this essay is devoted to explaining what this means, and why it matters. Why should we care about the effect of political processes on public character? Why is this particular trait important and worth preserving? How is it threatened by direct democracy? In conclusion, and by way …

Can We Compare Evils? The Enduring Debate On Genocide And Crimes Against Humanity, Steven R. Ratner

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A look back at the twentieth century reveals that the most critical steps in the criminalization of mass human rights constituted the academic work of Raphel Lemkin and his conceptualization of genocide; the International Military Tribunal Charter’s criminalization of crimes against humanity and the trials that followed; and the conclusion and broad ratification of the Genocide Convention. The Convention was the first treaty since those of slavery and the “white slave traffic” to criminalize peacetime actions by a government against its citizens. Since that time, customary international law has recognized the de-coupling of crimes against humanity from wartime.

Refugee Solution, Or Solutions To Refugeehood?, James C. Hathaway

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This is the text of a lecture delivered by James C. Hathaway in London in October 2006 to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of Jesuit Refugee Service. The lecture was sponsored jointly by the Centre for the Study of Human Rights, London School of Economics; the Heythrop Institute for Religion, Ethics, and Public Life; and Jesuit Refugee Service (UK).

The Meaning Of 'Necessary' In Gatt Article Xx And Gats Article Xiv: The Myth Of Cost-Benefit Balancing, Donald H. Regan

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Conventional wisdom tells us that in Korea–Beef, the Appellate Body interpreted the word ‘necessary’ in GATT Article XX to require a cost–benefit balancing test. The Appellate Body is supposed to have applied this test also in EC–Asbestos, US–Gambling (involving GATS Article XIV), and Dominican Republic–Cigarettes. In this article I demonstrate, by detailed analysis of the opinions, that the Appellate Body has never engaged in such balancing. They have stated the balancing test, but in every case they have also stated the principle that Members get to choose their own level of protection, which is logically inconsistent with judicial review by …

Holmes V. South Carolina Upholds Trial By Jury, Samuel R. Gross

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Bobby Lee Holmes was convicted of a brutal rape-murder and sentenced to death. The only evidence that connected him to the crime was forensic: a palm print, and blood and fiber evidence. (Biological samples taken from the victim for two rape kits were compromised and yielded no identifiable evidence.) Holmes claimed that the state's forensic evidence was planted and mishandled, and that the rape and murder were committed by another man, Jimmy McCaw White. At a pretrial hearing three witnesses testified that they saw White near the victim's house at about the time of the crime, and four others testified …

Why Sudan? Ambiguous Identities Forge Persistent Conflict, Laura Nyantung Beny

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The following essay is excerpted from the prospectus for Perspectives on Genocide and Genocidal Violence in the Sudan, edited by Law School Assistant Professor Laura N. Beny, Sondra Hale of UCLA, and Lako Tongun of Claremont Colleges, California. The book is under advance contract for publication by the University of Michigan Press. Its 14 chapters, written by prominent historians, anthropologists, social scientists, political leaders, and others, “tell overlapping stories about the social constructions of race, gender, culture, and religious and political loyalties, each of which underlies the longstanding conflict” in Sudan, according to Beny, whose essay in the book is …

Homer Clark: Colleague And Friend, James Boyd White

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Born in Chicago in 1918, Homer Clark was raised in the Long Island suburbs of New York City. After high school he attended Amherst College, where he was an athlete-playing football, squash, and I think baseball too--as well as of course a good student. There he met the major influence in his intellectual life, Theodore Baird, who was the dominant academic figure at Amherst in those days. Baird was an English teacher, whose extraordinary freshman composition course opened the minds of generations of students. Baird and Homer hit it off, especially after they got into an argument in class. Homer …

Branch Rickey, '11: Much More Than Pioneering Baseball Leader, Richard D. Friedman

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Branch Rickey is best known as the president and general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers who brought Jackie Robinson into big league baseball in 1947, thus integrating a major American institution seven years before Brown v. Board of Education. Even apart from this heroic step, Rickey would probably be known as the most significant baseball executive ever, primarily for his work with the Dodgers and, earlier, the St. Louis Cardinals; the modern farm system and extensive spring training facilities are chief among his many innovations. Less well known is the fact that Rickey was a 1911 graduate of the University …

Moderator's Report: Legal Experts' Workshop On The Future Global Legal Order, Craig H. Allen

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In late 2006, as part of its multifaceted effort to help the Chief of Naval Operations develop a new, contemporary maritime strategy for the nation, the Naval War College convened a “Delphi group” of experts—in this case, in international law—to provide the maritime strategy development team a candid assessment of the probable state of the global legal order in 2020. The workshop, chaired by Craig H. Allen, the Charles H. Stockton Professor of International Law, was held 31 October–1 November 2006 in the College’s Decision Support Center (equipped with an advanced World Wide Web–based group collaboration and decision-support system), in …

Can China Promote Electronic Commerce Through Law Reform? Some Preliminary Case Study Evidence, Jane K. Winn, Song Yuping

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The government of the People’s Republic of China (P.R.C.) has announced its intention to make China a global leader in innovation by 2020. Many Chinese business leaders share this goal. The primary focus of this national strategy is to transform China into an exporter of high-technology products based on Chinese designs rather than merely a low cost, high volume manufacturer of products based on technology developed in other countries.

This paper will examine the implications for this strategy with regard to the use of computerized management information systems by Chinese businesses, and its relationship to recent law reform efforts intended …

Collateralizing Intellectual Property, Xuan-Thao Nguyen

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This Article identifies and critiques the collateralization of intellectual property, revealing the complexity of intersecting secured transaction law, namely Article 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code, and doctrinal intellectual property laws such as patent law, copyright law, and trademark law. The inquiry challenges the silence surrounding the pervasive use of intellectual property as collateral in secured financing and suggests changes to the existing framework on secured financing law.

The Article proceeds as follows: Part II discusses the normative intellectual property rights for patents, copyrights, and trademarks and how such rights are utilized as corporate assets. Part III describes different forms …

A Hidden History Of Affirmative Obligation, Patrick O. Gudridge

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No abstract provided.

Breaking Free Of Chevron's Constraints: Zuni Public School District No. 89 V. U.S. Department Of Education, Osamudia R. James

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No abstract provided.

Divorce Reform: Rights Protections In The New Swaziland, Tamar Ezer, Aisha Glasford, Elizabeth Hollander, Lakeisha Poole, Grant Rabenn, Alexandria Tindall

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No abstract provided.

Hedge Funds And Governance Targets, William Wilson Bratton

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Corporate governance interventions by hedge fund shareholders are triggering debates between advocates of management empowerment and advocates of aggressive monitoring by actors in the capital markets. This Article intervenes with an empirical question: What, based on the record so far have the hedge funds actually done to their targets? Information has been collected on 130 domestic firms identified in the business press since 2002 as targets of activist hedge funds, including the funds' demands, their tactics, and the results of their interventions for the targets' governance and finance. The survey results show that the hedge funds have an enviable record …

Guantanamo Forever: United States Sovereignty And The Unending State Of Exception, Mary Anne Franks

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No abstract provided.

More Stories Of Jurisdiction-Stripping And Executive Power: Interpreting The Prison Litigation Reform Act (Plra), Johanna Kalb

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No abstract provided.

Loud Rules, Wendy Gerwick Couture

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No abstract provided.

Policy Formulation Versus Policy Implementation Under The Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation And Management Act: Crab Rationalization, Richard Henry Seamon

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The Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (MSA) governs management of fisheries located three to 200 miles off the coast of the United States. The MSA is unique in administrative law in that it devolves policy formulation to eight Regional Fishery Management Councils rather than to a federal agency. That agency, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), is relegated primarily to developing regulations that implement the councils' policies. NMFS can review the councils' policies only to ensure that they are consistent with existing laws. NMFS has no authority to revise policy to suit its own preferences, or to write regulations …

Exciting Initiatives In Environment And Natural Resources Law At The University Of Idaho College Of Law, Barbara Cosens

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No abstract provided.

University Of Idaho Weighs Future Options In Statewide Legal Education, Donald L. Burnett Jr.

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No abstract provided.