Law Commons^™

The Coase Theorem And Arthur Cecil Pigou, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

In "The Problem of Social Cost" Ronald Coase was highly critical of the work of Cambridge University Economics Professor Arthur Cecil Pigou, presenting him as a radical government interventionist. In later work Coase's critique of Pigou became even more strident. In fact, however, Pigou's Economics of Welfare created the basic model and many of the tools that Coase's later work employed. Much of what we today characterize as the "Coase Theorem," including the relevance of transaction costs, externalities, and bilateral monopoly, was either stated or anticipated in Pigou's work. Further, Coase's extreme faith in private bargaining led him to fail …

Changing The Paradigm Of Stock Ownership From Concentrated Towards Dispersed Ownership? Evidence From Brazil And Consequences For Emerging Countries, Erica Gorga

Cornell Law Faculty Working Papers

This paper analyzes micro-level dynamics of changes in ownership structures. It investigates a unique event: changes in ownership patterns currently taking place in Brazil. It builds upon empirical evidence to advance theoretical understanding of how and why concentrated ownership structures can change towards dispersed ownership.

Commentators argue that the Brazilian capital markets are finally taking off. The number of listed companies and IPOs in the Sao Paulo Stock Exchange (Bovespa) has greatly increased. Firms are migrating to Bovespa’s special listing segments, which require higher standards of corporate governance. Companies have sold control in the market, and the stock market has …

The Resilience Of Law, Joseph Vining

Law & Economics Working Papers Archive: 2003-2009

The development of "law and economics" over the last half-century has expanded and reinforced a perception among academic lawyers that law itself is a social science. During the same period social science has moved closer to the discipline of natural science and the presuppositions and methods of its thought and work. This essay explores why law is not and cannot be a social science, and why there are grounds for hope in a future for democracy grounded in the rule of law.

China, Business Law, And Finance -- Accession To The World Trade Organization, Joseph Vining

Law & Economics Working Papers Archive: 2003-2009

China's entry into the world economy will affect not just how we act but how we think. It will affect especially what "business," "business law," and "business corporation" come to mean both in a transnational setting and in American law. The nature of American business law today still stands in the way of a wholly profit-maximizing approach to law or the world in general. But there is strong pressure, consistent with a general tendency in Western thought, to make business and corporate decision-making entirely manipulative and calculating and to eliminate the force of human value from it. This Youde Lecture …

Taking Distribution Seriously, Robert C. Hockett

Cornell Law Faculty Working Papers

It is common for legal theorists and policy analysts to think and communicate mainly in maximizing terms. What is less common is for them to notice that each time we speak explicitly of socially maximizing one thing, we speak implicitly of distributing another thing and equalizing yet another thing. We also, moreover, effectively define ourselves and our fellow citizens by reference to that which we equalize; for it is in virtue of the latter that our social welfare formulations treat us as “counting” for purposes of socially aggregating and maximizing.

To attend systematically to the inter-translatability of maximization language on …

Accredited Indians: Increasing The Flow Of Private Equity Into Indian Country As A Domestic Emerging Market, Gavin Clarkson

Law & Economics Working Papers Archive: 2003-2009

Indian Country is America’s domestic emerging market, and as in a number of emerging markets, many successful businesses in Indian Country are starving for expansion capital. The US Treasury estimates that the private equity deficit in Indian Country is $44 billion. While the handful of wealthier tribes might be logical investors in private equity funds deploying capital in Indian Country, the existing securities laws present a significant impediment. In particular, Regulation D of the Securities Act of 1933 does not treat tribes as “accredited investors,” thus denying those tribes the ability to participate in the private equity market. Since there …

Standing At The Crossroads: The Roberts Court In Historical Perspective, Maxwell L. Stearns

Faculty Scholarship

After eleven years, the longest period in Supreme Court history with no change in membership, the Roberts Court commenced in the year 2005 with two new justices. John Roberts replaced William Rehnquist as the seventeenth Chief Justice and Samuel Alito replaced Sandra Day O’Connor as Associate Justice. The conventional wisdom suggests that on the nine-justice Supreme Court, these two appointments have produced a single-increment move, ideologically, to the right. The two Chief Justices occupy roughly the same ideological position. In contrast, whereas O’Connor was generally viewed as occupying the Court’s centrist, or median, position, Alito has instead continued to embrace …

From Langdell To Law And Economics: Two Conceptions Of Stare Decisis In Contract Law And Theory, Jody S. Kraus

Faculty Scholarship

In his classic monograph, The Death of Contract, Grant Gilmore argued that Christopher Columbus Langdell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Samuel Williston trumped up the legal credentials for their classical bargain theory of contract law. Gilmore's analysis has been subjected to extensive criticism, but its specific, sustained, and fundamental charge that the bargain theory was based on a fraudulent misrepresentation of precedential authority has never been questioned. In this Essay, I argue that Gilmore's case against the classical theorists rests on the suppressed premise that the precedential authority of cases resides in the express judicial reasoning used to decide them. In …