Law Commons^™

Bailouts, Buy-Ins, And Ballyhoo, Robert C. Hockett

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The bailout strategy now being pursued by Treasury under the recently authorized Troubled Asset Relief Plan, if “strategy” it can be called, remains obscure and erratic at best. All the while markets remain jittery and credit remains tight, as the underlying source of our present financial jitters—continued decline in the housing market and still mounting foreclosures—goes unaddressed. This piece proposes an interesting and novel approach to solving the financial problem. If it works out, it would eventually minimize the cost to the government.

Judicial Adherence To A Minimum Core Approach To Socio-Economic Rights – A Comparative Perspective, Joie Chowdhury

Cornell Law School Inter-University Graduate Student Conference Papers

Today’s world is witness to extraordinary inequality and the most desperate poverty. Millions of people across the world have no access to adequate food or water, basic health care or minimum levels of education. There are many avenues through which to approach the issue of improving socio-economic conditions. Courts, especially recently, have in certain countries, been seeking to ameliorate these conditions, to some extent, through the means of socio-economic rights adjudication.

For courts to effectively empower people to realize their socio-economic rights, attention to implementation of judgments is essential. A strong normative base for such judgments is just as crucial, …

Pareto Versus Welfare, Robert C. Hockett

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Many normatively oriented economists, legal academics and other policy analysts appear to be "welfarist" and Paretian to at least moderate degree: They deem positive responsiveness to individual preferences, and satisfaction of one or more of the familiar Pareto criteria, to be reasonably undemanding and desirable attributes of any social welfare function (SWF) employed to formulate social evaluations. Some theorists and analysts go further than moderate welfarism or Paretianism, however: They argue that "the Pareto principle" requires the SWF be responsive to individual preferences alone - a position I label "strict" welfarism - and conclude that all social evaluation should in …

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 …

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 …

Economic Sanctions Against Human Rights Violations, Buhm Suk Baek

Cornell Law School Inter-University Graduate Student Conference Papers

The idea of human rights protection, historically, has been considered as a domestic matter, to be realized by individual states within their domestic law and national institutions. The protection and promotion of human rights, however, have become one of the most important issues for the international community as a whole. Yet, with time, it has become increasingly difficult for the international community to address human rights problems collectively. Despite a significant development in the human rights norms, effective protection of fundamental human rights and their legal enforcement has a long way to go.

This paper will argue that economic sanctions …

Reflective Intensions: Two Foundational Decision-Points In Mathematics, Law, And Economics, Robert C. Hockett

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

This Article, transcribed from a symposium talk given by the author, examines two critical junctures at which foundational decisions must be made in three areas of theoretical inquiry - mathematics, law, and economics. The first such juncture is that which the Article labels the "arbitrary versus criterial choice" juncture. This is the decision point at which one must select between what is typically called an "algorithmic," "principled," "law-like," or "intensionalist" understanding of those concepts which figure foundationally in the discipline in question on the one hand, and a "randomized," "combinatorial," or "extensionalist" such understanding on the other hand.

The second …

What Kinds Of Stock Ownership Plans Should There Be? Of Esops, Other Sops And "Ownership Societies", Robert C. Hockett

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Present-day advocates of an ownership society (OS) do not seem to have noticed the means we have already employed to become an OS where homes and human capital (higher education) are concerned. Nor do they appear to have considered whether these same means - which amount to publicly enhanced private credit markets - might be employed to spread shares in business firms, with a view to completing our OS. This article, the third in a series, seeks tentatively to fill that gap. It does so first by demonstrating how the Employee Stock Ownership Plan, or ESOP, in effect replicates our …

Minding The Gaps: Fairness, Welfare, And The Constitutive Structure Of Distributive Assessment, Robert C. Hockett

Cornell Law Faculty Working Papers

Despite over a century’s disputation and attendant opportunity for clarification, the field of inquiry now loosely labeled “welfare economics” (WE) remains surprisingly prone to foundational confusions. The same holds of work done by many practitioners of WE’s influential offshoot, normative “law and economics” (LE).

A conspicuous contemporary case of confusion turns up in recent discussion concerning “fairness versus welfare.” The very naming of this putative dispute signals a crude category error. “Welfare” denotes a proposed object of distribution. “Fairness” describes and appropriate pattern of distribution. Welfare itself is distributed fairly or unfairly. “Fairness versus welfare” is analytically on all fours …

Sustainable Development And Private Global Governance, Douglas A. Kysar

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

This Article utilizes recent controversy over Coca-Cola's alleged depletion of groundwater resources in India as a vehicle for exploring competing conceptions of global environmental governance and the role of private actors within them. Initially, it uses the Coca-Cola groundwater situation to identify core substantive and procedural meanings that lurk within the otherwise ingeniously ambiguous concept of sustainable development. Through this exercise, it is shown that - when properly understood - the sustainable development paradigm stands in considerable tension with the premises of market liberalism that drive such political and economic trends as global market integration; privatization and commodification of water …

Financing Chinese Capitalism: Principal Banks, Economic Crisis, And Chinese Family Firms In Singapore, Henry W. Yeung

Cultural Approaches to Asian Financial Markets

It is a widely circulated myth that Chinese family firms rely exclusively on kinship ties and network capital to finance their domestic and international operations. In this empirical paper, I argue that large Chinese family firms are increasingly engaging with financial markets on a global scale. In order to finance their transnational business activities, these firms require financial services from banks beyond their domestic economies, resulting in a growing number and geographical spread of their principal banks. Second, I contend that as these Chinese family firms are diversifying their principal banks beyond a narrow confinement to other Chinese family-owned banks …

Death Of The Law , Owen M. Fiss

Cornell Law Review

No abstract provided.