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Full-Text Articles in Law and Economics

Executive Underreach, In Pandemics And Otherwise, David E. Pozen, Kim Lane Scheppele Jan 2020

Executive Underreach, In Pandemics And Otherwise, David E. Pozen, Kim Lane Scheppele

Faculty Scholarship

Legal scholars are familiar with the problem of executive overreach, especially in emergencies. But sometimes, instead of being too audacious or extreme, a national executive's attempts to address a true threat prove far too limited and insubstantial. In this Essay, we seek to define and clarify the phenomenon of executive underreach, with special reference to the COVID-19 crisis; to outline ways in which such underreach may compromise constitutional governance and the international legal order; and to suggest a partial remedy.


The Fortification Of Inequality: Constitutional Doctrine And The Political Economy, Kate Andrias Jan 2018

The Fortification Of Inequality: Constitutional Doctrine And The Political Economy, Kate Andrias

Faculty Scholarship

As Parts I and II of this Essay elaborate, the examination yields three observations of relevance to constitutional law more generally: First, judge-made constitutional doctrine, though by no means the primary cause of rising inequality, has played an important role in reinforcing and exacerbating it. Judges have acquiesced to legislatively structured economic inequality, while also restricting the ability of legislatures to remedy it. Second, while economic inequality has become a cause célèbre only in the last few years, much of the constitutional doctrine that has contributed to its flourishing is longstanding. Moreover, for several decades, even the Court’s more liberal …


Overcoming The Great Forgetting: A Comment On Fishkin And Forbath, Jedediah S. Purdy Jan 2016

Overcoming The Great Forgetting: A Comment On Fishkin And Forbath, Jedediah S. Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

Fishkin and Forbath’s (F&F’s) manuscript is a project of recovery. It portrays the present as a time marked by a “Great Forgetting” of a tradition of constitutional political economy. F&F name what has been forgotten the “democracy of opportunity” tradition. Recovering it would mean again treating the following three principles as linked elements at the core of our Constitution: (1) an anti-oligarchy principle that works to prevent wealth from producing grossly unequal political power; (2) a commitment to a broad middle class with secure, respected work; and (3) a principle of inclusion that opens participation in both citizenship and the …


Building Labor's Constitution, Kate Andrias Jan 2016

Building Labor's Constitution, Kate Andrias

Faculty Scholarship

This essay begins with a puzzle: scholars have built a robust set of constitutional claims about labor rights, claims with deep roots in the labor movement’s own past struggles and its own traditions of constitutional claim-making. Yet, workers’ movements today have made no use of these claims, Andrias reports. The reason, she suggests, has to do with the deep mutual hostility between workers’ movements and the courts. If past were prologue, workers could at least use such arguments outside the courts, but, she argues, “in our [contemporary] legal culture, constitutional arguments are primarily judicial arguments,” and have a way of …


The Political Economy Of "Constitutional Political Economy", Jeremy K. Kessler Jan 2016

The Political Economy Of "Constitutional Political Economy", Jeremy K. Kessler

Faculty Scholarship

Since the early 1990s, constitutional history has experienced a renaissance. This revival had many causes, but three stand out: the Rehnquist Court's attack on formerly sacrosanct features of the "New Deal agenda"; Reagan-Era reassessments of American political development by political scientists, historians, and historical sociologists; and the frustration of constitutional scholars with the inability of legal process theory or political philosophy to produce "authoritative constitutional principles." Spurred by legal crisis and this mix of disciplinary innovation and stagnation, law professors began to tell new stories about our constitutional heritage. They focused on the sources and significance of the New Deal's …


The Federal Reserve: A Study In Soft Constraints, Kathryn Judge Jan 2015

The Federal Reserve: A Study In Soft Constraints, Kathryn Judge

Faculty Scholarship

In response to the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression, the Federal Reserve (the Fed) took a number of unprecedented steps to try to minimize the adverse economic consequences that would follow. From providing liquidity injections to save companies like Bear Stearns and American International Group (AIG) to committing to a prolonged period of exceptionally low interest rates and buying massive quantities of longer-term securities to further reduce borrowing costs, the Fed's response to the 2007 through 2009 financial crisis (the Crisis) has been creative and aggressive. These actions demonstrated that the Fed is uniquely powerful among federal agencies, …


From Langdell To Law And Economics: Two Conceptions Of Stare Decisis In Contract Law And Theory, Jody S. Kraus Jan 2008

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 …


Does The Constitution Require That We Kill The Competitive Goose? Pricing Local Phone Services To Rivals, William J. Baumol, Thomas W. Merrill Jan 1998

Does The Constitution Require That We Kill The Competitive Goose? Pricing Local Phone Services To Rivals, William J. Baumol, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

This Article concludes a series by these authors and Professors J. Gregory Sidak and Daniel F. Spulber, published last year in this journal. Here, Professors Baumol and Merrill address the issues surrounding the pricing of local phone services to long distance rivals, clarifying their points of agreement and disagreement with Sidak and Spulber. In their previous articles, Sidak and Spulber argued that the movement toward competition in local telephone service should be accompanied by substantial compensation to existing local telephone carriers, a view that Baumol and Merrill do not share. Rather, they note three points of disagreement between Sidak and …


The Local Government Boundary Problem In Metropolitan Areas, Richard Briffault Jan 1996

The Local Government Boundary Problem In Metropolitan Areas, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

Local government boundaries play an important role in the governance of metropolitan areas by defining local electorates and tax bases and the scope of local regulatory powers and service responsibilities. Yet, the close association of local powers with local boundaries generates spillovers, fiscal disparities, and interlocal conflicts. Real local autonomy is constrained but the local government system fails to provide a means for addressing regional problems. Public choice theorists and political decentralizationists oppose regional governments because of the threat to local autonomy that would result from removing powers from local hands. Richard Briffault's solution to the metropolitan governance problem is …


Economics Of Public Use, Thomas W. Merrill Jan 1986

Economics Of Public Use, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

The fifth amendment to the United States Constitution, as well as most state constitutions, provides that private property shall not be taken "for public use" unless just compensation is paid. American courts have long construed this to mean that some showing of "publicness" is a condition precedent to a legitimate exercise of the power of eminent domain. Thus, when a proposed condemnation of property lacks the appropriate public quality, the taking is deemed to be unconstitutional and can be enjoined. In practice, however, most observers today think the public use limitation is a dead letter. Three recent decisions, upholding takings …


Constitutional Regulation Of Provisional Creditor Remedies: The Cost Of Procedural Due Process, Robert E. Scott Jan 1975

Constitutional Regulation Of Provisional Creditor Remedies: The Cost Of Procedural Due Process, Robert E. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

In recent years a series of Supreme Court decisions has purported to envelop the rights of defaulting debtors in an enlarged concept of procedural due process. The central theme underlying this development is clearly an attempt by the Court to impose some degree of constitutional control on the exercise of provisional creditor remedies. The path that leads from Sniadach v. Family Finance Corp. to North Georgia Finishing, Inc. v. Di-Chem, Inc., is however, far from clear and the cases have provoked serious questioning of the meaning and impact of this doctrine. Due process as reflected in Sniadach and Fuentes …