Law and Economics Commons^™

Private Environmental Nudges, Anthony Moffa

Faculty Publications

Environmentalist outcry against single-use plastics has rapidly translated into municipal and state policy. Bans and taxes on plastic bags, and, to a lesser extent, polices targeting plastic food/drink containers and plastic straws, have popped up all over the country. Many large national corporations, including Starbucks, Disney, and Hyatt to name a few, have also taken steps to reduce the amount of single-use plastics that their customers add to the waste stream.

Two ongoing discussions in the environmental law scholarship parallel these innovations in policy. The first re-examines the proper role for subnational governments in environmental policymaking, reviving a debate about …

Narrowing Data Protection's Enforcement Gap, Filippo Lancieri

Maine Law Review

The rise of data protection laws is one of the most profound legal changes of this century. Yet, despite their nominal force and widespread adoption, available data indicates that these laws recurrently suffer from an enforcement gap—that is, a wide disparity between the stated protections on the books and the reality of how companies respond to them on the ground. Indeed, Appendix I to this Article introduces a novel literature review of twenty-six studies that analyzed the impact on the ground of the GDPR and the CCPA: none found a meaningful improvement in citizen’s data privacy. This raises the question: …

Toxic Public Goods, Brian L. Frye

Maine Law Review

Everybody loves public goods. After all, they are a perpetual utility machine. Obviously, we want as many of them as possible. But what if the consumption of a public good actually decreases net social welfare? I refer to this kind of public good as a "toxic public good." In this essay, I discuss three kinds of potential toxic public goods: trolling, pornography, and ideology, and I reflect on how we might make the production of toxic public goods more efficient.

The Unmet Legal Needs Of The Poor In Maine: Is Mandatory Pro Bono The Answer?, Wendy F. Rau

Maine Law Review

In 1989, the Maine Commission on Legal Needs was formed to study the civil legal needs of Maine's poor population and to develop a plan for meeting those needs. Similar projects have been undertaken in a number of other states and by the American Bar Association in recent years. Each study has revealed a significant unmet need among the poor for assistance with legal problems. There seems little doubt that the situation is serious and widespread. The difficulty lies in finding a solution. One proposal that has been advanced is mandatory pro bono, a program that would require attorneys to …

Precedent And Dialogue In Investment Treaty Arbitration, Richard C. Chen

Faculty Publications

Since the turn of the century, investment treaty arbitration (ITA) tribunals have begun citing past decisions with increasing frequency. They do so despite the absence of any formal doctrine of stare decisis and the presence of structural obstacles to the use of precedent in this context. Scholarship in this area has focused on explaining the rise of this de facto doctrine of precedent and evaluating the merits of the practice. Few have grappled with more practical questions about how precedent should operate in this unique sphere, but even a cursory examination of ITA decisions would reveal that some order and …

Legal Deserts: A Multi-State Perspective On Rural Access To Justice (Forthcoming), Danielle M. Conway

Faculty Publications

Rural America faces an increasingly dire access to justice crisis, which serves to exacerbate the already disproportionate share of social problems afflicting rural areas. One critical aspect of that crisis is the dearth of information and research regarding the extent of the problem and its impacts. This article begins to address that gap by providing surveys of rural access to justice in six geographically, demographically, and economically varied states: California, Georgia, Maine, Minnesota, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. In addition to providing insights about the distinct rural challenges confronting each of these states, the legal resources available, and existing policy responses, …

The Legal Architecture Of Nation-Building: An Introduction, Charles H. Norchi

Maine Law Review

In the future, a historian studying the early twenty-first century will observe a trend: numerous lawyers applying their skill sets to the problems of pathological states. Our future historian will note that the topography of the post-Cold War international system was marked by weakly-governed states failing. Fragile states eroded, frayed, and disintegrated under stress, and their internal social processes became highly susceptible to external forces. Powerful non-state actors, including private armies, operated within the porous boundaries of entities that were once functioning polities. Legal authority became divorced from political control as non-state actors wielded naked power, challenging formal state structures …

The Apps For Justice Project: Employing Design Thinking To Narrow The Access To Justice Gap, Lois R. Lupica

Faculty Publications

The lack of available resources to make civil justice available to all, coupled with the fact that existing strategies fail to account for the research on cognitive capacity and other deployment challenges faced by the poor, explain in large part why a high percentage of low-income individuals facing legal problems fail to take action to respond to their legal problems. Such a failure to respond in a timely fashion to a nascent legal problem can lead to an escalation of the initial problem and the emergence of new ones.

The access-to-justice community has begun to respond to this intensifying crisis …

Shaping Regional Economies To Sustain Quality Work: The Cooperative Health Care Network, Peter R. Pitegoff

Faculty Publications

This chapter chronicles a creative response to social retrenchment, a saga of strategic deployment of accessible resources and a reshaping of regional economic forces for the benefit of targeted labor markets. While charting its own course, CHCB is part of a mutually supportive network of health care employers and trainers, including successful home care companies in Philadelphia and the South Bronx. Together, these three corporations form the core of the Cooperative Health Care Network and employ over 500 home health aides. About 80 percent of the employees were formerly dependent on public assistance. The network [network] experience and their applicability …

Child Care Policy And The Welfare Reform Act, Peter R. Pitegoff

Faculty Publications

This article sketches the 1996 Welfare Reform Act's major changes with particular attention to federally subsidized child care for low-income families.

Chapter 5: Unions, Finance, And Labor's Capital, Peter R. Pitegoff

Faculty Publications

Events in recent decades have dramatized the need for labor attention beyond narrow issues of wages and working conditions. In the face of widespread industrial disinvestment, unions have been hard-pressed to protect the job status or employment, or the future of their members. At the same time, the developing labor law has narrowed the range of bargaining opportunities for unions to affect corporate decisions-the very decisions that result in job dislocations and corporate transformations. The effectiveness of strikes has been undermined by growing use of permanent replacement workers.

To thrive in the coming decades, unions must carve out a new …

Urban Revitalization And Community Finance: An Introduction, Peter R. Pitegoff

Faculty Publications

"In his 1933 poem Burn the Cities, Nathanael West, the iconoclastic American novelist and urban radical, portrays the city as a focal point of discontent and of anguish for the world's predicament.2 From Jerusalem to Paris and finally to London, the poem winds through distressing urban imagery with scant opportunity for escape. The implicit modicum of hope is an overthrow of the present order. From older cities abroad, West imports an apocalyptic vision of cities at home."

Child Care Enterprise, Community Development, And Work, Peter R. Pitegoff

Faculty Publications

Child care enterprise can be a vehicle for community-based economic development. Beyond the critical goal of child care service, day care as an enterprise can help build capacity for job creation and entrepreneurship in the inner city and in disadvantaged communities. Stable child care institutions with quality jobs can sound a counterpoint to the feminization of poverty. The demand for child care services is substantial and growing. In single parent families and in households with two working parents, day care is essential to enable parents to work or go to school. Further, high quality early childhood programs can have a …