Digital Commons Network^™

Presidential Control And Administrative Capacity, Nicholas Bednar

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Presidential control is the power to direct administrative capacity toward the President’s own policy objectives. Accordingly, presidential power vis-à-vis administrative policymaking has two necessary components: control and capacity. First, the President must have the ability to set the agency’s policymaking agenda and direct the day-to-day activities of its leadership and career employees. Second, the agency needs a well-managed team of policymakers with expertise and experience in both the substantive policy area and the policymaking process. Yet scholars have long assumed—without much empirical testing—that the administrative state has sufficient capacity to implement the President’s agenda. Not so.

This Article argues that …

The Rhetoric And Reality Of Shareholder Profit Maximization, Claire A. Hill

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There is presently a heated debate as to what a corporation’s purpose should be. The debate is between proponents of shareholder profit maximization (SPM), the idea that companies should be run exclusively in the financial interests of their shareholders, and proponents of stakeholderism, the idea that in addition to shareholder financial interests, companies should be run to further interests of other stakeholders. At least some of these other stakeholders are quite sympathetic and their interests, or more precisely, the respects in which their interests are purportedly being harmed (or at least insufficiently attended to), are quite salient. While SPM and …

Anticipating A New Modern Skidmore Standard, Kristin E. Hickman

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In Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the Supreme Court overruled Chevron deference but blessed giving agency interpretations of statutes “respect” or “weight” under the Skidmore standard during judicial review. Yet, the Court in Loper Bright offered only a few limited references regarding Skidmore as a doctrine, with little guidance regarding what judicial review under Skidmore ought to look like. The Court might not have felt the need to elaborate, as courts have been applying Skidmore for eighty years. As applied, however, Skidmore is a more complicated doctrine than many people realize. An extensive Skidmore jurisprudence exists, with nuances that at …

Legal Scholarship Through The Lens Of Generative Ai, Darkly, Andrew Martineau, Loren Turner

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Unlike traditional search engines limited to connecting users to original source content, generative AI systems produce new, ad-hoc sources of information derived primarily from patterns in their training data and information fed into the system as context. As such, generative AI systems can play a mediating role between users and information sources, especially when these systems are integrated into databases and web search engines. This article examines how GPT-4 (ChatGPT) interacts with law review articles, revealing its unreliability in summarizing them independently but notable accuracy when provided with full-text input. Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) offers a potential solution for improving …

Scientific And Technical Expertise After Loper Bright, Sapna Kumar

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Courts once trusted federal agencies for their expertise in administering complex statutory schemes, particularly regarding science and technology. Unlike judges, agency officials can narrowly focus on a specific area of law and have access to experts to inform their decision making. In Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, the Supreme Court created a presumption that, absent language to the contrary, Congress intends for agencies to interpret statutory ambiguities. Chevron allowed agencies to utilize their varied forms of expertise while ensuring oversight from generalist judges. This court–agency partnership abruptly ended, however, in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. The Court …

Unbecoming Public Benefit Corporations, Brett H. Mcdonnell

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Becoming a Public Benefit Corporation by Michael B. Dorff1 is a strong, useful book, clear and well-written. Addressed in good part to entrepreneurs and investors, its sub-title encapsulates much of its core message to them: "Express Your Values, Energize Stakeholders, Make the World a Better Place." I see the book as making two core points. First, benefit corporations are a reasonable legal form for entrepreneurs and investors to adopt. Second, this new legal form may help companies do a better job of behaving in a socially responsible way, though this point is less certain than the first, and benefit corporations …

Regulating Robo-Advisors In An Age Of Generative Artificial Intelligence, Daniel Schwarcz, Tom Baker, Kyle Logue

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New generative artificial intelligence (“AI”) tools can increasingly engage in personalized, sustained, and natural conversations with users. This technology has the capacity to reshape the financial services industry, making customized expert financial advice broadly available to consumers. However, AI’s ability to convincingly mimic human financial advisors also creates significant risks of large-scale financial misconduct. Which of these possibilities becomes reality will depend largely on the legal and regulatory rules governing “robo-advisors” that supply fully automated financial advice to consumers.

This Article consequently critically examines this evolving regulatory landscape, arguing that current U.S. rules fail to adequately limit the risk that …

Hiding In Plain Sight: Erisa’S Cure For The $1.4 Trillion Health Benefits Market, Amy B. Monahan, Barak D. Richman

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Since 1974, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) has imposed fiduciary duties on those who manage and administer employee benefit plans. But for the largest employee benefits—retirement benefits and health plans, which together constitute 13% of total national compensation—ERISA’s fiduciary duties have played very different roles. For retirement benefits, ERISA scrutinizes plan managers and requires employers to select plan investments with care. For health plans, there is a regulatory vacuum, as ERISA imposes few federal requirements yet preempts state efforts to ensure quality plan offerings. In short, ERISA has advanced protections for retirement plans but mostly curtailed protections for …

Abuse Of Power In The Workplace: The New Gender Discrimination Claims, June R. Carbone, Nancy Levit, Naomi Cahn

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This article draws on our book, Fair Shake: Women and the Fight to Build a Just Economy, to show how the fight for gender equality has changed. Antidiscrimination laws took hold during an era of relative economic equality; the fight for gender equality was a fight to gain access to the rights of white men. Today’s economy creates much greater inequality and reserves the greatest rewards for a much smaller group, again predominately white and male, who can defy the rules and get away with it. In such contexts, anti-discrimination law premised on a fight for equality can provide only …

Bribery Law: Is Anything Left?, Richard W. Painter

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No abstract provided.

Phyllis Schlafly And How Forgetting Women's Struggles For Equality Perpetuates Inequality, Jill Elaine Hasday

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In a nation whose Constitution purports to speak for “We the People,” too many of the stories that powerful Americans tell about law and society include only We the Men. A long line of judges, politicians, and other influential voices have ignored women’s struggles for equality or distorted them beyond recognition by wildly exaggerating American progress. Even as sexism continues to warp constitutional law, political decisionmaking, and everyday life, prominent Americans have spent more than a century proclaiming that the United States has already left sex discrimination behind.

This symposium essay draws on my book, We the Men, to …

Narrowing The Frame: Consumer Insurance Policies And The Limits Of The Restatement Of Consumer Contracts, Daniel Benjamin Schwarcz

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No abstract provided.

Avoision: When Government Lawyers Turn The Sovereign Against Itself, Richard Painter

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Lawyers sometimes use legally permissible but ethically dubious strategies to avoid the law and at other times they cross the line into illegal law evasion. Between the two is a gray area of conduct highly likely, but not certain, to be illegal known as law “avoision.” Lawyering at the outer limits of the law is controversial in the private sector when lawyers represent clients against the government or against other private parties. The better interpretation of the law may stand on the other side, and the lawyer must decide how far to go in an arguably illegal direction on behalf …

Obamacare For Homeowners Insurance: Fixing America's Broken Insurance Markets In A Time Of Climate Change, Daniel Benjamin Schwarcz

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Over the last decade, homeowners insurance markets nationwide have experienced unprecedented instability due to climate change. These disruptions, which are likely to accelerate in the coming years, risk destabilizing real estate markets, triggering financial instability, and undermining the nation’s resilience to climate change. Despite these massive stakes, federal and state reforms to date have largely failed to result in more accessible and affordable homeowners insurance coverage that promotes climate change resilience. This Article offers a new way forward, arguing that today’s troubled homeowners insurance markets resemble the broken, state health insurance markets that pre-dated the 2010 passage of the Affordable …

Applying The Regulatory Report Card To Tax Regulations, Kristin E. Hickman, Bridget C.E. Dooling

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An invited contribution to an issue of the Journal of Benefit–Cost Analysis honoring the work of the late Dr. Jerry Ellig, this essay recognizes and draws upon the Regulatory Report Card methodology developed by Ellig and Dr. Patrick McLaughlin to evaluate the quality of regulatory impact analysis published by federal government agencies in conjunction with notice-and-comment rulemaking. The essay anticipates a forthcoming study of changes to tax regulatory practices as a result of a 2018 Memorandum of Agreement between the Treasury Department and the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs – a study the authors discussed and hoped to conduct …

The Necessary And Proper Clause And The Law Of Administration, Ilan Wurman

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The Necessary and Proper Clause authorizes Congress to establish and shape the administrative state. But the Necessary and Proper Clause is rarely cited in the relevant Supreme Court opinions or litigant briefs. This is a mistake. In several of the Court’s recent prominent cases, the Necessary and Proper Clause’s meaning and effect could have been dispositive. This Article makes that case. It demonstrates that there are plausible arguments against the Supreme Court’s removal and Seventh Amendment jurisprudence as they relate to public administration, though this Article takes no strong position on those arguments. The Court recently and correctly held, on …

Economic History And The Remaking Of Family Law, June R. Carbone, Naomi Cahn

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In looking at the history of family law, we locate family law – and the status of women and children within it – as a function of political economy. That is, family law is shaped by a societal system that allocates access to, and control of, sources of wealth, decision-making power, and responsibility for dependents. As the nature of family assets has changed from land to male wage labor to two incomes and a complex set of complementary employer and state-provided benefits, so too have family dynamics and, ultimately, family law. They have evolved into the contemporary system, with a …

Ai Assistance In Legal Analysis: An Empirical Study, Jonathan H. Choi, Daniel Benjamin Schwarcz

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No abstract provided.

Legal Civil War, June Carbone, Nancy Levit, Naomi Cahn

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In an era of partisan polarization in which each side sees the other as illegitimate and a threat to the nation and its values, the term “civil war” is often brandished, from state and federal immigration battles to abortion access to election disputes. Civil war, as used in these contexts, does not necessarily raise the specter of armed confrontation between rival armies but does suggest divisions so deep that they threaten the nation’s ability to endure. This Essay introduces the concept of a legal civil war to describe conflicts within a country where rival factions defy the established rule of …

The Magna Carta, Jarkesy, And The Constitutional Jury Requirement In Crime-Based Deportation, Linus Chan, Hans Frank-Holzner

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No abstract provided.

Executive Clemency And Immigration Federalism: Reconsidering Presidential Power Over Deportation Orders, Linus Chan, Emma Wittmer, Lauren Butler

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No abstract provided.

Liability, Property, And Inalienability Rules In Employee Data Regulation, Matthew T. Bodie

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Legal protections for workers’ data have usually taken the form of privacy protections designed to deter data processing that is excessive or invasive. Such protections generally fall into the category of liability rules, under which rights can be infringed as long as compensation is provided for the violation. As Guido Calabresi and A. Douglas Melamed have described in “Property Rules, Liability Rules, and Inalienability: One View of the Cathedral,” liability rules are contrasted with either property rules that prevent the involuntary transfer of rights or inalienability rules that prohibit rights transfers altogether. This article explores how property rules and inalienability …

In Memoriam: Robert D. Cooter, Francesco Parisi

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The International Review of Law & Economics is publishing these notes in memory and celebration of Robert D. Cooter—its Editor from 1988 to 2004—offering brief reflections on him as teacher, scholar, and exemplar. A giant of law and economics, Robert D. Cooter combined breadth with creative insight: he helped build a systematic economic understanding of torts, contracts, and property, a novel approach to public law and Constitutional design, and opened new frontiers on the interaction between law and social norms and on the expressive power of law. His humanity and scholarly ethos—curiosity, humor, and intellectual honesty—left a lasting mark on …

Collegiate Nil Collectives: Context, Structure, And Future, Matthew T. Bodie, Esdras D. Camacho

Articles

Since its inception, the NCAA has championed the principle of amateurism in college sports-the idea that collegiate athletes may not receive monetary compensation for their athletic performance. In its 2021 decision in National Collegiate Athletic Association v. Alston, however, the Supreme Court found the NCAA had violated antitrust law with its restrictions on certain benefits provided to athletes. With the possibility of much greater liability to follow, the NCAA soon thereafter enacted a radical departure from past practice, enabling athletes to profit from their names, images, and likenesses ("NIL") while maintaining their amateur status. There were important limitations on this …

Free Speech And Incorporation: A Reassessment, Ilan Wurman

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Many of the Supreme Court’s most controversial free speech decisions involve state laws. In Gitlow v. New York, the Court assumed that the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech applied directly against the states via the Fourteenth Amendment, a doctrine today referred to as incorporation. Yet there is reason to doubt incorporation is correct as a matter of the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. Indeed, much of the historical evidence involves debates over the freedom of speech, but none of the historical actors seemed to think the First Amendment applied against the states. This short essay evaluates the …

The Emerging Framework For The Recognition & Enforcement Of Annulled Arbitral Awards In U.S. Jurisprudence, Sarah Klim

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The recognition and enforcement of foreign awards are governed almost universally by the United Nations Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards (the "New York Convention"). However, this recognition and enforcement necessarily invokes national judicial power. The New York Convention does not devise a harmonized set of rules for courts to follow when faced with a request to recognize and enforce an annulled award. This has resulted in divergent approaches by national courts, which derive "not from any perversity of judges but from good faith variants in perspectives on how to construe the treaty."  This paper seeks …

Annual Survey Of Georgia Law: Legal Ethics, Patrick Longan

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This Survey covers the period from June 1, 2024–May 31, 2025.1 The Article discusses developments with respect to lawyer discipline, bar admission and reinstatement, malpractice, ineffective assistance of counsel, disqualification of counsel, judicial misconduct and recusal, attorney’s fees and liens, contempt and other sanctions, unauthorized practice of law, attorney-client privilege, prosecutorial misconduct, amendments to the Georgia Rules of Professional Conduct, advisory opinions, one miscellaneous matter, and potential reforms to the delivery of legal services.

Our Partisan Supreme Court And An Essential First Step Toward Reclaiming What's Been Lost, Gary Simson

Articles

Partisan decision-making by even only one Supreme Court Justice in a single case is not a trivial matter. The ill effects are greatly compounded when five or more Justices of a similar partisan bent regularly deliberate about, and decide, cases in a partisan way. At that point, we’ve got what can fairly be described as a partisan Supreme Court.

I argue in this Article that, to all of our great misfortune, a partisan Supreme Court is very much what we’ve got today. On a more hopeful note, though, I also argue that although reforming the Court to be a much …

The Dangers Of Denying Prosecutorial Independence: Wrongful Convictions, Official Misconduct, And Public Corruption, Meagan R. Hurley

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In recent years, desires to limit prosecutorial discretion have become the focus of a national dialogue on the authority of the elected officials, allegations of their misconduct, and the need for stronger accountability measures. Legislatures across the country have considered a slew of bills aimed at diminishing prosecutorial power by prohibiting “progressive” office policies, creating oversight commissions, and promulgating simplified processes to recall or remove prosecutors entirely. In various jurisdictions, those proposals are now coming to fruition. While heightened scrutiny for some of the legal system’s most powerful leaders may seem attractive, an analysis of national trends aimed at curtailing …

Harmonizing Delegation And Deference After Loper Bright, Kristin Hickman, Amy J. Wildermuth

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By overturning Chevron, the Supreme Court's Loper Bright decision clearly changed the way in which courts must approach agency actions interpreting statutes. But Loper Bright stopped well short of declaring that courts should always ignore agency interpretations and only interpret statutes using their independent judgment. In two critical paragraphs, the Court acknowledged that some statutory provisions delegate discretionary authority to agencies counseled a more restrained judicial review for reasoned decisionmaking when agencies exercise such power. But, whereas Chevron focused nearly exclusively on the statutory word or phrase that an agency was endeavoring to interpret and implement, Loper Bright shifts …