Law Commons^™

A Complete Property Right Amendment, John H. Ryskamp

ExpressO

The trend of the eminent domain reform and "Kelo plus" initiatives is toward a comprehensive Constitutional property right incorporating the elements of level of review, nature of government action, and extent of compensation. This article contains a draft amendment which reflects these concerns.

Essay -- Preemption, Agency Cost Theory, And Predatory Lending By Banking Agents: Are Federal Regulators Biting Off More Than They Can Chew?, Christopher L. Peterson

ExpressO

A pitched battle is currently being waged for control of the American banking industry. For over a hundred years, the federal and state governments have maintained a complex, but relatively stable truce in their contest for power. At the beginning of our republic, state governments were the primary charterers and regulators of banks. In the wake of the Civil War, the National Bank Act created parity between federal and state banks, cementing the notion of a “dual banking system” that endured through the twentieth century. But in the past five years, the federal government has increasingly used its powers under …

Predatory Structured Finance, Christopher L. Peterson

ExpressO

Predatory lending is a real, pervasive, and destructive problem as demonstrated by record settlements, jury awards, media exposes, and a large body of empirical scholarship. Currently the national debate over predatory mortgage lending is shifting to the controversial question of who should bear liability for predatory lending practices. In today’s subprime mortgage market, originators and brokers quickly assign home loans through a complex and opaque series of transactions involving as many as a dozen different strategically organized companies. Loans are typically transferred into large pools, and then income from those loans is “structured” to appeal to different types of investors. …

Just Until Payday, Ronald Mann, James Hawkins

ExpressO

Abstract The growth of payday lending markets during the last 15 years has been the focus of substantial regulatory attention both here and abroad, producing a dizzying array of initiatives by federal and state policymakers. Those initiatives have conflicting purposes – some seek to remove barriers to entry and others seek to impose limits on the business. As is often the case in banking markets, the resulting patchwork of federal and state laws poses a problem when one state is able to dictate the practices of a national industry. For most of this industry’s life, just that has happened – …

Bond Repudiation, Tax Codes, The Appropriations Process And Restitution Post-Eminent Domain Reform, John H. Ryskamp

ExpressO

This brief comment suggests where the anti-eminent domain movement might be heading next.

Bankruptcy Abuse: An Empirical Study Of Consumer Exemptions Cases, Bernard Trujillo

ExpressO

On April 20, 2005, the President of the United States signed a sweeping legislative overhaul of the consumer bankruptcy system. The bankruptcy reform legislation is based on an empirical assertion: that sophisticated debtors with the means to re-pay their debts were instead filing for bankruptcy and acquiring a discharge, thereby abusing the bankruptcy system.

This Article presents the results of an empirical study of bankruptcy court doctrine in consumer exemptions proceedings over a twenty-year period. The findings suggest a serious empirical flaw in the premise of the bankruptcy reform legislation. The study shows that the bankruptcy system minimizes abuse by …

Breaking The Bank: Revisiting Central Bank Of Denver After Enron And Sarbanes-Oxley, Celia Taylor

ExpressO

No abstract provided.

Global Credit Card Use And Debt: Policy Issues And Regulatory Responses, Ronald J. Mann

ExpressO

The rise of card-based payments has transformed the landscape of payments in the last half century, from one dominated by government-supported paper-based payments to one dominated by wholly private systems. The rise of those payments presents a number of policy problems, the most serious of which is the empirically demonstrable likelihood that use of the cards contributes to an undue level of consumer credit and that borrowing on the cards contributes to a rise in the level of consumer bankruptcy. Although the existing pattern shows great variation from country to country, regulators should take no solace in those variations. Building …