Law Commons^™

Restoring The Natural Law: Copyright As Labor And Possession, Alfred C. Yen

Alfred C. Yen

In this Article, Professor Yen explores the problems associated with viewing copyright solely as a tool for achieving economic efficiency and advocates for the restoration of natural law to copyright jurisprudence. The Article demonstrates that economics has not been solely responsible for copyright’s development and basic structure, but has rather developed along lines suggested by neutral law, despite modern copyright jurisprudence. The Article considers the consequences of extinguishing copyright’s natural law facets in favor of the blind pursuit of efficiency and concludes by exploring the implications of restoring natural law thinking to copyright jurisprudence.

Evaluating Imf Crisis Prevention As A Matter Of Global Justice, Frank J. Garcia

Frank J. Garcia

No abstract provided.

Understanding Csr: An Empirical Study Of Private Self-Regulation, Benedict Sheehy

Benedict Sheehy

Abstract: The article is a study of an important burgeoning form of regulation—private self-regulation—in the area of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Rather than taking a purely theoretical approach or a social scientific study relying publicly reported data, the article addresses the issue by way of interview based case studies. As a study in regulation it clarifies the difference between various types of self-regulation, trade associations’ codes as private self-regulation and government sponsored self-regulation. This distinction hampers efforts to understand the important aspects of motivation and compliance. This study provides empirical examination of compliance in private self-regulation. Given the impact and …

The Marginalist Revolution In Corporate Finance: 1880-1965, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries fundamental changes in economic thought revolutionized the theory of corporate finance, leading to changes in its legal regulation. The changes were massive, and this branch of financial analysis and law became virtually unrecognizable to those who had practiced it earlier. The source of this revision was the marginalist, or neoclassical, revolution in economic thought. The classical theory had seen corporate finance as an historical, relatively self-executing inquiry based on the classical theory of value and administered by common law courts. By contrast, neoclassical value theory was forward looking and as a result …

No More Abuse: The Dodd-Frank And Consumer Financial Protection Act's "Abusive" Standard, Tiffany S. Lee

Tiffany S Lee

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Financial Protection Act creates the new Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection. This consumer watchdog will be responsible for the most powerful consumer protections in American history. Under section 1031(d) of the Act, the Bureau may ban acts and practices that are unfair, deceptive, or abusive. While the unfair and deceptive standards have existed for some time, “abusive” is a relatively new legal standard with limited jurisprudential history. Thus, ironically, critics assert that the inclusion of the abusive standard is itself an abuse of legislative power. This Article asserts that despite some criticism to …

Collective Choice, Justin Schwartz

Justin Schwartz

This short nontechnical article reviews the Arrow Impossibility Theorem and its implications for rational democratic decisionmaking. In the 1950s, economist Kenneth J. Arrow proved that no method for producing a unique social choice involving at least three choices and three actors could satisfy four seemingly obvious constraints that are practically constitutive of democratic decisionmaking. Any such method must violate such a constraint and risks leading to disturbingly irrational results such and Condorcet cycling. I explain the theorem in plain, nonmathematical language, and discuss the history, range, and prospects of avoiding what seems like a fundamental theoretical challenge to the possibility …

Introduction To Creation Without Restraint: Promoting Liberty And Rivalry In Innovation, Christina Bohannan, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

This document contains the table of contents, introduction, and a brief description of Christina Bohannan & Herbert Hovenkamp, Creation without Restraint: Promoting Liberty and Rivalry in Innovation (Oxford 2011).

Promoting rivalry in innovation requires a fusion of legal policies drawn from patent, copyright, and antitrust law, as well as economics and other disciplines. Creation Without Restraint looks first at the relationship between markets and innovation, noting that innovation occurs most in moderately competitive markets and that small actors are more likely to be truly creative innovators. Then we examine the problem of connected and complementary relationships, a dominant feature of …

The Unconstitutionality Of Current Legal Barriers To Telemedicine In The United States: Analysis And Future Directions Of Its Relationship To National And International Health Care Reform, Deth Sao, Amar Gupta

Deth Sao

The current health care crisis in the United States compels a consideration of the crucial role that telemedicine could play towards deploying a pragmatic solution. The nation faces rising costs and difficulties in access to and quality of medical services. Telemedicine can potentially help to overcome these challenges, as it can provide new cost-effective and efficient methods of delivering health care across geographic distances. The full benefits and future potential of telemedicine, however, are constrained by overlapping and often inconsistent and inadequate regulatory frameworks, as well as the repertoire of standards imposed by state governments and professional organizations. Proponents of …

Neo-Brandeisianism And The New Deal: Adolf A. Berle, Jr., William O. Douglas, And The Problem Of Corporate Finance In The 1930s, Jessica Wang

Seattle University Law Review

This essay revisits Adolf A. Berle, Jr. and The Modern Corporation and Private Property by focusing on the triangle of Berle, Louis D. Brandeis, and William O. Douglas in order to examine some of the underlying assumptions about law, economics, and the nature of modern society behind securities regulation and corporate finance in the 1930s. I explore Douglas and Berle’s academic and political relationship, the conceptual underpinnings of Brandeis, Berle, and Douglas’s critiques of modern finance, and the ways in which the two younger men—Berle and Douglas—ultimately departed from their role model, Brandeis.

Tracking Berle's Footsteps: The Trail Of The Modern Corporation's Law Chapter, William W. Bratton, Michael L. Wachter

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

A Comprehensive Theory Of Deal Structure: Understanding How Transactional Structure Creates Value, Michael S. Knoll, Daniel M. G. Raff

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Regulation By Markets And Higher Education, Benedict Sheehy

Benedict Sheehy

Markets have a number of uses. One increasingly important use by politicians is as a means of regulating the supply and distribution of goods and services formerly supplied and distributed by governments on non-market bases. The use of markets as a regulator of higher education is not novel. However, the increased reliance on markets as a regulator of higher education is an on-going experiment with certain predictable failures. This article explores the uses of the market in the supply and distribution of higher education and weighs it against the stated policy objectives, with particular attention to the application proposed in …

Slides: Intermountain Oil And Gas Bmp Project, Kathryn Mutz

Best Practices for Community and Environmental Protection (October 14)

Presenter: Kathryn Mutz, Natural Resources Law Center

19 slides

September 11th, John Maynard Keynes, Kenneth J. Arrow, And Me: The Nexus, David Randall Jenkins

David Randall Jenkins, Ph.D.

What Price Security?, Donald C. Masters

Journal of Strategic Security

This article presents a critique of the Copenhagen Consensus Center's(CCC) exhaustive study on transnational terrorism, published in 2008.The implications of this study are controversial, yet highly relevant in today's economic environment. The Obama administration must come toterms with fiscal realities that will challenge budget priorities and invigorate what will undoubtedly prove to be tough negotiations on Capitol Hill for homeland security dollars. It is proposed here that standard economic tools such as benefit cost analysis, cost effectiveness criteria, and simulation models can help identify areas where security can be either extended or improved using fewer resources. Greater movement towards competitive …

Judicial Martial Law - Appendix, David Randall Jenkins

David Randall Jenkins

No abstract provided.

Fragility: The Next Wave In Critical Infrastructure Protection, Allan Mcdougall

Journal of Strategic Security

In North America today, we are about to embark on a significant effort to repair, or even upgrade, many aspects of our infrastructure. Many of these efforts are linked to economic recovery packages. Others are based on sheer need. The challenge for decision makers and planners involves ensuring that scarce economic resources are put to their best use. Understanding the concept of fragility plays a pivotal part in reaching that understanding.Fragility, like many other systems—particularly Information Technology (IT ) systems—works on the concept of subjects and objects. Subjects are those entities that seek to exploit the services (or capacity) offered …

The U.S. Economic Crisis: Another "Lost Decade"?, Paula Chungsathaporn

Honors College Theses

America is experiencing the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression originating with problems from mortgage backed securities and seeping into every major sector in the economy. We have witnessed the downfall or government takeover of some of the most powerful companies in the country, contributing to the highest unemployment rate America has seen in decades. During the 1990s, Japan experienced what is commonly referred to as “the lost decade,” a period of prolonged stagnant growth. Many similarities can be drawn between the current U.S. crisis and the Japanese crisis of the late 90s. The macroeconomic conditions that caused the …

Judicial Martial Law, David Randall Jenkins

David Randall Jenkins

No abstract provided.

Taxing Shared Economies Of Scale, Brad Borden

Bradley T. Borden

Economies of scale exist if long-run average costs decline as output rises. All else being equal, the decline in average costs should lead to greater profitability, making economies of scale attractive to businesses. Nobel laureate George Stigler recognized that economies of scale should help determine the optimum size of a firm. To obtain economies of scale and optimum firm size, parties may integrate resources or grant access to resources without integrating. Such arrangements create shared economies of scale. Tax law must consider the effects of shared economies of scale and address them. In particular, the varying degrees of scale-sharing raise …

Delivery Of Legal Services To Immigrant Small Business Owners: The Problems And A Model To Solve Them, William A. Langer, Pablo A. Ormachea

William A Langer

Delivery of Legal Services to Immigrant Small Business Owners: The Problems and a Model to Solve Them. By Pablo Ormachea & William Langer

Immigrant entrepreneurs not only provide essential support for individual families, but also serve as key engines of economic growth for United States cities. While immigrant small-business owners continuously stimulate growth in various economic sectors, creating new jobs and helping to develop inner-city neighborhoods, they overcome considerable obstacles and barriers to reach these achievements. This article argues that a deeper understanding of such systemic barriers can help to reduce such barriers so that an increasingly larger number of …

Passive Discrimination: When Does It Make Sense To Pay Too Little?, Jonah B. Gelbach, Jonathan Klick, Lesley Wexler

All Faculty Scholarship

Economists have long recognized employers’ ability to construct benefits packages to induce workers to sort themselves into and out of jobs. For instance, to encourage applications from individuals with a highly valued but largely unobservable characteristic, such as patience, employers might offer benefits that patient individuals are likely to value more than other individuals. By offering a compensation package with highly valued benefits but a relatively low wage, employers will attract workers with the favored characteristic and discourage other individuals from applying for or accepting the job. While economic theory generally views this kind of self-selection in value neutral terms, …

Federalism, Variation, And State Regulation Of Franchise Termination, Jonathan Klick, Bruce Kobayashi, Larry Ribstein

All Faculty Scholarship

This article discusses and expands on our recent work examining the effects of franchise-termination laws. In a prior article, we examined empirically the effect of franchise-termination laws on the level of franchise activity. Our analysis improved upon the prior literature in two major ways. First, our work exploited two new sources of panel data to provide new empirical evidence on the effect of franchise termination laws. Second, our analysis examined variation in states’ restrictions on the ability of franchisors and franchisees to contract around a particular state’s regulation. We found that the effects of termination laws on the overall level …

Neoclassicism And The Separation Of Ownership And Control, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

"Separation of ownership and control" is a phrase whose history will forever be associated with Adolf A. Berle and Gardiner C. Means' The Modern Corporation and Private Property (1932), as well as with Institutionalist economics, Legal Realism, and the New Deal. Within that milieu the large publicly held business corporation became identified with excessive managerial power at the expense of stockholders, social irresponsibility, and internal inefficiency. Neoclassical economists both then and ever since have generally been critical, both of the historical facts that Berle and Means purported to describe and of the conclusions that they drew. In fact, however, within …

International Strategic Alliance, Mohd Arif

Mohd Arif

A Strategic Alliance is a relationship between firms to creat more value than they can on their own

Agency Costs, Charitable Trusts, And Corporate Control: Evidence From Hershey's Kiss-Off, Jonathan Klick, Robert H. Sitkoff

All Faculty Scholarship

In July 2002 the trustees of the Milton Hershey School Trust announced a plan to diversify the Trust’s investment portfolio by selling the Trust’s controlling interest in the Hershey Company. The Company’s stock jumped from $62.50 to $78.30 on news of the proposed sale. But the Pennsylvania Attorney General, who was then running for governor, opposed the sale on the ground that it would harm the local community. Shortly after the Attorney General obtained a preliminary injunction, the trustees abandoned the sale and the Company’s stock dropped to $65.00. Using standard event study methodology, we find that the sale announcement …

Private Equity's Three Lessons For Agency Theory, William W. Bratton

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Disadvantages Of Immigration Restriction As A Policy To Improve Income Distribution, Howard F. Chang

All Faculty Scholarship

In this Article, I argue that tax and transfer policies are more efficient than immigration restrictions as instruments for raising the after tax incomes of the least skilled native workers. Policies to protect these native workers frol1'l immigrant competition in the labor market do no better at promoting distributive justice and are likely to impose a greater economic burden on natives in the country of immigration than the tax alternative. These immigration restrictions are especially costly given the disproportionate burden that they place on households with working women, which discourages fel1'wle participation in the labor force. This burden runs contrary …

The Legal Periphery Of Dominant Firm Conduct, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

This essay explores two different but related problems and how U.S. antitrust law and EU competition law approach them. The first is the offense of attempt to monopolize, which concerns the acts that a firm that is not yet dominant might undertake in order to become dominant. The second is the offense of monopoly or dominant firm leveraging, which occurs when a firm uses its dominant position in one market to cause some kind of harm in a different market where it also does business.

The language of EU and U.S. provisions concerning dominant firms provokes one to think that …

Reasonable Emissions Of Greenhouse Gases: Efficient Abatement For A Stock Pollutant, Howard F. Chang

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.