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Newsroom: Logan On 2015'S Record Settlements, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

Also available @ http://law.rwu.edu/story/logan-2015s-record-settlements

Street Drug Markets Beyond Favelas In Belo Horizonte, Brazil, Elenice De Souza De Souza Oliveira, Braulio Figueiredo Alves Silva, Marcos Oliveira Prates

Department of Justice Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This study examines whether social disorganization mechanisms that explain clusters of street drug markets in socially disorganized neighborhoods in developed countries can also help explain geographical patterns of drug dealing across neighborhoods in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Data for this study includes drug arrests from 2007 to 2011 and socio demographic data from the 2010 Census. To examine the influence of exploratory variables on drug market locations, the Negative Binominal regression model was used at two levels of analysis—the Belo Horizonte city center and other neighborhoods including favelas. The findings show that a high hot spot of street drug markets located …

Legal Beagle's Blog Archive For December 2015, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

Revising The U.S. Vertical Merger Guidelines: Policy Issues And An Interim Guide For Practitioners, Steven C. Salop, Daniel P. Culley

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Mergers and acquisitions are a major component of antitrust law and practice. The U.S. antitrust agencies spend a majority of their time on merger enforcement. The focus of most merger review at the agencies involves horizontal mergers, that is, mergers among firms that compete at the same level of production or distribution.

Vertical mergers combine firms at different levels of production or distribution. In the simplest case, a vertical merger joins together a firm that produces an input (and competes in an input market) with a firm that uses that input to produce output (and competes in an output market). …

Trending @ Rwulaw: Professor Peter Margulies's Post: Cybersecurity: A 'Must-Know' For Lawyers And Citizens, Peter Margulies

Law School Blogs

No abstract provided.

Mandatory Arbitration In Consumer Finance And Investor Contracts, Michael S. Barr

Articles

Mandatory pre-dispute arbitration clauses are pervasive in consumer financial and investor contracts—for credit cards, bank accounts, auto loans, broker-dealer services, and many others. These clauses often ill serve households. Consumers are typically presented with contracts on a “take it or leave it” basis, with no ability to negotiate over terms. Arbitration provisions are often not clearly disclosed, and in any event are not salient for consumers, who do not focus on the importance of the provision in the event that a dispute over the contract later arises, and who may misforecast the likelihood of being in such a dispute. The …

The 4th Annual Professor Anthony J. Santoro Business Law Lecture Series: Consumer Protection In The Broadband Era: The Role Of The Fcc, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

New Dtca Guidance — Enough To Empower Consumers?, Christopher Robertson

Faculty Scholarship

As one of only two countries that permit direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) of pharmaceuticals, the United States tasks the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) with regulating that advertising to ensure that it doesn't mislead consumers. When a drug maker publishes or broadcasts a claim that its drug has benefits in a particular disease, the FDA requires it to include information on the product's risks as well. Since it's not feasible for companies to include all the important information about their products in a television ad, the FDA requires them to refer viewers to more complete information, such as that in a …

Saving Charitable Settlements, Christine P. Bartholomew

Journal Articles

This Article defies the conventional wisdom that all charitable distributions from a class action settlement fund are types of cy pres. Instead, it proposes a radical delineation between “cy pres remainders” (meaning settlement funds left over after individual monetary distributions) and “charitable settlements” (meaning money initially distributed to charities as part of class action settlements). While both have cy pres roots, these two settlement structures have been conflated, jeopardizing the potential utility of charitable settlements. After articulating more precise nomenclature for these distinct distribution methods, this Article justifies why we must preserve charitable settlements. This defense is particularly timely, as …

Helping Buyers Beware: The Need For Supervision Of Big Retail, Rory Van Loo

Faculty Scholarship

Since the financial crisis, consumer regulators have closely supervised sellers of credit cards and home mortgages to stamp out anticompetitive practices. Supervision programs give financial regulators ongoing access to sophisticated firms' internal data outside the litigation process. This often enables examiners to identify and correct harmful conduct more rapidly and effectively than would be possible using publicly available information and cumbersome legal tools.

Consumers spend four times more on retail goods than on financial products. The retail sector’s dominant firms — such as Amazon, Walmart, Unilever, and Kraft — employ large teams of quantitative experts armed with advanced information technologies, …

Internet Payment Blockades: Sopa And Pipa In Disguise? Or Worse?, Stacey Dogan

Shorter Faculty Works

The law of intermediary liability in intellectual property reflects a constant struggle for balance. On the one hand, rights owners frustrated by the game of whack-a-mole have good reason to look for more efficient ways to stanch the flow of infringement. While this concern is not a new one, the global reach and decentralization of the Internet have exacerbated it. On the flipside, consumers, technology developers, and others fret about the impact of broad liability: it can impede speech, limit competition, and impose a drag on economic sectors with only a peripheral relationship to infringement. As the Supreme Court put …

Predatory Pricing Under The Areeda-Turner Test, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

Few works of legal scholarship have had the impact enjoyed by Areeda and Turner's 1975 article on predatory pricing. Proof of predatory pricing under the Areeda-Turner test requires two things. The plaintiff must show a market structure such that the predator could rationally foresee "recouping the losses through higher profits earned in the absence of competition." This requirement, typically called "recoupment," requires the plaintiff to show that, looking from the beginning of the predation campaign, the predator can reasonably anticipate that the costs of predation will be more than offset by the present value of a future period of monopoly …

Price Gouging: A Gray Area, Mathis Mateus

Common Reading Essay Contest Winners

Second Place

Essay Prompt: In Justice, Sandel discusses a number of contemporary political issues (e.g. price gouging during the 2004 Hurricane, the 2008-9 financial meltdown, the volunteer army, pregnancy surrogates, executive pay, slavery reparations, immigration, and gay marriage). Take a position on one of the issues discussed in the book and make the best case that you can for why this position is the most just. You may include evidence from the book, your prior studies, your own experience, and/or outside research. (Outside research is not required.)

Intuitive Formalism In Contract, Tess Wilkinson-Ryan

All Faculty Scholarship

This Article starts with the proposition that most American contracting is consumer contracting, posits that consumer contracting has particular and even peculiar doctrinal features, and concludes that these features dominate the lay understanding of contract law. Contracts of adhesion constitute the bulk of consumer experience with contract law. It is not hard to see that someone discerning the nature of contract law from a sample composed almost entirely of boilerplate terms and conditions would come quickly to the conclusion that contract law is highly formal.

Within the realm of potentially enforceable deals (i.e., those that are supported by consideration and …

It's Time To Remove The 'Mossified' Procedures For Ftc Rulemaking, Jeffrey Lubbers

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This article, prepared for The George Washington Law Review’s Symposium “The FTC at 100,” addresses the FTC’s rulemaking process — specifically the quasi-adjudicative process mandated by the Magnuson-Moss Warranty — Federal Trade Commission Improvement Act of 1975 and the additional procedures added by the Federal Trade Commission Improvements Act of 1980 (collectively called the “Magnuson-Moss Procedures”). The article compares how long it took the FTC to complete or terminate the rulemakings it undertook under the Magnuson-Moss Procedures (including amendments to previously issued rules) with the amount of time it took the FTC to issue rules under the “regular” Administrative Procedure …

Environmental Privacy, Katrina Fischer Kuh

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

This Article looks to nuisance doctrine, surveillance under environmental statutes, and Fourth Amendment cases arising in implementation of fish and game laws (the hunter enforcement cases) to better understand our experience, to date, balancing the need for environmental information with privacy. Section A analyzes common law nuisance and its relationship to individual privacy concerns and concludes that the law affords little *7 value to or protection of privacy in the context of at least one type of environmental externality -- conduct that gives rise to a common law nuisance. Recognizing that most environmentally significant individual behaviors do not constitute a …

(Still) "Unsafe At Any Speed": Why Not Jail For Auto Executives?, Rena I. Steinzor

Faculty Scholarship

Americans can be forgiven for wondering what has gone so drastically wrong with the companies that sell automobiles. In 2014, 64 million, a number equivalent to one in five of the cars on the road, was recalled. Safety defects such as the lack of torque in ignition switches installed in GM compact cars like the Cobalt put motorists in the terrifying position of coping with a stalled engine and loss of power brakes while traveling at high speeds. GM had the audacity to classify this condition was not a safety defect, but instead was merely “inconvenient” for its customers. It …

Reforming The Law Of Reputation, Frank A. Pasquale

Faculty Scholarship

Unfair and deceptive practices of controllers and processors of data have adversely affected many citizens. New threats to individuals’ reputations have seriously undermined the efficacy of extant regulation concerning health privacy, credit reporting, and expungement. The common thread is automated, algorithmic arrangements of information, which could render data properly removed or obscured in one records system, nevertheless highly visible or dominant in other, more important ones.

As policymakers reform the law of reputation, they should closely consult European approaches to what is now called the “right to be forgotten.” Health privacy law, credit reporting, and criminal conviction expungement need to …

Fixing Failure To Warn, Aaron D. Twerski, James A. Henderson Jr.

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Design-defect and failure-to-warn cases share the same structural elements. Just as the defendant cannot defend a case premised on defective design without knowing the specifics of how the plaintiff would redesign the product to make it safer, so with regard to defective warnings the plaintiff cannot challenge the reasonableness of the defendant's marketing or whether better warnings would have saved the plaintiff from injury without knowing the specifics of the proposed warnings. No court would accept as adequate a statement by the plaintiff that she has a general idea for a reasonable alternative design (RAD), and no court should accept …

Regulating Farming: Balancing Food Safety And Environmental Protection In A Cooperative Governance Regime, Margot J. Pollans

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

After providing a brief overview of regulation in each area, Part I of this Article identifies three types of discordance between produce safety and environmental protection on farms. First, because of limited resources, farmers will have to choose between implementing food safety practices and implementing environmental practices. Second, indirect trade-offs between the two regulatory goals result in damaging collateral consequences for the environment. Food safety regulation may exacerbate a range of existing environmental harms. Third, there is at least one direct clash that may make compliance with food safety law incompatible with participation in certain environmental programs. Part I also …

Closed-End Fund Ipo Considerations, Benjamin P. Edwards

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Redefining Prey And Predator In Class Actions, Christine P. Bartholomew

Journal Articles

Aggregate litigation’s potential as a tool for the disempowered is not being realized. Class actions have come under serious attack in the last decade as critics have successfully worked to change traditional notions of victimhood. The leading narrative identifies big businesses as the vulnerable prey needing protection from large class claims and the greedy class actions attorneys who bring them. Relying on this narrative, courts and Congress have made class actions harder to pursue, from filing and class certification to settlement approval.

Vulnerability theory offers an alternative framework to rehabilitate class actions. From this perspective, the legal system currently disadvantages …

"Whimsy Little Contracts" With Unexpected Consequences: An Empirical Analysis Of Consumer Understanding Of Arbitration Agreements, Paul F. Kirgis, Jeff Sovern, Elayne E. Greenberg, Yuxaing Liu

Faculty Law Review Articles

Arbitration clauses have become ubiquitous in consumer contracts. These arbitration clauses require consumers to waive the constitutional right to a civil jury, access to court, and, increasingly, the procedural remedy of class representation. Because those rights cannot be divested without consent, the validity of arbitration agreements rests on the premise of consent. Consumers who do not want to arbitrate or waive their class rights can simply decline to purchase the products or services covered by an arbitration agreement. But the premise of consent is undermined if consumers do not understand the effect on their procedural rights of clicking a box …

Putting Disclosure To The Test: Toward Better Evidence-Based Policy, Talia B. Gillis

Faculty Scholarship

Financial disclosures no longer enjoy the immunity from criticism they once had. While disclosures remain the hallmark of numerous areas of regulation, there is increasing skepticism as to whether disclosures are understood by consumers and do in fact improve consumer welfare. Debates on the virtues of disclosures overlook the process by which regulators continue to mandate disclosures. This article fills this gap by analyzing the testing of proposed disclosures, which is an increasingly popular way for regulators to establish the benefits of disclosure. If the testing methodology is misguided then the premise on which disclosures are adopted is flawed, leaving …

Robots In The Home: What Will We Have Agreed To?, Margot E. Kaminski

Publications

A new technology can expose the cracks in legal doctrine. Sometimes a technology resists analogy. Sometimes, through analogies, it reveals inconsistencies in the law, or basic flaws in framing, or in the fit between different parts of the legal system. This Essay addresses robots in the home, and what they reveal about U.S. privacy law. Household robots might not themselves uproot U.S. privacy law, but they will reveal its inconsistencies, and show where it is most likely to fracture. Just as drones are serving as a legislative “privacy catalyst” — encouraging the enactment of new privacy laws as people realize …

Who Regulates The Robots, Margot Kaminski

Publications

No abstract provided.

Contra Proferentem And The Role Of The Jury In Contract Interpretation, Ethan J. Leib, Steve Thel

Faculty Scholarship

Revisiting Bill Whitford’s work on the role of the jury in contract interpretation and his work on consumer form contracting inspired us to take a careful look at a doctrine of contract interpretation that is usually thought to help consumers in interpretive battles with those who draft their contracts unilaterally. But we found that contra proferentem -- the canon that requires construing or interpreting a contract against the drafter when ambiguities arise -- is more confusing than we expected. What we have done here is lay out some of the complexities of the doctrine, focusing on its broader application outside …

Lift Not The Painted Veil! To Whom Are Directors’ Duties Really Owed?, Martin Gelter, Geneviève Helleringer

Faculty Scholarship

In this article, we identify a fundamental contradiction in the law of fiduciary duty of corporate directors across jurisdictions, namely the tension between the uniformity of directors’ duties and the heterogeneity of directors themselves. American scholars tend to think of the board as a group of individuals elected by shareholders, even though it is widely acknowledged (and criticized) that the board is often a largely self-perpetuating body whose inside members dominate the selection of their future colleagues and eventual successors. However, this characterization is far from universally true internationally, and it tends to be increasingly less true even in the …

Data Breach (Regulatory) Effects, David Thaw

Articles

No abstract provided.

Reasonable Expectations Of Privacy Settings: Social Media And The Stored Communications Act, David Thaw, Christopher Borchert, Fernando Pinguelo

Articles

In 1986, Congress passed the Stored Communications Act (“SCA”) to provide additional protections for individuals’ private communications content held in electronic storage by third parties. Acting out of direct concern for the implications of the Third-Party Records Doctrine — a judicially created doctrine that generally eliminates Fourth Amendment protections for information entrusted to third parties — Congress sought to tailor the SCA to electronic communications sent via and stored by third parties. Yet, because Congress crafted the SCA with language specific to the technology of 1986, courts today have struggled to apply the SCA consistently with regard to similar private …