Law Commons^™

Justice, The Bretton Woods Institutions And The Problem Of Inequality, Frank J. Garcia

Frank J. Garcia

The Bretton Woods Institutions are, together with the WTO, the preeminent international institutions devoted to managing international economic relations. This mandate puts them squarely in the center of the debate concerning development, inequality and global justice. While the normative analysis of the WTO is gaining momentum, the systematic normative evaluation of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund is comparatively less developed. This essay aims to contribute to that nascent inquiry. How might global justice criteria apply to the ideology and operations of the Bank and Fund? Political theory offers an abundance of perspectives from which to conduct such …

Is Free Trade "Free?" Is It Even "Trade?" Oppression And Consent In Hemispheric Trade Agreements, Frank J. Garcia

Frank J. Garcia

In order for free trade as a policy to deliver fully on its social promise, it must be both “free” and “trade.” In fact, it must be free, in the sense of voluntary, to be trade at all. In other words, for normative and practical reasons, free trade requires that global economic relations be structured through agreements which reflect the consent of those subject to them. The neoliberal trading system today only imperfectly lives up to this obligation. In this essay, I will examine the role of consent in trade agreements, drawing on examples from CAFTA as representative of important …

The Moral Hazard Problem In Global Economic Regulation, Frank J. Garcia

Frank J. Garcia

Global regulation of international business transactions presents a particular form of the moral hazard problem. Global firms use economic and political power to manipulate state and state-controlled multilateral regulation to preserve their opportunity to externalize the social costs of global economic activity with impunity. Unless other actors can effectively counter this at the national and global regulatory levels, globalization re-creates the conditions for under-regulated or “robber baron” capitalism at the global level. This model of economic activity has been rejected at the national level by the same modern democratic capitalist states which currently dominate globalization, creating a crisis of legitimacy …

Reincidentes, Habituales Y Derecho Penal Económico, Javier Fernando Quiñones

Javier Fernando Quiñones

Se analizan las instituciones del Derecho Penal de autor peruano, destacando que si bien está establecidas en la parte general del código penal peruano no comprenden a toda clase de delito, pues desde su fundamento y esencia responden al denominado derecho penal nuclear. Se trata entonces de una clara vulneración de la garantía de la igualdad ante la ley.

The Misuse Of Tax Incentives To Align Management-Shareholder Interests, James R. Repetti

James R. Repetti

The U.S. tax system contains many provisions which are intended to align management of large publicly traded companies more closely to stockholders. This article shows that many of the tax provisions that have been adopted are of questionable effectiveness because they fail to address the complexities of stockholder-management relations in attempting to motivate management to act in the best interests of stockholders. The article proposes that rather than Congress attempting to identify the best way that it can use the tax system to motivate management, Congress should eliminate tax provisions which subsidize management's inefficiencies in order to encourage stockholders, themselves, …

Environmental Law And Three Economies: Navigating A Sprawling Field Of Study, Practice, And Societal Governance In Which Everything Is Connected To Everything Else, Zygmunt J.B. Plater

Zygmunt J.B. Plater

From the Author’s Introduction: This Essay addresses four of the challenges facing academics in this field, two of which are logistical and two conceptual. The two logistical challenges briefly addressed here are endemic in teaching environmental law—choosing what to teach and deciding how to teach it. Today some rough generalizations on strategies for curricular coping can be made, emerging from the evolution of environmental law courses at many American law schools over the past twenty-five years. The conceptual challenges may be even more difficult to tackle, and are addressed here at a greater length: first, how to frame and define …

Coal Law From The Old World: A Perspective On Land Use And Environmental Regulation In The Coal Industries Of The United States, Great Britain, And West Germany, Zygmunt J.B. Plater

Zygmunt J.B. Plater

America’s reentry into the Coal Age has been one of the major consequences of the Mideast oil-producing nations’ discovery of their collective marketing power, and in this new emphasis on coal the United States is not alone. Like the United States, many industrialized nations with domestic coal reserves had allowed their coal industries to languish under the influence of low-priced, petroleum based energy economy and are now hastening to strengthen their coal production. Different nations approach the regulation of their resurgent coal industries in varying ways, however, and these differences can be instructive to American observers, particularly as they relate …

Law, Media, & Environmental Policy: A Fundamental Linkage In Sustainable Democratic Governance, Zygmunt J.B. Plater

Zygmunt J.B. Plater

The functional linkages between law and media have long been signficant in shaping American democratic governance. Over the past thirty-five years, environmental analysis has similarly become essential to shaping international and domestic governmental policy. Environmentalism—focusing as it does on realistic interconnected accounting of the full potential negative consequences as well as benefits of proposed actions, policies, and programs, over the long term as well as the short term, with careful consideration of all realistic alternatives— provides a legal perspective important for societal sustainability. Because environmental values and norms are often in tension with established industrial interests that resist public interest …

The Three Economies: An Essay In Honor Of Joseph Sax, Zygmunt J.B. Plater

Zygmunt J.B. Plater

How does one evaluate the important public values and impacts of things that do not have a market price and then integrate them into the fabric of our system of social governance? That question lies within most or all of Joseph Sax's work over the years. The first part of this article represents an attempt to distill some of Joseph Sax's intellectual dimensions, beyond those already chronicled in the comments of other contributors to this symposium, with some linked themes and observations drawn from Sax beyond his writings. The second part, instigated by several of Sax's articles, presents "The Three …

Free The Market. Peter J. Boettke. Spanish Translation, Mario Šilar

Mario Šilar

No abstract provided.

“Autoría Y Participación En Los Delitos Especiales”, Javier Fernando Quiñones

Javier Fernando Quiñones

No abstract provided.

Holding My Breath: The Experience Of Being Sikh After 9/11, Muninder Kaur Ahluwalia

Department of Counseling Scholarship and Creative Works

This article is based on the author’s experiences after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York City and the impact of the attacks on her life as a New Yorker, an academic, and a member of a Sikh family and community. To position the author’s narrative, her reflection integrates race-based traumatic stress (Carter, 2007), a model suggesting that individuals who are targets of racism experience harm or injury. The author outlines lessons learned that affect her both personally and professionally, including (a) Paralysis can happen but advocacy and allies are healing, (b) Trauma changes the work, and (c) …

Inclusión Social Y Acceso Al Mercado, Jose Luis Sardon

Jose Luis Sardon

No abstract provided.

Assessing Post-Ada Employment: Some Econometric Evidence And Policy Considerationsjels, John J. Donohue

John Donohue

This article explores the relationship between the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the relative labor market outcomes for people with disabilities. Using individual-level longitudinal data from 1981 to 1996 derived from the previously unexploited Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), we examine the possible effect of the ADA on (1) annual weeks worked; (2) annual earnings; and (3) hourly wages for a sample of 7,120 unique male household heads between the ages of 21 and 65, as well as for a subset of 1,437 individuals appearing every year from 1981 to 1996. Our analysis of the larger sample suggests …

Assessing Post-Ada Employment: Some Econometric Evidence And Policy Considerations, John J. Donohue

John Donohue

In this article, we offer innovative analysis and additional evidence on the relationship between the Americans with Disabilities Act (“ADA”) and the relative labor market outcomes for people with disabilities, the very class protected by its landmark provisions. Using individual-level longitudinal data from 1981 to 1996 derived from the previously unexploited Panel Study of Income Dynamics (“PSID”), we examine the possible effect of the ADA on (1) annual weeks worked; (2) annual earnings; and (3) hourly wages for a sample of 7120 unique male household heads between the ages of 21 and 65 as well as a subset of 1147 …

Tying Arrangements And Lawful Alternatives: Transaction Costs Considerations, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

Tying arrangements often increase welfare by promoting product quality and protecting the supplier's goodwill in the tying product. When the tying product works effectively only with ancillary materials or accessories or services of a particular kind or quality, its supplier can assure the requisite quality of the ancillary product only by supplying that product itself. The cost savings defense and the defenses of quality control or good will are the most widely recognized and accepted tying defenses.

One characteristic of manufactured products is differentiation among the offerings of various brands. This in turn produces a need for more specialized provision …

Quasi Exclusive Dealing, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

A firm's discounting policies over a single product raise concerns analogous to exclusive dealing in two situations. First, the firm may offer conditional discounts structured in such a way as to induce customers to take most of their requirements for a given product from the defendant. In addition, a firm may employ “slotting” fees or similar allowances paid by manufacturers to retailers, with the possible result that rivals have difficulty obtaining access to shelf space. Neither practice is literally "exclusive dealing," because neither involves a condition that the purchaser not deal in the goods of a rival, although they may …

Eminent Domain And Racial Discrimination: A Bogus Equation, J. Peter Byrne

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This paper is a transcript of testimony by Professor J. Peter Byrne before the U.S. Civil Rights Commission on August 12, 2011.

This hearing addresses claims that the use of eminent domain for economic development unfairly and disproportionately harms racial and ethnic minorities. These claims draw on the history of urban renewal prior to the 1960’s, when many African Americans and others were displaced by publicly funded projects that bulldozed their homes in largely failed attempts to modernize cities. Justice Clarence Thomas’s dissent in Kelo v. City of New London further argued that the use of eminent domain for economic …

College Students And The U.S. Census, Scott L. Schaffer

UVM Libraries Conference Day

Scott discusses college-student statistics and implications from how that data is used in the United States census.

Margin Squeeze In Mexican Mobile Telecommunications, Víctor Pavón-Villamayor

Víctor Pavón-Villamayor

No abstract provided.

Harsanyi 2.0, Matthew D. Adler

All Faculty Scholarship

How should we make interpersonal comparisons of well-being levels and differences? One branch of welfare economics eschews such comparisons, which are seen as impossible or unknowable; normative evaluation is based upon criteria such as Pareto or Kaldor-Hicks efficiency that require no interpersonal comparability. A different branch of welfare economics, for example optimal tax theory, uses “social welfare functions” (SWFs) to compare social states and governmental policies. Interpersonally comparable utility numbers provide the input for SWFs. But this scholarly tradition has never adequately explained the basis for these numbers.

John Harsanyi, in his work on so-called “extended preferences,” advanced a fruitful …

Legal Mechanization Of Corporate Social Responsibility Through Alien Tort Statute Litigation: A Response To Professor Branson With Some Supplemental Thoughts, Donald J. Kochan

Donald J. Kochan

This Response argues that as ATS jurisprudence “matures” or becomes more sophisticated, the legitimate limits of the law regress. The further expansion within the corporate defendant pool – attempting to pin liability on parent, great grandparent corporations and up to the top – raises the stakes and complexity of ATS litigation. The corporate social responsibility discussion raises three principal issues about how a moral corporation lives its life: how a corporation chooses its self-interest versus the interests of others, when and how it should help others if control decisions may harm the shareholder owners, and how far the corporation must …

Tying Noncompetitive Goods, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

Many of the classic tying cases involved tied products that were common staples such as button fasteners, canned ink, dry ice, or salt. These products were sold in competitive markets, presumably at prices very close to cost. For most of them the most likely explanations for the tie were quality control or price discrimination, both with competitively benign results in the great majority of situations. When the tied good is sold in a noncompetitive market, however, an additional consumer welfare enhancing result is likely to obtain – namely, the elimination of double marginalization, which occurs when separate sellers of complementary …

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 …

Is The Wto Quietly Fading Away?: The New Regionalism And Global Trade Rules, Stephen J. Powell, Trisha Low

UF Law Faculty Publications

While scholars and governments alike view the liberalization of international trade as a positive development, they disagree on the medium that will accomplish this objective with the highest economic returns. Some experts believe that multilateralism through the 150+ member World Trade Organization (WTO) is the only way to achieve truly open and efficient trade. Others view multilateralism as but an aspiration and find that regionalism offers the only viable prospect for the meaningful further opening of markets.

In light of what we label the "new regionalism," our paper explores in detail the positive and negative effects of regional trade arrangements …

Avanzando En La Integración De América Latina: Elementos Jurídico - Económicos Para La Construcción De Una Propuesta En Materia De Convergencia, Iván A. Rojas V

Iván Rojas V

A Preface To Neoclassical Legal Thought, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

Most legal historians speak of the period following classical legal thought as “progressive legal thought.” That term creates an unwarranted bias in characterization, however, creating the impression that conservatives clung to an obsolete “classical” ideology, when in fact they were in many ways just as revisionist as the progressives legal thinkers whom they critiqued. The Progressives and New Deal thinkers whom we identify with progressive legal thought were nearly all neoclassical, or marginalist, in their economics, but it is hardly true that all marginalists were progressives. For example, the lawyers and policy makers in the corporate finance battles of the …

Clearings And Thickets, Robert D. Cooter, Aaron Edlin

Robert Cooter

Abstract: Intellectual property rights create temporary monopoly power for innovators. Monopoly pricing transfers wealth to the innovator from the innovations buyers -- consumers, producers, and other innovators. For innovations mostly used in consumption and production, the transfer from consumers and producers to innovators increases the profitability of innovating and causes more of it. The welfare gains from faster growth quickly overtake the temporary losses from monopoly’s dead weight loss. Thus intellectual property rights should be strong for innovations mostly used by consumers and producers. In contrast, for innovations mostly used by other innovators, the transfer of wealth from one innovator …

Clearings And Thickets, Robert D. Cooter, Aaron Edlin

Aaron Edlin

Abstract: Intellectual property rights create temporary monopoly power for innovators. Monopoly pricing transfers wealth to the innovator from the innovations buyers -- consumers, producers, and other innovators. For innovations mostly used in consumption and production, the transfer from consumers and producers to innovators increases the profitability of innovating and causes more of it. The welfare gains from faster growth quickly overtake the temporary losses from monopoly’s dead weight loss. Thus intellectual property rights should be strong for innovations mostly used by consumers and producers. In contrast, for innovations mostly used by other innovators, the transfer of wealth from one innovator …

The Employee Free Act Choice: Economic Consequences And Political Implications, Peter Dreier

Peter Dreier

No abstract provided.