Law Commons^™

The Ethical Challenges Of The Marketplace, Eduardo M. Peñalver

Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy

No abstract provided.

The Normalization Of Prostitution In Switzerland: The Origin Of Policies, Corinne Isler, Marjut Jyrkinen

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

In this article, we examine how socio-political actors frame prostitution and problems attached to the phenomenon and what types of policies they suggest. The sex trade in Switzerland has been tolerated since 1942, and prostitution is protected under the economic freedom guaranteed by the Swiss constitution. Any critique of prostitution is viewed as counterproductive, claimed to be rooted in old-fashioned ideas about sexuality and thought to worsen the situation for women who sell sex. The role of sex buyers is largely obscured, and the presumed right to buy sex remains unquestioned.

Pearl Lagoon's White Lobster: The Societal, Economic, Political And Autonomous Effects, Rafely Palacios

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

The Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua is home to the greatest number of impoverished individuals in the country. However, the people of Pearl Lagoon - a municipality in the South Caribbean Coast Autonomous Region - have found a way to escape their poor economic situations.

Due to the municipality’s close proximity to drug routes utilized by Colombian cartels and to the country itself, community members have turned to the drug trade in hopes of pursuing financial secureness. With the introduction of the “white lobster” or cocaine packets, the community as a whole has transformed its social, economic, and political spheres. In …

Hipster Antitrust: New Bottles, Same Old W(H)Ine?, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

Although the debate over hipster antitrust is often portrayed as something new, experienced observers recognize it as a replay of an old argument that was resolved by the global consensus that antitrust should focus on consumer welfare rather than on the size of firms, the levels of industry concentration, and other considerations. Moreover, the history of the Federal Trade Commission’s Section 5 authority to prevent unfair methods of competition stands as a reminder of the dangers of allowing enforcement policy to be guided by vague and uncertain standards.

Parallel Worlds: Comparing Rural Development To Development In Global Communities, Jena Martin, Karon Powell

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Unicorns, Guardians, And The Concentration Of The U.S. Equity Markets, Amy Deen Westbrook, David A. Westbrook

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Deadlier Road Accidents? Traffic Safety Regulations And Heterogeneous Motorists’ Behavior, Christine Ho, Madhav S. Aney

Research Collection School Of Economics

In 2003, China enacted the Road Traffic Safety Law in an attempt to promote traffic safety.We employ a difference-in-differences strategy on province level data, where fire accidentsare used as a control group for road accidents, to estimate the effects of the law on road accidents and casualties. Our findings suggest that while the law was successful in decreasing thenumber of accidents and casualties, the ratio of deaths to accidents and injuries to accidentsincreased. Exploring the potential channels, we find no evidence that “hit-and-kill” incentives,that is, incentives for motorists to kill the pedestrians that they hit due to China’s peculiar personal …

Proposal For A Non-Subsidized, Non-Retirement-Plan, Employee-Owned Investment Vehicle To Replace The Esop, Sean M. Anderson, Andrew Stumpff Morrison

Law & Economics Working Papers

The authors have previously been critical of the existing American legal exemption and subsidy regime for employee stock ownership plans (“ESOPs”). By definition such plans create dangerously undiversified investment programs tying employees’ retirement security to the financial health of a single company – which, to compound the problem, is the employees’ employer, thereby correlating participants’ retirement security risk with the risk of losing their jobs. No demonstrated compensating policy benefit justifies this extraordinary large-scale departure from basic principles of financial prudence. One context, however, where a plausible case might be made for employee ownership is that which arises when a …

Dual Residents: A Sur-Reply To Zelinsky, Michael S. Knoll, Ruth Mason

All Faculty Scholarship

In this article, we respond to Professor Zelinsky’s criticism of our arguments regarding the constitutionality of New York’s tax residence rule. We argue that the Supreme Court’s decision in Wynne requires reconsideration of the New York Court of Appeal’s decision in Tamagni.

Aligning Incentives And Cost Allocation In Discovery, Jonathan R. Nash, Joanna M. Shepherd

Faculty Articles

Recent proposals to revise Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26 to incorporate cost allocation of discovery have sparked considerable controversy. Advocates for reform argue that replacing the long-standing “producer-pays” presumption with something more akin to a “requester-pays” rule would better align economic incentives and reduce litigants’ ability to wield discovery as an instrument to force settlement. Opponents argue that such a reform would limit access to justice by saddling requesters with an ex ante burden of funding the opposition’s discovery.

In this Article, we explain that either a rule requiring both parties to share the costs of discovery (“cost-sharing rule”) …

Unbundling Freedom In The Sharing Economy, Deepa Das Acevedo

Faculty Articles

Courts and scholars point to the sharing economy as proof that our labor and employment infrastructure is obsolete because it rests on a narrow and outmoded idea that only workers subjected to direct, personalized control by their employers need work-related protections and benefits. Since they diagnose the problem as being our system’s emphasis on control, these critics have long called for reducing or eliminating the primacy of the “control test” in classifying workers as either protected employees or unprotected independent contractors. Despite these persistent criticisms, however, the concept of control has been remarkably sticky in scholarly and judicial circles.

This …

Venezuela Public Health Issue, Luke Vargas

Global Public Health

While every country around the world faces a form of public health issues, the issues that the country of Venezuela faces are different. Their public health problem is not a disease that can be solved by science, or a cure. It’s a problem that can only be solved by the people within the county itself. The country of Venezuela now lacks the proper medical supplies needed to help cure diseases and normal vaccinations, and the only ones to blame is their government. Because their government has now refused to pay their debts to the surrounding countries they have now lost …

Moral Rights: The Economic Ramifications Of Moral Rights Under Vara In The U.S., Akilah Chandler

MA Theses

When balancing the interests of the art market gatekeepers including patrons, dealers, and auction house intermediaries, with the interest of artists, artists have always bared the shorter end of the stick. It has been almost 30 years since the U.S. legal system acknowledged moral rights and a lifetime that artist have had to defend those rights. However, the question remains— how has the art market balanced these conflicting interests and at what expense? This paper will explore the effects moral rights have on an artist’s market and with that, the overall art market. This paper will also cover the ramifications …

The Future Encyclopedia Of Luddism, Miriam A. Cherry

All Faculty Scholarship

In common parlance, the term “Luddite” means someone who is anti-technology, or maybe, just not adept at using technology. Historically, however, the Luddite movement was a reaction born of industrial accidents and dangerous machines, poor working conditions, and the fact that there were no unions to represent worker interests during England’s initial period of industrialization. The Luddites did not hate technology; they only channeled their anger toward machine-breaking because it had nowhere else to go. The attached book chapter is an alternate history (written circa 2500) that depends on the critical assumption that the Luddites succeeded in their industrial campaign …

The Hausmann-Gorky Effect, Mitu Gulati, Ugo Panizza

Faculty Scholarship

For over a century, legal scholars have debated the question of what to do about the debts incurred by despotic governments; asking whether successor non-despotic governments should have to pay them. That debate has gone nowhere. This paper examines whether an Op Ed written by Harvard economist, Ricardo Hausmann, in May 2017, may have shown an alternative path to the goal of increasing the cost of borrowing for despotic governments. Hausmann, in his Op Ed, had sought to produce a pricing penalty on the entire Venezuelan debt stock by trying to shame JPMorgan into removing Venezuelan bonds from its emerging …

The Modigliani-Miller Theorem At 60: The Long-Overlooked Legal Applications Of Finance’S Foundational Theorem, Michael S. Knoll

All Faculty Scholarship

2018 marks the 60th anniversary of the publication of Franco Modigliani and Merton Miller’s The Cost of Capital, Corporation Finance, and the Theory of Investment. Widely hailed as the foundation of modern finance, their article, which purports to demonstrate that a firm’s value is independent of its capital structure, is little known by lawyers, including legal academics. That is unfortunate because the Modigliani-Miller capital structure irrelevancy proposition (when inverted) provides a framework that can be extremely useful to legal academics, practicing attorneys and judges.

Assessing The Effectiveness Of The Federal Reserve’S Quantitative Easing Policy In Lowering Long-Term Interest Rates, Lee Philip Perry

Senior Projects Spring 2018

This project looks at the effectiveness of Quantitative Easing on lowering long-term interest rates. To come up with an answer I look through three separate channels in which QE works to lower long-term rates: the speculation channel, inflations expectation channel, and portfolio balance channel. In examining these channels and their respective effects, I combine relative channel and general economic theory with data relative to each channel such as long-term yields, inflation expectation data, public holdings of federal debt, and much more in order to understand whether QE was at the forefront of the reduction in yields. Through these channels, we …

Labor Market Immigrant Integration And Employment: An Analysis Of Eu Countries, Iro Gkrimpizi

Senior Projects Spring 2018

This Senior Project advances the immigrant integration debate, examining the effect of labor market immigrant integration policies on the European labor force. Building on an existing body of literature that examines the migration and immigrant integration debate, this paper assesses the relationship between immigrant integration policies in the EU and the employment rate of the total, non-EU, low-skilled, young, old, and female labour force, by using panel data at the EU level to answer the question, “Can the labor market integration of immigrants lead to positive labor market outcomes as expressed by the employment rate?”. The relationship between labor market …

The Effect Of Occupational Licensing On Wages And Employment: Evidence From Electricians And Massage Therapists, Matt Shafer

MPA/MPP/MPFM Capstone Projects

No executive summary.

The Rule Of Reason, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

Antitrust’s rule of reason was born out of a thirty-year (1897-1927) division among Supreme Court Justices about the proper way to assess multi-firm restraints on competition. By the late 1920s the basic contours of the rule for restraints among competitors was roughly established. Antitrust policy toward vertical restraints remained much more unstable, however, largely because their effects were so poorly understood.

This article provides a litigation field guide for antitrust claims under the rule of reason – or more precisely, for situations when application of the rule of reason is likely. At the time pleadings are drafted and even up …

A "Chinese Wall" At The Nation's Borders: Justice Stephen Field And The Chinese Exclusion Case, Polly J. Price

Faculty Articles

First, the sweeping implications of The Chinese Exclusion Case had as much to do with the Supreme Court's concerns about its relationship with both Congress and the President as it did with the Chinese as a disparaged racial group. There are other dimensions beyond race, and one of these was the Supreme Court's view of its role with respect to the other branches of government. Importantly, the Court did not decide the balance of authority between the President and Congress on matters of immigration, an omission that surely lessens its precedential value today.

Second, the Court's pronouncement in the Chinese …

The Future Encyclopedia Of Luddism, Miriam A. Cherry

All Faculty Scholarship

In common parlance, the term “Luddite” means someone who is anti-technology, or maybe, just not adept at using technology. Historically, however, the Luddite movement was a reaction born of industrial accidents and dangerous machines, poor working conditions, and the fact that there were no unions to represent worker interests during England’s initial period of industrialization. The Luddites did not hate technology; they only channeled their anger toward machine-breaking because it had nowhere else to go. The attached book chapter is an alternate history (written circa 2500) that depends on the critical assumption that the Luddites succeeded in their industrial campaign …

Pakistan's Institutions: We Know They Matter, But How Can They Work Better?, Michael Kugelman, Ishrat Husain

Faculty Research - Books

Back in 2012, a Pakistani professor named Farakh A. Khan issued a dire warning about the state of his country’s public institutions. “Pakistan suffers from institutional failure,” he declared in an essay published about a year before his death. “Failed institutions are unable to correct the problems faced by the society and eventually lead to economic failure… If our leaders are sincere for change in Pakistan then they have to first get the institutions working again. But do they know how or have the will to do it?

Maduro Bonds, G. Mitu Gulati, Ugo Panizza

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Property Musings At The U.S.-Mexico Border, Gerald S. Dickinson

Articles

President Donald J. Trump issued an Executive Order calling for “a physical wall on the southern border” of the United States in January, 2017. In his address before Congress, the President stated, “[W]e will soon begin the construction of a great wall along our southern border.” The political response to the Executive Order has been swift. Representative Lamar Smith of Texas views the Executive Order as a testament to the President “honoring his commitment” to immigration enforcement. Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin favorably compares the border mandates in Israel and Egypt as successful examples of how to mitigate illegal immigration. …

The Technologies Of Race: Big Data, Privacy And The New Racial Bioethics, Christian Sundquist

Articles

Advancements in genetic technology have resurrected long discarded conceptualizations of “race” as a biological reality. The rise of modern biological race thinking – as evidenced in health disparity research, personal genomics, DNA criminal forensics, and bio-databanking - not only is scientifically unsound but portends the future normalization of racial inequality. This Article articulates a constitutional theory of shared humanity, rooted in the substantive due process doctrine and Ninth Amendment, to counter the socio-legal acceptance of modern genetic racial differentiation. It argues that state actions that rely on biological racial distinctions undermine the essential personhood of individuals subjected to such taxonomies, …

Critical Race Ip, Anjali Vats, Deidre A. Keller

Articles

In this Article, written on the heels of Race IP 2017, a conference we co-organized with Amit Basole and Jessica Silbey, we propose and articulate a theoretical framework for an interdisciplinary movement that we call Critical Race Intellectual Property (Critical Race IP). Specifically, we argue that given trends toward maximalist intellectual property policy, it is now more important than ever to study the racial investments and implications of the laws of copyright, trademark, patent, right of publicity, trade secret, and unfair competition in a manner that draws upon Critical Race Theory (CRT). Situating our argument in a historical context, we …

Dorothy Moser Medlin Papers - Accession 1049, Dorothy Moser Medlin

Manuscript Collection

(The Dorothy Moser Medlin Papers are currently in processing.)

This collection contains most of the records of Dorothy Medlin’s work and correspondence and also includes reference materials, notes, microfilm, photographic negatives related both to her professional and personal life. Additions include a FLES Handbook, co-authored by Dorothy Medlin and a decorative mirror belonging to Dorothy Medlin.

Major series in this collection include: some original 18th century writings and ephemera and primary source material of André Morellet, extensive collection of secondary material on André Morellet's writings and translations, Winthrop related files, literary manuscripts and notes by Dorothy Medlin (1966-2011), copies …

Horizontal Mergers, Market Structure, And Burdens Of Proof, Herbert J. Hovenkamp, Carl Shapiro

All Faculty Scholarship

Since the Supreme Court’s landmark 1963 decision in Philadelphia National Bank, antitrust challengers have mounted prima facie cases against horizontal mergers that rested on the level and increase in market concentration caused by the merger, with proponents of the merger then permitted to rebut by providing evidence that the merger will not have the feared anticompetitive effects. Although the way that concentration is measured and the triggering levels have changed over the last half century, the basic approach has remained intact. This longstanding structural presumption, which is well supported by economic theory and evidence, has been critical to effective …

Horizontal Shareholding And Antitrust Policy, Fiona M. Scott Morton, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

“Horizontal shareholding” occurs when one or more equity funds own shares of competitors operating in a concentrated product market. For example, the four largest mutual fund companies might be large shareholders of all the major United States air carriers. A growing body of empirical literature concludes that under these conditions market output in the product market is lower and prices higher than they would otherwise be.

Here we consider how the antitrust laws might be applied to this practice, identifying the issues that courts are likely to encounter and attempting to anticipate litigation problems. We assume that neither the mutual …