Law Commons^™

One Size Does Not Fit All: A Framework For Tailoring Intellectual Property Rights, Michael W. Carroll

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

The United States and its trading partners have adopted cultural and innovation policies under which the government grants one-size-fits-all patents and copyrights to inventors and authors. On a global basis, the reasons for doing so vary, but in the United States granting intellectual property rights has been justified as the principal means of promoting innovation and cultural progress. Until recently, however, few have questioned the wisdom of using such blunt policy instruments to promote progress in a wide range of industries in which the economics of innovation varies considerably.

Provisionally accepting the assumptions of the traditional economic case for intellectual …

Between Formulary Apportionment And The Oecd Guidelines: A Proposal For Reconciliation, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Law & Economics Working Papers Archive: 2003-2009

While there have been few decided cases under the 1995 Transfer Pricing regulations and the OECD Guidelines, it is clear by now that the transfer pricing problem is as bad as it ever was. That is why my co-authors Kimberly Clausing and Michael Durst and I have recently re-proposed adopting Formulary Apportionment (FA). However, it is clear from the reactions we received that it is unlikely we will persuade advocates of the ALS and in particular the OECD that FA is the way forward (although this may change if the Obama Administration were to press the issue, or if the …

Land Virtues, Eduardo M. Peñalver

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

This article has two goals. First, I explore some of the descriptive and normative shortcomings of traditional law and economics discussions of the ownership and use of land. These market-centered approaches struggle in different ways with features of land that distinguish it from other "commodities." The complexity of land - its intrinsic complexity, but even more importantly the complex ways in which human beings interact with it - undermines the notion that owners will focus on a single value, such as wealth, in making decisions about their land. Adding to the equation land's "memory," by which I mean the combined …

Evolutionary Theory And The Origin Of Property Rights, James E. Krier

Law & Economics Working Papers Archive: 2003-2009

Legal scholars have never settled on a satisfactory account of the evolution of property rights. The touchstone for virtually all discussion, Harold Demsetz’s Toward a Theory of Property Rights, has a number of well-known (and not so well-known) shortcomings, perhaps because it was never intended to be taken as an evolutionary explanation in the first place. There is, in principle at least, a pretty straightforward fix for the sort of evolutionary approach pursued by followers of Demsetz, but even then that approach – call it the conventional approach – fails to account for very early property rights, right at the …

Bailouts, Buy-Ins, And Ballyhoo, Robert C. Hockett

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The bailout strategy now being pursued by Treasury under the recently authorized Troubled Asset Relief Plan, if “strategy” it can be called, remains obscure and erratic at best. All the while markets remain jittery and credit remains tight, as the underlying source of our present financial jitters—continued decline in the housing market and still mounting foreclosures—goes unaddressed. This piece proposes an interesting and novel approach to solving the financial problem. If it works out, it would eventually minimize the cost to the government.

Incidence And Accidents: Regulation Of Executive Compensation Through The Tax Code, Joy Mullane

Working Paper Series

Congress has enacted a number of tax provisions that aim to penalize companies and their executives when the executive is paid more than Congress thinks is desirable. Congress was motivated to enact these provisions by intense public sentiments regarding executive compensation levels during times of economic turmoil. This article demonstrates, however, that not only are these provisions ineffective at reducing executive compensation levels, but they penalize the wrong people. This article reveals that the penalties do not significantly fall on the executives that Congress was targeting with enactment of the penalties. Instead, these penalties impose costs on a variety of …

Judicial Adherence To A Minimum Core Approach To Socio-Economic Rights – A Comparative Perspective, Joie Chowdhury

Cornell Law School Inter-University Graduate Student Conference Papers

Today’s world is witness to extraordinary inequality and the most desperate poverty. Millions of people across the world have no access to adequate food or water, basic health care or minimum levels of education. There are many avenues through which to approach the issue of improving socio-economic conditions. Courts, especially recently, have in certain countries, been seeking to ameliorate these conditions, to some extent, through the means of socio-economic rights adjudication.

For courts to effectively empower people to realize their socio-economic rights, attention to implementation of judgments is essential. A strong normative base for such judgments is just as crucial, …

Law, Economics, And Torture, James Boyd White

Book Chapters

This paper addresses three sets of questions, among which it wishes to draw connections: (1) Why has there been so little resistance to the recent massive transfer of national wealth to the rich and super-rich? It is the majority who are injured, and they presumably hold the power in a democracy: why have they not exercised it? (2) Why are law schools so dominated by questions of policy, with rather little interest in the intellectual and linguistic activities of the practicing lawyer and judge? Why indeed do judicial opinions themselves seem so often to be written in a dead and …