Law Commons^™

Price Discrimination, Personal Use And Piracy: Copyright Protection Of Digital Works, Michael J. Meurer

Faculty Scholarship

The growth of digital information transmission worries copyright holders who fear the new technology threatens their profits because of greater piracy and widespread sharing of digital works. They have responded with proposals for expanded protection of digital works. Specifically, they seek restrictions on personal use rights regarding digital works provided by the fair use and first sale doctrines. The proposed changes in the allocation of property rights to digital information significantly affect the ability of copyright holders to practice price discrimination. Broader user rights make discrimination more difficult; broader producer rights make discrimination easier. I argue that more price discrimination …

Trends. International Trade And The Subversion Of Justice: Japan, The European Union, And Iraq, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

The author discusses the moral philosophy, the psychology of moral judgment, and treatises on law often suggest that justice subsumes some combination of behavioral and intentional accountability and equity.

For Realization: Income Taxation, Sectoral Accretionism, And The Virtue Of Attainable Virtues, Edward A. Zelinsky

Articles

No abstract provided.

Almost Everybody Disagrees Almost All The Time: The Genericity Of Weakly Merging Nowhere, Ronald I. Miller, Chris William Sanchirico

All Faculty Scholarship

Suppose we randomly pull two agents from a population and ask them to observe an unfolding, infinite sequence of zeros and ones. If each agent starts with a prior belief about the true sequence and updates this belief on revelation of successive observations, what is the chance that the two agents will come to agree on the likelihood that the next draw is a one? In this paper we show that there is no chance. More formally, we show that under a very unrestrictive definition of what it means to draw priors “randomly,” the probability that two priors have any …

Class Action Reform, Qui Tam, And The Role Of The Plaintiff, Jill E. Fisch

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Unfunded Mandates And Fiscal Federalism: A Critique, Robert W. Adler

Vanderbilt Law Review

The term "unfunded federal mandates" is used to challenge federal obligations imposed on states and localities without accompanying funding. Unfunded mandates were alluded to by both the majority and dissenting opinions in Printz v. United States, in which provisions of the Brady Handgun Violence Protection Act were invalidated by the U.S. Supreme Court on Tenth Amendment grounds. In this Article, Professor Adler critiques the fiscal, legal, and policy arguments against unfunded federal mandates. This analysis, in turn, raises two broader issues. First, is the concept of unfunded mandates independently useful to the nation's ongoing debate about federal- ism? Second, does …

Restating Capitalization Standards And Rules: The Case For "Rough Justice" Regulations (Part Two), John W. Lee, Eldridge Blanton, Veena Luthra, Glenn Walberg, Darryl Whitesell

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Labor And The Supreme Court: Review Of The 1996-1997 Term, Keith N. Hylton

Faculty Scholarship

The U.S. Supreme Court's 1996-1997 Term will surely not be remembered among lawyers for its decisions in the employment area. Most of these decisions involved narrow questions of statutory interpretation, and for the most part the Court has handed down opinions consistent with existing case law. There was not one National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) decision this Term and the two employment discrimination cases involved fairly technical issues of statutory interpretation. The feeling of a quiet year is put across by simply reading the statutes at issue other than Title VII: the Federal Employers' Liability Act (FELA) (one case), the …

Lifestyles Of The Not-So-Rich Or Famous: The Role Of Choice And Sacrifice In Bankruptcy, A. Mechele Dickerson

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Product Liability And Legal Leverage: The Perverse Effect Of Stiff Penalties, Michael S. Knoll

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Irrational Expectations, Lynn A. Stout

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Rational expectations models have become a staple of economic theory and the basis for a Nobel Prize. This article argues that rational expectations analysis suffers from potentially fatal flaws that seriously undermine its value in understanding many market phenomena. Using the example of financial markets, the article illustrates how the rational expectations approach has worked to obscure, rather than to illuminate, our understanding of speculation and speculative markets. This misguidance raises problems for law and policy.

Deterrence's Difficulty, Neal Kumar Katyal

Michigan Law Review

We all crave simple elegance. Physicists since Einstein have been searching for a grand unified theory that will tie everything together in a simple model. Law professors have their own grand theories - law and economics's Coase Theorem and constitutional law's Originalism immediately spring to mind. Criminal law is no different, for the analogue is our faith in deterrence - the belief that increasing the penalty on an activity will mean that fewer people will perform it. This theory has much to commend it. After all, economists and shoppers have known for ages that a price increase in a good …

Response: Between Economics And Sociology: The New Path Of Deterrence, Dan M. Kahan

Michigan Law Review

The explosive collision of economics and sociology has long illuminated the landscape of deterrence theory. It is a debate as hopeless as it is spectacular. Economics is practical but thin. Starting from the simple premise that individuals rationally maximize their utility, economics generates a robust schedule of prescriptions - from the appropriate size of criminal penalties,1 to the optimal form of criminal punishments, to the most efficient mix of private and public investments in deterrence. Yet it is the very economy of economics that ultimately subverts it: its account of human motivations is too simplistic to be believable, and it …

Securities Disclosure In A Globalizing Market: Who Should Regulate Whom, Merritt B. Fox

Michigan Law Review

One of the most dramatic examples of increasing interaction across national boundaries in recent years has been the burgeoning volume of transnational transactions in corporate equities. Most developed capitalist countries impose affirmative obligations on issuers of corporate equity to disclose certain information about themselves. While these obligations are imposed on issuers, they are triggered by transactions. The growth in transnational transactions is thus increasingly raising difficult issues concerning the reach of differing national regimes. Given the magnitude of legal resources devoted to compliance with such disclosure regulations, they promise to feature prominently in the larger discussion of the role of …

Law And Economic Development: A New Beginning?, Lan Cao

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Immovable Object Versus The Irresistable Force: Rethinking The Relationship Between Secured Credit And Bankruptcy Policy, Lawrence Ponoroff, F. Stephen Knippenberg

Michigan Law Review

The last leaf in O. Henry's classic short story was hanging by a delicate thread, but it never fell. It never fell, of course, because it wasn't real; Old Behrman had painted it (and caught pneumonia for his trouble) in order to give Johnsy the will to live. The Supreme Court's decision in Dewsnup v. Timm is also hanging by a thread, following a barrage of scholarly criticism and more than four years of limiting case law and legislative incursions on the case's core conceptual rationale. But the holding in Dewsnup, unlike the last leaf, is very real. It has …

The Southeastern Water Compact, Panacea Or Pandora's Box? A Law And Economics Analysis Of The Viability Of Interstate Water Compacts, David Copas

William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review

No abstract provided.

Realizing The Re-Emergence Of The Chinese Stock Market: Fact Or Fiction?, Ann P. Vandevelde

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

The stock market which currently exists in the People's Republic of China (PRC) is a product of the "open door policy" introduced by Deng Xiaoping in 1978, following the death of Mao Zedong, to promote economic development over class struggle. Following limited experimentation with stock issuance at the local level, the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges opened in 1990 and 1991 respectively. Since its recent inception, China's stock market--which comprises the trading of domestically owned A-Shares and foreign-owned B-Shares--has experienced impressive growth together with periods of volatility as well as lackluster performance. Recent performance of A-Share trading has been strong, …

European Community Competition Law, Subsidiarity, And The National Courts, Eric F. Hinton

Brigham Young University Journal of Public Law

No abstract provided.

The Comparative And The Critical Perspective In International Agreements, Ángel Oquendo

Faculty Articles and Papers

No abstract provided.

Globalization In Question: The International Economy And The Possibilities Of Governance, By Paul Hirst And Grahame Thompson, Jeffery A. Hart

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

No abstract provided.

Legal Differences Without Economic Distinctions: Points, Penalties, And The Market For Mortgages, Alan L. Feld

Faculty Scholarship

Economic analysis can serve many functions when applied to the law, most notably prediction (how people' react to laws and lawmaking processes), evaluation (whether these reactions result in social efficiency), and description (which features of laws, and lawmaking are salient). Here we propose to describe. We use economic analysis to show a legal difference without an economic distinction. We demonstrate the economic equivalence of two practices in the mortgage market. Interestingly, widespread bans exist on one of these practices, but no restrictions exist on the other.

Specifically, in this essay we examine the relationship among points, prepayment penalties, and financial …

Assessing Consensus: The Promise And Performance Of Negotiated Rulemaking, Cary Coglianese

All Faculty Scholarship

Over its thirteen year history, the negotiated rulemaking process has yielded only thirty-five final administrative rules. By comparison, the federal government publishes over 3,000 final rules each year through the ordinary notice-and- comment process. Why have federal agencies relied so little on negotiated rulemaking? I examine this question by assessing the impact of negotiating rulemaking on its two major purposes: (1) reducing rulemaking time; and (2) decreasing the amount of litigation over agency rules. My analysis suggests that the asserted problems used to justify negotiated rulemaking have been overstated and that the limitations of negotiated rulemaking have been understated. Negotiated …

Pleading And Proof: The Economics Of Legal Burdens, Thomas R. Lee

BYU Law Review

Courts have traditionally assigned burdens of pleading and burdens of proof by mechanically applying any of a number of meaningless "tests." Conventional doctrine assigns these burdens to the party to whose case the issue in question is "essential," or to the party who must establish the "affirmative proposition." Neither of these tests provides a coherent methodology for making such allocations. The first is circular-an issue is "essential" by virtue of the fact that the party has been assigned the burden. The latter is unworkable; it depends on accidents of syntax and may be easily manipulated. This Article attempts to fill …

The Idea Of Fairness In The Law Of Enterprise Liability, Gregory C. Keating

Michigan Law Review

The theory and practice of enterprise liability are oddly disjoined. On the one hand, case rhetoric insists that considerations of fairness are among the primary justifications for imposing enterprise liability. On the other hand, normatively inclined and theoretically ambitious scholarship on enterprise liability is overwhelmingly economic in cast. Economically inclined scholars have flocked to the field, while other kinds of tort theorists have shunned it, implicitly or explicitly conceding it to economic analysis. This paper argues that, contrary to this consensus, there is a powerful and important fairness case to be made for enterprise liability. This case fits the rhetoric …

Price Theory And Vertical Restraints: A Misunderstood Relation, Alan J. Meese

Faculty Publications

The Chicago School of antitrust analysis has exerted a strong influence over the law of vertical restraints in the past two decades, leading the Supreme Court to abandon much of its traditional hostility toward such agreements. Chicago's success has provoked a vigorous response from Populists, who support the traditional approach. Chicago, Populists claim, has improperly relied upon neoclassical price theory to inform the normative and descriptive assumptions that drive its analysis of trade restraints generally and of vertical restraints in particular. This reliance is misplaced, Populists assert, because the real world departs from that portrayed by price-theoretic models and, at …

Child Care Policy And The Welfare Reform Act, Peter R. Pitegoff

Faculty Publications

This article sketches the 1996 Welfare Reform Act's major changes with particular attention to federally subsidized child care for low-income families.

Dumping And Anti-Dumping In International Trade Origins, Legal Nature, And Evolution Developments In Brazil And In The United States, Luiz Claudio Duarte

LLM Theses and Essays

Dumping is when an exporting country sells their goods in the foreign market for less than the price of the goods in their own domestic market. Dumping has a negative connotation because it threatens domestic industries in the importing country. In response to harmful dumping situations, mechanisms of defense have been developed to protect nations from unfair trade practices. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) recognizes in Article VI anti-dumping tariffs as a legitimate defense to protect domestic industries from foreign predatory pricing practices. This paper focuses on anti-dumping developments in international trade since the beginning of the …

Are Tuna And Dolphins The Same? A Rule Of Reason Approach To Resolve The Trade And Environment Conflict, Anantha K. Paruthipattu

LLM Theses and Essays

Trade and environment are both primary values in an ecologically and economically interdependent world; unleashing trade without regard to environmental impact is as detrimental as guarding the environment at the expense of trade and development. Tuna and dolphins have come to symbolize the policy struggle between trade and environment. In early 1990, the United States banned the import of tuna from Mexico and other countries that were fishing in a manner that damaged dolphins in the Eastern Tropical Pacific Ocean. Mexico challenged this ban before a GATT Panel, which ruled against the United States and held that the tuna ban …

Legal Aspect And Problems In International American Franchise Transaction In Indonesia, Veronika

LLM Theses and Essays

The Republic of Indonesia, a country in Southeast Asia, faced serious economic problems in 1966, the total debt was (U.S.) $2.3 billion and exceeded export earnings. The government encourages the private sector to take part in this economic development since the government itself faced a scarcity of fund. The government has tried to attract private investment either domestic or foreign investor by launching the deregulation program. The purpose of this thesis is to make an argument that Indonesian franchises need protection and that it is time now for the legislative body in Indonesia to enact a franchise law. The study …