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Full-Text Articles in Law

Insource The Shareholding Of Outsourced Employees: A Global Stock Ownership Plan, Robert C. Hockett Dec 2014

Insource The Shareholding Of Outsourced Employees: A Global Stock Ownership Plan, Robert C. Hockett

Robert C. Hockett

With the American economy stalled and another federal election campaign season well underway, the “outsourcing” of American jobs is again on the public agenda. Latest figures indicate not only that claims for joblessness benefits are up, but also that the rate of American job-exportation has more than doubled since the last electoral cycle. This year’s political candidates have been quick to take note. In consequence, more than at any time since the early 1990s, continued American participation in the World Trade Organization, in the North American Free Trade Agreement, and in the processes of global economic integration more generally appear …


Reflective Intensions: Two Foundational Decision-Points In Mathematics, Law, And Economics, Robert C. Hockett Dec 2014

Reflective Intensions: Two Foundational Decision-Points In Mathematics, Law, And Economics, Robert C. Hockett

Robert C. Hockett

This Article, transcribed from a symposium talk given by the author, examines two critical junctures at which foundational decisions must be made in three areas of theoretical inquiry - mathematics, law, and economics. The first such juncture is that which the Article labels the "arbitrary versus criterial choice" juncture. This is the decision point at which one must select between what is typically called an "algorithmic," "principled," "law-like," or "intensionalist" understanding of those concepts which figure foundationally in the discipline in question on the one hand, and a "randomized," "combinatorial," or "extensionalist" such understanding on the other hand. The second …


Materializing Citizenship: Finance In A Producers' Republic, Robert C. Hockett Dec 2014

Materializing Citizenship: Finance In A Producers' Republic, Robert C. Hockett

Robert C. Hockett

This invited essay critically assesses a movement of which I consider myself to be part – the movement to “redemocratize” financial institutions in a manner that restores, to non-wealthy citizens, access to basic financial services comparable to those enjoyed by wealthy citizens. I argue that while financial redemocratization of this sort is necessary to the larger project from which it draws most of its meaning – viz that of redemocratizing access to the resources requisite to productive enterprise and meaningful citizenship more generally – it is far from sufficient to this task. We must therefore take special care not to …


From "Mission-Creep" To Gestalt-Switch: Justice, Finance, The Ifis, And The Intended Beneficiaries Of Globalization, Robert C. Hockett Dec 2014

From "Mission-Creep" To Gestalt-Switch: Justice, Finance, The Ifis, And The Intended Beneficiaries Of Globalization, Robert C. Hockett

Robert C. Hockett

No abstract provided.


Bringing It All Back Home: How To Save Main Street, Ignore K Street, And Thereby Save Wall Street, Robert C. Hockett Dec 2014

Bringing It All Back Home: How To Save Main Street, Ignore K Street, And Thereby Save Wall Street, Robert C. Hockett

Robert C. Hockett

No abstract provided.


Bailouts, Buy-Ins, And Ballyhoo, Robert C. Hockett Dec 2014

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

Robert C. Hockett

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.


Bretton Woods 1.0: A Constructive Retrieval For Sustainable Finance, Robert Hockett Dec 2014

Bretton Woods 1.0: A Constructive Retrieval For Sustainable Finance, Robert Hockett

Robert C. Hockett

Global trade imbalance and domestic financial fragility are intimately related. When a nation runs persistently massive current account deficits to maintain global liquidity as has the United States now for decades, its central bank effectively relinquishes exchange rate flexibility to become a de facto central bank to the world. That in turn prevents the bank from playing its essential credit-modulatory role at home, at least absent strict capital controls that are difficult to administer and have long been taboo. And this can in turn render credit-fueled asset price bubbles and busts all but impossible to prevent, irrespective of the nation's …


Why (Only) Esops?, Robert Hockett Dec 2014

Why (Only) Esops?, Robert Hockett

Robert C. Hockett

No abstract provided.


Taking Distribution Seriously, Robert C. Hockett Dec 2014

Taking Distribution Seriously, Robert C. Hockett

Robert C. Hockett

It is common for legal theorists and policy analysts to think and communicate mainly in maximizing terms. What is less common is for them to notice that each time we speak explicitly of socially maximizing one thing, we speak implicitly of distributing another thing and equalizing yet another thing. We also, moreover, effectively define ourselves and our fellow citizens by reference to that which we equalize; for it is in virtue of the latter that our social welfare formulations treat us as “counting” for purposes of socially aggregating and maximizing. To attend systematically to the inter-translatability of maximization language on …


Legally Defending Mission-Creep: How The Bretton Woods Charters Anticipate And Justify Imf Attention To "Structural" Variables In Its Oversight Of The Global Financial System, Robert C. Hockett Dec 2014

Legally Defending Mission-Creep: How The Bretton Woods Charters Anticipate And Justify Imf Attention To "Structural" Variables In Its Oversight Of The Global Financial System, Robert C. Hockett

Robert C. Hockett

No abstract provided.


Human Persons, Human Rights, And The Distributive Structure Of Global Justice, Robert C. Hockett Dec 2014

Human Persons, Human Rights, And The Distributive Structure Of Global Justice, Robert C. Hockett

Robert C. Hockett

It is common for economically oriented transnational legal theorists to think and communicate mainly in maximizing terms. It is less common for them to notice that each time we speak explicitly of maximizing one thing, we speak implicitly of distributing another thing and equalizing yet another thing. Moreover, we effectively define ourselves and our fellow humans by reference to that which we equalize. For it is in virtue of the latter that our global welfare formulations treat us as "counting" for purposes of globally aggregating and maximizing. To analyze maximization language on the one hand, and equalization and identification language …


Why Paretians Can’T Prescribe: Preferences, Principles, And Imperatives In Law And Policy, Robert C. Hockett Dec 2014

Why Paretians Can’T Prescribe: Preferences, Principles, And Imperatives In Law And Policy, Robert C. Hockett

Robert C. Hockett

Recent years have witnessed two linked revivals in the legal academy. The first is renewed interest in articulating a normative “master principle” by which legal rules might be evaluated. The second is renewed interest in the prospect that a variant of Benthamite “utility” might serve as the requisite touchstone. One influential such variant now in circulation is what the Article calls “Paretian welfarism.” This Article rejects Paretian welfarism and advocates an alternative it calls “fair welfare.” It does so because Paretian welfarism is inconsistent with ethical, social, and legal prescription, while fair welfare is what we have been groping for …


The Macroprudential Turn: From Institutional “Safety And Soundness” To “Systemic Stability” In Financial Supervision, Robert C. Hockett Dec 2014

The Macroprudential Turn: From Institutional “Safety And Soundness” To “Systemic Stability” In Financial Supervision, Robert C. Hockett

Robert C. Hockett

This Working Paper is no longer available. The published version of this article is available at: http://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/facpub/1405/ Since the global financial dramas of 2008-09, authorities on financial regulation have come increasingly to counsel the inclusion of macroprudential policy instruments in the standard ‘toolkit’ of finance-regulatory measures employed by financial supervisors. The hallmark of this perspective is its focus not simply on the safety and soundness of individual financial institutions, as is characteristic of the traditional ‘microprudential’ perspective, but also on certain structural features of financial systems that can imperil such systems as wholes. Systemic ‘financial stability’ thus comes to supplement, …


What The New Treasury Must Do, Robert C. Hockett Dec 2014

What The New Treasury Must Do, Robert C. Hockett

Robert C. Hockett

After a number of heady false starts, against the backdrop of threatened financial catastrophe, Congress and the White House enacted a stopgap financial “bailout”plan early in October 2008. From that point onward the “plan” has repeatedly morphed, morphed again, and morphed back through a string of remarkably fleeting guises. One suspects this dynamic will continue, at least for a while, as a new president and Congress find their footing in the first half of 2009.


What Kinds Of Stock Ownership Plans Should There Be? Of Esops, Other Sops And "Ownership Societies", Robert C. Hockett Dec 2014

What Kinds Of Stock Ownership Plans Should There Be? Of Esops, Other Sops And "Ownership Societies", Robert C. Hockett

Robert C. Hockett

Present-day advocates of an ownership society (OS) do not seem to have noticed the means we have already employed to become an OS where homes and human capital (higher education) are concerned. Nor do they appear to have considered whether these same means - which amount to publicly enhanced private credit markets - might be employed to spread shares in business firms, with a view to completing our OS. This article, the third in a series, seeks tentatively to fill that gap. It does so first by demonstrating how the Employee Stock Ownership Plan, or ESOP, in effect replicates our …


How The International Financial Institutions Can Help To Win Globalization Of More Stakeholders - By Making More Stockholders, Robert C. Hockett Dec 2014

How The International Financial Institutions Can Help To Win Globalization Of More Stakeholders - By Making More Stockholders, Robert C. Hockett

Robert C. Hockett

No abstract provided.


Minding The Gaps: Fairness, Welfare, And The Constitutive Structure Of Distributive Assessment, Robert C. Hockett Dec 2014

Minding The Gaps: Fairness, Welfare, And The Constitutive Structure Of Distributive Assessment, Robert C. Hockett

Robert C. Hockett

Despite over a century’s disputation and attendant opportunity for clarification, the field of inquiry now loosely labeled “welfare economics” (WE) remains surprisingly prone to foundational confusions. The same holds of work done by many practitioners of WE’s influential offshoot, normative “law and economics” (LE). A conspicuous contemporary case of confusion turns up in recent discussion concerning “fairness versus welfare.” The very naming of this putative dispute signals a crude category error. “Welfare” denotes a proposed object of distribution. “Fairness” describes and appropriate pattern of distribution. Welfare itself is distributed fairly or unfairly. “Fairness versus welfare” is analytically on all fours …


The Impossibility Of A Prescriptive Paretian, Robert C. Hockett Dec 2014

The Impossibility Of A Prescriptive Paretian, Robert C. Hockett

Robert C. Hockett

Most normatively oriented economists appear to be “welfarist” and Paretian to one degree or another: They deem responsiveness to individual preferences, and satisfaction of one or more of the Pareto criteria, to be a desirable attribute of any social welfare function. I show that no strictly “welfarist” or Paretian social welfare function can be normatively prescriptive. Economists who prescribe must embrace at least one value apart from or additional to “welfarism” and Paretianism, and in fact will do best to dispense with Pareto entirely.