Law Commons^™

3d Printing And Healthcare: Will Laws, Lawyers, And Companies Stand In The Way Of Patient Care?, Evan R. Youngstrom

Evan R. Youngstrom

Today, our society is on a precipice of significant advancement in healthcare because 3D printing will usher in the next generation of medicine. The next generation will be driven by customization, which will allow doctors to replace limbs and individualize drugs. However, the next generation will be without large pharmaceutical companies and their justifications for strong intellectual property rights. However, the current patent system (which is underpinned by a social tradeoff made from property incentives) is not flexible enough to cope with 3D printing’s rapid development. Very soon, the social tradeoff will no longer benefit society, so it must be …

The Theory Of Fields And Its Application To Corporate Governance, Neil Fligstein

Seattle University Law Review

My goal here is twofold. First, I want to introduce the theory of strategic action fields to the law audience. The main idea in field theory in sociology is that most social action occurs in social arenas where actors know one another and take one another into account in their action. Scholars use the field construct to make sense of how and why social orders emerge, reproduce, and transform. Underlying this formulation is the idea that a field is an ongoing game where actors have to understand what others are doing in order to frame their actions. Second, I want …

Agency Theory As Prophecy: How Boards, Analysts, And Fund Managers Perform Their Roles, Jiwook Jung, Frank Dobbin

Seattle University Law Review

In 1976, Michael Jensen and William Meckling published a paper reintroducing agency theory that explained how the modern corporation is structured to serve dispersed shareholders. They purported to describe the world as it exists but, in fact, they described a utopia, and their piece was read as a blueprint for that utopia. We take a page from the sociology of knowledge to argue that, in the modern world, economic theories function as prescriptions for behavior as much as they function as descriptions. Economists and management theorists often act as prophets rather than scientists, describing the world not as it is, …

On The Existential Function Of The Social And The Limits Of Rationalist Accounts Of Human Behavior, Doug Mcadam

Seattle University Law Review

Rational choice theory has achieved widespread influence in a number of social science disciplines, most notably economics and political science. Given its prominent position within economics, it is not surprising that rational choice theory (and other rationalist perspectives) dominates theory and research on the corporation and decision-making by corporate actors. By contrast, however, the theory has failed to gain more than a toehold in sociology. Indeed, most sociologists are downright hostile to rational choice theory. When pressed to explain why, those in the discipline are very likely to complain that the perspective is “asociological”; that the theory posits an atomized …

Law And The Theory Of Fields, Frank Partnoy

Seattle University Law Review

The distinction between “material” and “existential” plays a prominent role in A Theory of Fields, and it played a prominent role in discussions at the Berle VII Symposium. In general, the authors advocated the importance of the ongoing use of social skills and the collaborative efforts to seek meaning, particularly in ways beyond the merely “material.” However, the extent to which rules might matter in these efforts was less clear. Overall, Fligstein and McAdam seek to use the concept of a strategic action field to develop a theory of social change and stability. Yet social change and stability are inextricably …

Benefit Corporations And Strategic Action Fields Or (The Existential Failing Of Delaware), Brett Mcdonnell

Seattle University Law Review

This Article analyzes the creation and growth of benefit corporations from the perspective of strategic action field theory in an attempt to shed some light upon both the subject and the methodology. It considers how the new legal field of benefit corporations responded to weaknesses in the existing fields of business and nonprofit corporations. Where major field participants such as directors, officers, employees, shareholders, or donors wish to pursue both financial and public-spirited goals that sometimes conflict without subordinating either type of goal to the other, both profit and nonprofit corporations may be unsatisfactory. Benefit corporations attempt not only to …

Confounding Ockham's Razor: Minilateralism And International Economic Regulation, Eric C. Chaffee

Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law

In Minilateralism: How Trade Alliances, Soft Law, and Financial Engineering Are Redefining Economic Statecraft, Professor Chris Brummer embraces the complexity of the global economic system and its regulation by exploring the emerging role and dominance of varying strands of economic collaboration and regulation that he collectively refers to as “minilateralism.” In describing the turn toward minilateralism, Brummer notes a number of key features of this new minilateral system, including a shift away from global cooperation to strategic alliances composed of the smallest group necessary to achieve a particular goal, a turn from formal treaties to informal non-binding accords and other …

Gandhi’S Prophecy: Corporate Violence And A Mindful Law For Bhopal, Nehal A. Patel

Nehal A. Patel

AbstractOver thirty years have passed since the Bhopal chemical disaster began,and in that time scholars of corporate social responsibility (CSR) havediscussed and debated several frameworks for improving corporate responseto social and environmental problems. However, CSR discourse rarelydelves into the fundamental architecture of legal thought that oftenbuttresses corporate dominance in the global economy. Moreover, CSRdiscourse does little to challenge the ontological and epistemologicalassumptions that form the foundation for modern economics and the role ofcorporations in the world.I explore methods of transforming CSR by employing the thought ofMohandas Gandhi. I pay particular attention to Gandhi’s critique ofindustrialization and principle of swadeshi (self-sufficiency) …

“To Promote The General Welfare” Addressing Political Corruption In America, Bruce M. Owen

Bruce Owen

Systemic (but lawful) political corruption reduces well-being and equity in America. Madisonian democracy is no longer capable of containing such corruption. Proposals currently on the table to stem corruption are unlikely to be effective and tend to undermine basic rights. This essay describes a new approach—regulating the output of corrupted legislative and administrative processes, rather than the inputs. Providing for substantive ex post review of direct and delegated legislation would be far more protective of the “general welfare” of the People than other reforms, while no more or less difficult to implement. Supporting an umpire proposal may be a dominant …

The High Price Of Poverty: A Study Of How The Majority Of Current Court System Procedures For Collecting Court Costs And Fees, As Well As Fines, Have Failed To Adhere To Established Precedent And The Constitutional Guarantees They Advocate., Trevor J. Calligan

Trevor J Calligan

No abstract provided.

Public Actors In Private Markets: Toward A Developmental Finance State, Robert Hockett, Saule Omarova

Saule T. Omarova

The recent financial crisis brought into sharp relief fundamental questions about the social function and purpose of the financial system, including its relation to the “real” economy. This Article argues that, to answer these questions, we must recapture a distinctively American view of the proper relations among state, financial market, and development. This programmatic vision – captured in what we call a “developmental finance state” – is based on three key propositions: (1) that economic and social development is not an “end-state” but a continuing national policy priority; (2) that the modalities of finance are the most potent means of …

Cleaning The Muck Of Ages From The Windows Into The Soul Of Income Tax, John Passant

John Passant

The aim of this paper is to provide readers with an insight into Marx’s methods as a first step to understanding income tax more generally but with specific reference to Australia’s income tax system. I do this by introducing readers to the ideas about the totality that is capitalism, appearance and form, and the dialectic in Marx’s hands. This will involve looking at income tax as part of the bigger picture of capitalism, and understanding that all things are related and changes in one produce changes in all. Appearances can be deceptive and we need to delve below the surface …

Hospital Chargemaster Insanity: Heeling The Healers, George A. Nation Iii

George A Nation III

Hospital list prices, contained in something called a chargemaster are insanely high, often running 10 times the amount that hospitals routinely accept as full payment from insurers. Moreover, the relative level of a particular hospital’s chargemaster prices bears no relationship to either the quality of the services the hospital provides or, to the cost of the services provided. The purpose of these fictitious list prices is to serve as a starting point or anchoring point, for negotiations with third-party payers regarding the amount that they will actually pay the hospital for it’s goods and services.

Ironically, there is widespread agreement, …

Law In Regression? Impacts Of Quantitative Research On Law And Regulation, David C. Donald

David C. Donald

Quantitative research (QR) has undeniably improved the quality of law- and rulemaking, but it can also present risks for these activities. On the one hand, replacing anecdotal assertions regarding behavior or the effects of rules in an area to be regulated with objective, statistical evidence has advanced the quality of regulatory discourse. On the other hand, because the construction of such evidence often depends on bringing the complex realities of both human behavior and rules designed to govern it into simple, quantified variables, QR findings can at times camouflage complexity, masking real problems. Deceptively objective findings can in this way …

Copyright Porn Trolls, Wasting Taxi Medallions, And The Propriety Of ‘Property’, Tom W. Bell

Tom W. Bell

What happens when the government creates privileges that have powers rivaling those that the common law accords to property? Recent events in two seemingly unrelated areas suggest a troubling answer to that question. First, in copyright, porn trolls have sued thousands of John Does for allegedly participating in illegal file sharing. These suits evidently seek not judicial vindication but merely the defendants' identities, which the plaintiffs then use to reap settlement payments from guilty and innocent alike. Second, taxi drivers in cities across the world have launched legal, political, and physical attacks against Uber and other networked transportation services, accusing …

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 …

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

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.

Explaining The Importance Of Public Choice For Law, D. Daniel Sokol

D. Daniel Sokol

The next generation of government officials, business leaders and members of civil society likely will draw from the current pool of law school students. These students often lack a foundation of the theoretical and analytical tools necessary to understand law's interplay with government. This highlights the importance of public choice analysis. By framing issues through a public choice lens, these students will learn the dynamics of effective decision-making within various institutional settings. Filling the void of how to explain the decision-making process of institutional actors in legal settings is Public Choice Concepts and Applications in Law by Maxwell Stearns and …

Nuclear Chain Reaction: Why Economic Sanctions Are Not Worth The Public Costs, Nicholas C.W. Wolfe

Nicholas A Wolfe

International economic sanctions frequently violate human rights in targeted states and rarely achieve their objectives. However, many hail economic sanctions as an important nonviolent tool for coercing and persuading change. In November 2013, the Islamic Republic of Iran negotiated a temporary agreement with major world powers regarding Iran’s nuclear program. The United States’ media and politicians have repeatedly and incorrectly attributed Iran’s willingness to negotiate to the effectiveness of economic sanctions.

Politicians primarily focus on immediate domestic effects and enact sanctions without a thorough understanding of the long-term effects on the United States economy and the public within a targeted …

The Ciudades Modelo Project: Testing The Legality Of Paul Romer’S Charter Cities Concept By Analyzing The Constitutionality Of The Honduran Zones For Employment And Economic Development, Michael R. Miller

Michael R Miller

Over the last several years, the Honduran government has been aggressively advancing a "model cities" project that it argues will provide options for its citizens to escape the extreme violence in their country without migrating to the U.S. The model cities, which are formally called "Zones for Employment and Economic Development" ("ZEDEs"), are purported to be autonomously governed areas that will attract foreign investment and compete for residents by establishing safer communities and better managed institutions governed by the rule of law.

The ZEDEs trace their origin to a concept formulated by development economist Paul Romer, who proposed the idea …

On The Public-Law Character Of Competition Law: A Lesson Of Asian Capitalism, Michael Dowdle

Michael Dowdle

This article argues that competition law is best seen as a form of public law – ‘the law that governs the governing of the state – and not as simply a form of private market regulation. It uses the experiences of ‘Asian capitalism’ to show how capitalist economies are in fact much more variegated than the orthodox model of competition law presumes, and that this variegated character demands a form of regulation that is innately political rather than simply technical. Orthodox competition regimes address this complexity by segregating non-standard capitalisms into alternative doctrinal jurisprudences, but this renders conceptually invisible the …

Demon At The Back Door: Rise Of The Mexican Drug Cartels, Oliver T. Beatty

Oliver T Beatty

This article addresses the rise of the violent Mexican drug cartels and searches within the legislative and law enforcement toolbox on how to dethrone the epidemic of violence on the border. The Mexican drug cartels rose from the ashes and structural framework of the Colombian cocaine cartels which gave these new criminal empires their routes, connections, and ease at taking over Pablo Escobar’s monopoly on the drug trafficking game. In addressing the origins of the cartels this article explores the trajectory of cocaine from imported medical remedy to criminalized substance. Additionally this article explores how the Italian mafia was dismantled …

Let Educators Educate, Let Builders Build: Making A Case For School Facility Privatization, John Pizzo

John Pizzo

No abstract provided.

The Smokable Goods Tax: Crafting A Constitutional Marijuana Tax, Nima H. Mohebbi, Samuel T. Greenberg

Nima H. Mohebbi

Marijuana legalization and decriminalization has become a hot policy issue. Roughly twenty U.S. states have partially legalized marijuana (generally for medicinal purposes) and two states – Colorado and Washington – have legalized it for general adult recreational use. Given the likely hyper-growth of the cannabis market in view of the possible wide-scale legalization of marijuana, states might enjoy a potential budgetary windfalls from marijuana excise taxes. Marijuana, however, remains a federally controlled substance, the sale or use of which is subject to substantial penalties. For the states, this presents a potential problem in collecting excise taxes on marijuana – namely, …

Behavioral International Law, Tomer Broude

Tomer Broude

Economic analysis and rational choice have in the last decade made significant inroads into the study of international law and institutions, relying upon standard assumptions of perfect rationality of states and decision-makers. This approach is inadequate, both empirically and in its tendency towards outdated formulations of political theory. This article presents an alternative behavioral approach that provides new hypotheses addressing problems in international law while introducing empirically grounded concepts of real, observed rationality. First, I address methodological objections to behavioral analysis of international law: the focus of behavioral research on the individual; the empirical foundations of behavioral economics; and behavioral …

Corporate Social Responsibility In A Remedy-Seeking Society: A Public Choice Perspective, Donald J. Kochan

Donald J. Kochan

Written for the Chapman Law Review Symposium on “What Can Law & Economics Teach Us About the Corporate Social Responsibility Debate?,” this Article applies the lessons of public choice theory to examine corporate social responsibility. The Article adopts a broad definition of corporate social responsibility activism to include both (1) those efforts that seek to convince corporations to voluntarily take into account corporate social responsibility in their own decision-making, and (2) the efforts to alter the legal landscape and expand legal obligations of corporations beyond traditional notions of harm and duty so as to force corporations to invest in interests …

What Do We Worry About When We Worry About Price Discrimination? The Law And Ethics Of Using Personal Information For Pricing, Akiva A. Miller

Akiva A Miller

New information technologies have dramatically increased sellers’ ability to engage in retail price discrimination. Debates over using personal information for price discrimination frequently treat it as a single problem, and are not sufficiently sensitive to the variety of price discrimination practices, the different kinds of information they require in order to succeed, and the different ethical concerns they raise. This paper explores the ethical and legal debate over regulating price discrimination facilitated by consumers’ personal information. Various kinds of “privacy remedies”—self-regulation, technological fixes, state regulation, and legislating private causes of legal action—each have their place. By drawing distinctions between various …

The Commons, Capitalism, And The Constitution, George Skouras

George Skouras

Thesis Summary: the erosion of the Commons in the United States has contributed to the deterioration of community and uprooting of people in order to meet the dynamic demands of capitalism. This article suggests countervailing measures to help remedy the situation.

Beyond Finality: How Making Criminal Judgments Less Final Can Further The Interests Of Finality, Andrew Chongseh Kim

Andrew Chongseh Kim

Courts and scholars commonly assume that granting convicted defendants more liberal rights to challenge their judgments would harm society’s interests in “finality.” According to conventional wisdom, finality in criminal judgments is necessary to conserve resources, encourage efficient behavior by defense counsel, and deter crime. Thus, under the common analysis, the extent to which convicted defendants should be allowed to challenge their judgments depends on how much society is willing to sacrifice to validate defendants’ rights. This Article argues that expanding defendants’ rights on post-conviction review does not always harm these interests. Rather, more liberal review can often conserve state resources, …