Law Commons^™

Rate Base The Charge Space: The Law Of Utility Ev Infrastructure Investment, Adam D. Orford

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To fight climate change and support the transition to a zero-emissions transportation sector, the U.S. is setting out to build a huge fleet of electric vehicle (EV) charging stations. But EV charging equipment is expensive, and how to pay for it is not straightforward. This Article explores the emerging law and policy of using the bill payments of millions of electric utility customers to solve the problem. State utility regulators, in obscure technical proceedings, have begun directing billions of ratepayer dollars toward EV chargers. Is this an unfair and risky social spending experiment, as its opponents argue? Or is it …

Equality And Access To Credit: A Social Contract Framework, John Linarelli

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The problems governments face in regulating consumer finance fall into two categories: normative and cognitive. The normative problems have to do with the way that some governments, particularly those adhering to an American model of household finance, have financed social mobility and intergenerational welfare through debt, a tenuous and socially risky policy choice. Credit has a substantial social aspect to it in the United States, where the federal government has in some way engaged in subsidizing about 1/3 of consumer credit, particularly in the residential mortgage market, feeding into a substantial capital markets dimension through government-guaranteed securitization. Most Americans think …

Individual Preferences In Policy Analysis: A Normative Framework, Gabriel Weil

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No abstract provided.

The Segregation Of Markets, Christian Turner

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Campaign-finance reformers fear that rich donors’ money can be used disproportionately to influence the content of campaign advertising and thus, perhaps, the results of elections. In European football, UEFA has attempted to ban “financial doping,” rich owners’ use of money earned in sectors other than football to pay large sums for the best football players. Campaign-finance reform efforts and “financial fair play” rules in sport may seem like bespoke solutions to different problems. In fact, they are the same solution to the same problem. Both are attempts to ensure that power accumulated in one market is not brought into another …

The Legislative Role In Procedural Rulemaking Through Incremental Reform, Briana L. Rosenbaum

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Public policy theory generally studies two types of institutional change: major changes at critical moments and incremental change. Using an institutional public policy theoretical lens, this Article explores congressional efforts to incrementally change the substantive law through procedural change and litigation reform. While much attention has been paid to the 115th Congress’s policy-based proposals, scant attention has been paid to the fact that Congress had, at the same time, proposed sweeping changes to court access. From trans-substantive measures affecting procedure in every civil case, to targeted measures changing the procedures in police misconduct cases and medical malpractice lawsuits, the legislature …

The Legal Regulation Of U.S. Crowdfunding: An Organically Evolving Patchwork, Joan Macleod Heminway

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The legal regulation of crowdfunding in the United States is neither well calibrated nor holistic. With the exception of specific securities regulation legislation, the regulation of crowdfunding under U.S. law exists as an extension of principles of pre-existing regulation to a specific new and continually changing Internet-based financing space. As a result, while some common consumer protection objectives can be identified, the legal regulatory approach to crowdfunding did not develop through deliberate, rational choice based on coherent public policy objectives. Instead, it arose and evolved by necessity in response to the spontaneous and natural origination and development of crowdfunding as …

Dictation And Delegation In Securities Regulation, Usha Rodrigues

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When Congress undertakes major financial reform, either it dictates the precise contours of the law itself or it delegates the bulk of the rulemaking to an administrative agency. This choice has critical consequences. Making the law self-executing in federal legislation is swift, not subject to administrative tinkering, and less vulnerable than rulemaking to judicial second-guessing. Agency action is, in contrast, deliberate, subject to ongoing bureaucratic fiddling and more vulnerable than statutes to judicial challenge.

This Article offers the first empirical analysis of the extent of congressional delegation in securities law from 1970 to the present day, examining nine pieces of …

Investor And Market Protection In The Crowdfunding Era: Disclosing To And For The 'Crowd', Joan Macleod Heminway

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This article focuses on disclosure regulation in a specific context: securities crowdfunding (also known as crowdfund investing or investment crowdfunding). The intended primary audience for disclosures made in the crowdfund investing setting is the “crowd,” an ill-defined group of potential and actual investors in securities offered and sold through crowdfunding. Securities crowdfunding, for purposes of this article, refers to an offering of securities made over the Internet to a broad-based, unstructured group of investors who are not qualified by geography, financial wherewithal, access to information, investment experience or acumen, or any other criterion.

To assess disclosure to and for the …

The Fourth Era Of American Civil Procedure, Thomas O. Main, Stephen N. Subrin

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Every contemporary American lawyer who has engaged in litigation is familiar with the now fifty-four-volume treatise, Federal Practice and Procedure. Both of that treatise’s named authors, Charles Alan Wright and Arthur Miller, have mourned the death of a Federal Rules regime that they spent much of their professional lives explaining and often celebrating. Wright shared a sense of gloom about federal procedure that he compared to the setting before World War I. Miller has also published a series of articles that chronicled his grief.

We agree that something has fundamentally changed. In fact, we believe that we are in …

Foreword To The Conference: The Law: Business Or Profession? The Continuing Relevance Of Julius Henry Cohen For The Practice Of Law In The Twenty-First Century, Samuel J. Levine

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No abstract provided.

Persuasion Treaties, Melissa J. Durkee

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All treaties formalize promises made by national parties. Yet there is a fundamental difference between two kinds of treaty promise. This difference divides all treaties along a fault line: Treaties that govern the behavior of state parties and their agents fall on one side. Treaties in the second category — those I call “persuasion” treaties — commit state parties to changing the behavior of non-state actors as well. The difference is important because the compliance problems for the two sets of treaties sharply diverge. Persuasion treaties merit our systematic attention because they are both theoretically and practically significant. In areas …

How The Poor Got Cut Out Of Banking, Mehrsa Baradaran

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The United States currently has two banking systems — one for the rich, one for the poor. It wasn’t always this way. Throughout U.S. history, the government has enlisted certain banking institutions to serve the needs of the poor and offer low cost credit to enable low-income Americans to escape poverty. Credit unions, savings and loans and Morris Banks are three prominent examples of government-supported institutions with a specific focus of helping the poor. Unfortunately, these institutions are no longer fulfilling their missions and high-cost, usurious, and sometimes predatory check-cashers and payday lenders have quickly filled the void. These fringe …

Prioritizing Abortion Access Over Abortion Safety In Pennsylvania, Randy Beck

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This conference was prompted by the prosecution of Dr. Kermit Gosnell, who ran an abortion clinic in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Dr. Gosnell was convicted in May of 2013 of charges arising from the killing of viable infants born in his clinic, the negligent death of an adult patient, and the systematic disregard of regulations governing the performance of abortions in Pennsylvania. One question proposed for our consideration is whether Dr. Gosnell is an “outlier,” a description offered by the National Abortion Federation following Gosnell’s indictment.

Presumably, one might want to know whether Gosnell was typical of abortion providers because it could …

Proposal For An International Convention On Online Gambling, Marketa Trimble

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The proposal, which will be published as a chapter in a volume from the Internet Gaming Regulation Symposium co-organized by the William S. Boyd School of Law of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, in May 2012, presents the outline of an international convention ('Convention') that will facilitate cooperation among countries in enforcement of their online gambling regulations while allowing the countries to maintain their individual legal approaches to online gambling. Countries continue to vary in their approaches - some permit and regulate, and others prohibit online gambling, and even countries that permit and regulate online gambling approach the issue …

The Limits Of Procedural Private Ordering, Jaime L. Dodge

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Civil procedure is traditionally conceived of as a body of publicly-set rules, with limited carve-outs – most commonly, forum selection and choice of law provisions. I argue that these terms are mere instantiations of a broader, unified phenomenon of procedural private ordering, in which civil procedure is no longer irrevocably defined by law, but instead is a mere default that can be waived or modified by contract. Parties are no longer merely selecting between publicly-created procedural regimes but customizing the rules of procedure to be applied by the court – from statutes of limitations, discovery obligations and the admissibility of …

Extraterritorial Intellectual Property Enforcement In The European Union, Marketa Trimble

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This paper was prepared for the 2011 ABILA International Law Weekend – West volume of the Southwestern Journal of International Law. It addresses extraterritorial enforcement of intellectual property rights in the European Union. The maximum length of the paper was set by the Journal.

The problems associated with extraterritorial enforcement of intellectual property rights in the European Union (the “EU”) may be divided into three categories: enforcement of unitary EU-wide rights, enforcement of multiple national rights, and enforcement of rights based on one national law with extraterritorial effects on activities in other countries. Although these are three distinct categories of …

The Ilc And The Reconstruction Of U.S. Banking, Mehrsa Baradaran

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Since the Great Depression, bank regulators in the United States have endeavored to separate banking institutions from commercial firms, believing such separation was necessary for stability and growth. The recent collapse of our financial system indicates that this premise may be false, as Industrial Loan Companies ("ILCs") – the only institutions where commercial firms are permitted to own banks – remain sound. ILCs have persisted throughout U.S. banking history through exceptions and omissions in banking legislation, but the strength and resilience they have exhibited in the current financial collapse are worth investigating and even emulating. This article examines recent controversy …

Modernization Of New York's Land Use Laws Continues To Meet Growing Challenges Of Sustainability, Patricia E. Salkin, Jessica A. Bacher

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There has never been a more challenging time to practice land use planning and zoning law in New York. With goals of sustainability at the forefront of the land use regulatory agenda, this brief account of recent developments in land use law highlights some discernable trends, namely: the modernization and increased flexibility of New York State planning and zoning enabling acts, the inspired local initiatives and lethargic State response to affordable housing issues, and the increasing impact of alternative energy systems on local regulatory schemes.

Part I of this article explores the impacts on community development caused by the many …

The Burden Of Knowledge, Christian Turner

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Sometimes we are better off not knowing things. While we often hear that "ignorance is bliss," there has not been a comprehensive consideration in the legal academy of the virtues of ignorance and its regulation. Though the distribution of knowledge, like the distribution of other goods, is affected both directly and indirectly by law, several characteristics of knowledge distinguish it from other kinds of property. Much has been written about the impact of the nonrival and nonexclusive nature of knowledge on its production and distribution. This Article centers around two other attributes of knowledge that combine to create a special …

Securities Class Actions As Pragmatic Ex Post Regulation, Elizabeth Chamblee Burch

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Securities class actions are on the chopping block-again. Traditional commentators continue to view class actions with suspicion; they see class suits as nonmeritorious byproducts of self-interest and the attorneys who bring them as rent-seekers. Their conventional approach has popularized securities class actions' negative effects. High-profile commissions capitalizing on this rhetoric, such as the Committee on Capital Markets Regulation, have recently recommended eliminating or severely curtailing securities class actions. But this approach misses the point: in the ongoing push and pull of securities regulation, corporations are winning the battle.

Thus, understanding the full picture and texture of securities class actions necessitates …

Are We All Dopes? A Behavioral Law & Economics Approach To Legal Regulation Of Doping In Sports, Shawn Crincoli

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No abstract provided.

'Babushka Said Two Things - It Will Either Rain Or Snow; It Either Will Or Will Not': An Analysis Of The Provisions And Human Rights Implications Of Russia's New Law On Nongovernmental Organizations As Told Through Eleven Russian Proverbs, Robert C. Blitt

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Longtime observers of Russia increasingly have called attention to and expressed profound concern for the direction the Russian Federation has taken in recent years. In advancing President Putin's vision of "dictatorship of law" and "managed democracy," the Russian government has retreated from key democratic reforms, undermining the transition away from Soviet rule and imperiling significant gains in fundamental human rights.

It is against this backdrop that, in January 2006, President Putin ratified major amendments to the 1996 Law on Nonprofit Organizations, which regulates the creation, reorganization, activity, and liquidation of NGOs in Russia. Putin has claimed that the amendments to …

Federalism And Accountability: State Attorneys General, Regulatory Litigation, And The New Federalism, Timothy L. Meyer

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This Comment will examine how one particular state institution, state attorneys general (SAGs), has operated within a unique set of institutional and political constraints to create state-based regulation with nationwide impact in policy areas including consumer protection, antitrust, environmental regulation, and securities regulation. This state-based regulation casts doubt on one of the principle rationales advanced in the Supreme Court's anticommandeering line of cases for limiting federal power; namely, that such a move enhances electoral accountability, a concept central to our democracy. If in the absence of federal regulation a series of narrowly accountable state-based actors can create nationwide regulation in …

Takings Cases In The October 2004 Term (Symposium: The Seventeenth Annual Supreme Court Review), Leon D. Lazer

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No abstract provided.

Who Will Watch The Watchdogs?: International Human Rights Nongovernmental Organizations And The Case For Regulation, Robert C. Blitt

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Human rights nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have become a fixture within the international system and a driving force for creating and enforcing human rights norms at international law. This essay examines the growth of human rights NGOs and argues that the industry is in urgent need of formal regulation. After assessing the failure of informal market controls for ensuring accountability within the human rights NGO sector, this paper applies a law and economics consumer protection model to underscore the need for more formal regulation. However, rather than advance a case for government intervention, this paper proposes that human rights NGOs themselves …

Environmental Regulation Of Nanotechnology: Some Preliminary Observations, Glenn Harlan Reynolds

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No abstract provided.

Suffer The Little Children: Justifying Same-Sex Marriage From The Perspective Of A Child Of The Union, Lewis A. Silverman

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No abstract provided.

Constitutional Limits On Regulating Private Militia Groups, Thomas B. Mcaffee

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Read in a historical context, the Second Amendment provides clear answers to only a few of the questions regarding the appropriate limits of state regulatory power to restrict organizing and training private militia groups. Moreover, a basic analysis of the original materials yields conclusions that may be disappointing to both critics and sympathizers of the private militia movement. Critics may be unhappy with the conclusion that the individual right to bear arms offers important protection to at least some activities of private militia members. Sympathizers may be equally disappointed with the conclusion that activities which include full-scale preparation for a …

The Supreme Court And The Endangered Species Act (Symposium: The Supreme Court And Local Government Law: 1994-95 Term), Leon D. Lazer

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No abstract provided.

Deference To Agency Interpretations Of Regulations: A Post-Chevron Assessment, Thomas A. Schweitzer, Russell L. Weaver

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No abstract provided.