Law Commons^™

Price Gouging In A Pandemic, Christopher Buccafusco, Daniel Hemel, Eric L. Talley

Faculty Scholarship

The COVID-19 pandemic led to acute supply shortages across the country as well as concerns over price increases amid surging demand. In the process, it reawakened a debate about whether and how to regulate “price gouging” — a controversy that continues as inflation has accelerated even as the pandemic abates. Animating this debate is a longstanding conflict between laissez-faire economics, which champions price fluctuations as a means to allocate scarce goods, and perceived norms of consumer fairness, which are thought to cut strongly against sharp price hikes amid shortages.

This Article provides a new, empirically grounded perspective on the price …

Q&A With Lina Khan, Chair Of The U.S. Federal Trade Commission And Mark Glick, Professor Of Economics At The University Of Utah, Lina M. Khan

Faculty Scholarship

Let me tell you a little about Lina. Lina attended Yale Law school and while a third-year law student she wrote her famous and influential article Amazon’s Anti-Trust Paradox. Then, after graduating from law school, she worked as the legal director at the Open Markets Institute and during that period she continued to write a large number of influential antitrust papers. She then joined the faculty of my alma mater, Columbia Law School. In 2019, she was appointed as counsel to the U.S. House Judiciary Subcomittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law and, in 2021, President Biden appointed her …

Judges And The Deregulation Of The Lawyer's Monopoly, Jessica K. Steinberg, Anna E. Carpenter, Colleen F. Shanahan, Alyx Mark

Faculty Scholarship

In a revolutionary moment for the legal profession, the deregulation of legal services is taking hold in many parts of the country. Utah and Arizona, for instance, are experimenting with new regulations that permit nonlawyer advocates to play an active role in assisting citizens who may not otherwise have access to legal services. In addition, amendments to the Rules of Professional Conduct in both states, as well as those being contemplated in California, now allow nonlawyers to have a partnership stake in law firms, which may dramatically change the way capital for the delivery of legal services is raised as …

Driver For Contactless Payments, Ronald J. Mann

Faculty Scholarship

As a consumer, my primary experience with cash before the virus was standing in checkout lines observing the sluggish pace of cash transactions in front of me. Like so many things in our lives, the advent of the virus has changed the situation markedly. From the earliest days of infection, it has been far more unsettling to observe cash transactions knowing that the virus persists on paper and metal surfaces for days.

The dynamic that has driven the choices merchants offer in face-to-face retail transactions will change as well. Driven by the private exigencies of the retail environment, the last …

Blind Spot: The Attention Economy And The Law, Tim Wu

Faculty Scholarship

Human attention, valuable and limited in supply, is a resource. It has become commonplace, especially in the media and technology industries, to speak of an "attention economy" and of competition in "attention markets.” There is even an attentional currency, the "basic attention token," which purports to serve as a medium of exchange for user attention. Firms like Facebook and Google, which have emerged as two of the most important firms in the global economy, depend nearly exclusively on attention markets as a business model.

Yet despite the well-recognized commercial importance of attention markets, antitrust and consumer protection authorities have struggled …

Putting Disclosure To The Test: Toward Better Evidence-Based Policy, Talia B. Gillis

Faculty Scholarship

Financial disclosures no longer enjoy the immunity from criticism they once had. While disclosures remain the hallmark of numerous areas of regulation, there is increasing skepticism as to whether disclosures are understood by consumers and do in fact improve consumer welfare. Debates on the virtues of disclosures overlook the process by which regulators continue to mandate disclosures. This article fills this gap by analyzing the testing of proposed disclosures, which is an increasingly popular way for regulators to establish the benefits of disclosure. If the testing methodology is misguided then the premise on which disclosures are adopted is flawed, leaving …

Three Proposals For Regulating The Distribution Of Home Equity, Ian Ayres, Joshua Mitts

Faculty Scholarship

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s recently-released “qualified mortgage” rules effectively discourage predatory lending but miss an equally important source of systemic risk: low-equity clustering. Specific “volatility-inducing” mortgage terms, when present in a substantial cluster of mortgage contracts, exacerbate macroeconomic risk by increasing the chance that the housing and lending markets will have to absorb a wave of simultaneous defaults after a downturn in housing prices. This Article shows that these terms became prevalent in a substantial proportion of residential mortgages in the years leading up to the home mortgage crisis. In contrast, during the earlier “amortization era” (when mortgagors were …

The Empty Call For Benefit-Cost Analysis In Financial Regulation, Jeffrey N. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

The call for benefit-cost analysis (BCA) in financial regulation misunderstands the origins and utility of BCA as a guide to administrative rule making. Benefit-cost analysis imagines an omniscient social planner who can calculate costs and benefits from a natural system that generates prices (costs and benefits) that do not change (or change much) no matter what the central planner does. For example, the toxicity of chemicals, the health hazards of emissions, the statistical value of life – these do not change in response to health-and-safety regulation. For the financial sector, however, the system that generates costs and benefits is constructed …

Paper On The Business Case For Transparency, Perrine Toledano

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

CCSI strongly supports the transparency of contracts and tax flows. CCSI shares the belief of many stakeholders that transparency is essential to leverage extractive industries for sustainable development and is in the mutual interest of all stakeholders. However, some industry players continue to voice the concern that increased transparency would be harmful for their business. Therefore, CCSI is working to also establish the business case for transparency.

In one such case, some industry players have been lobbying against the regulations developed by the Security and Exchange Commission to implement the mandatory disclosure provisions of the Dodd Frank Wall Street Reform …

Unsafe At Any Price, Ronald J. Mann

Faculty Scholarship

Making Credit Safer is a fascinating collaboration between two scholars of very different bents. Elizabeth Warren's career rests oil decades of careful empirical research, integrated into trenchant policy analysis, and deeply informed by the cultural and social significance of debt. Oren Bar-Gill, by contrast, is a formally trained economist, who is at the start of his academic career, and has gained wide recognition for his successful application of theories of behavioral economics to the products that dominate the modern credit card industry.