Law Commons^™

The Dutch Auction Myth, Peter B. Oh

Articles

The bursting of the internet bubble continues to have ripple effects on the initial public offering (IPO) process. Critics of this process have fashioned a complex set of interconnected objections to the orthodox bookbuilding method for conducting IPOs, pricing shares, and allocating them to preferred investors. Critics instead hail online reverse-bid, or Dutch, auctions (Dutch IPOs) as an alternative method promising more equitable access, efficient prices, and egalitarian allocations.

This article comprehensively assesses the case for Dutch IPOs. Part I dissects critiques of bookbuilding, which rely on anomalous data, derogate established financial literature, and largely evaporate in the face of …

Sending The Bureaucracy To War, Elena Baylis, David Zaring

Articles

Administrative law has been transformed after 9/11, much to its detriment. Since then, the government has mobilized almost every part of the civil bureaucracy to fight terrorism, including agencies that have no obvious expertise in that task. The vast majority of these bureaucratic initiatives suffer from predictable, persistent, and probably intractable problems - problems that contemporary legal scholars tend to ignore, even though they are central to the work of the writers who created and framed the discipline of administrative law.

We analyze these problems through a survey of four administrative initiatives that exemplify the project of sending bureaucrats to …

Jurisprudential Schizophrenia: On Form And Function In Islamic Finance, Haider Ala Hamoudi

Articles

Despite its explosive growth over the past several decades, Islamic finance continues to have trouble attracting large numbers of otherwise pious Muslims as potential investors. The underlying reason for this is that the means that the practice employs to circumvent some of the central Muslim bans relating to finance (most notably, the ban on interest) are entirely formal in their structure and are equivalent to conventional structures both legally and economically. However, the practice purports to serve functional ends; namely, through offering Muslims alternative means of finance that are intended to further Islamic ideals of fairness and social justice. This …

Muhammad's Social Justice Or Muslim Cant?: Langdellianism And The Failures Of Islamic Finance, Haider Ala Hamoudi

Articles

Though it is advertised and promoted as the bulwark of an alternative economic system based on populist Muslim notions of social justice and fairness, Islamic finance as a practice has failed to meet these objectives. The causes of that failure and the question of whether alternative approaches are possible are the subject of this Article.

The failure of Islamic finance to provide that which it promotes is the direct consequence of the application of an Islamic logic driven interpretive system through which rules are derived, which its adherents claim was formalized and systematized by the early jurist Muhammad Ibn Idris …