Law Commons^™

A Legal Theory Of Finance, Katharina Pistor

Faculty Scholarship

This paper develops the building blocks for a legal theory of finance. LTF holds that financial markets are legally constructed and as such occupy an essentially hybrid place between state and market, public and private. At the same time, financial markets exhibit dynamics that frequently put them in direct tension with commitments enshrined in law or contracts. This is the case especially in times of financial crisis when the full enforcement of legal commitments would result in the self-destruction of the financial system. This law-finance paradox tends to be resolved by suspending the full force of law where the survival …

Educating The Invincibles: Strategies For Teaching The Millennial Generation In Law School, Emily Benfer, Colleen F. Shanahan

Faculty Scholarship

Each new generation of law students presents its own set of challenges for law teachers seeking to develop competent and committed members of the legal profession. This article aims to train legal educators to recognize their students' generational learning style and to deliver a tailored education that supports the development of skilled attorneys. To help legal educators better understand the newest generation of law students, this article explores the traits associated with the Millennial Generation of law students, including their perspective on themselves and others, on education and on work. It then provides detailed and specific strategies for teaching millennial …

Shallow Signals, Bert I. Huang

Faculty Scholarship

Whether in dodging taxes, violating copyrights, misstating corporate earnings, or just jaywalking, we often follow the lead of others in our choices to obey or to flout the law. Seeing others act illegally, we gather that a rule is weakly enforced or that its penalty is not serious. But we may be imitating by mistake: what others are doing might not be illegal – for them.

Whenever the law quietly permits some actors to act in a way that is usually forbidden, copycat misconduct may be erroneously inspired by the false appearance that "others are doing it too." The use …

Regulatory Capabilities: A Normative Framework For Assessing The Distributional Effects Of Regulation, Katharina Pistor, Fabrizio Cafaggi

Faculty Scholarship

This paper develops the normative concept of "regulatory capabilities", which asserts that nobody – individuals, groups or entities – should be subjected to a regulatory regime – public or private, domestic or transnational – without some freedom to choose. Choice in this context means the ability to accept or reject a regulatory regime imposed by others or to create an alternative one. A mere formal option is not sufficient; the freedom to choose requires real alternatives. The concept of regulatory capabilities has particular traction in the transnational context where private, hybrid public-private and public actors compete for influence, shape domestic …

Law In Finance, Katharina Pistor

Faculty Scholarship

Law’s relevance to finance is by now well recognized, in no small part due to the literature on "law and finance" (La Porta et al. 1998; La Porta, Lopez-de-Silanes, and Shleifer 2008) celebrated in this journal ten years ago under the heading "the new comparative economics" (Djankov et al. 2003). There will always be some debate as to whether a specific law or regulation distorts or supports markets, but few would argue today that law is irrelevant to financial markets or that they could operate entirely outside it.

This special issue takes the debate about the relation between law and …

Private Standards Organizations And Public Law, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

Simplified, universal access to law is one of the important transformations worked by the digital age. With the replacement of physical by digital copies, citizens ordinarily need travel only to the nearest computer to find and read the texts that bind them. Lagging behind this development, however, has been computer access to standards developed by private standards development organizations, often under the umbrella of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), and then converted by agency actions incorporating them by reference into legal obligations. To discover what colors the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) requires for use in work-place caution …