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Report On Offense Grading In Pennsylvania, Paul H. Robinson, Criminal Law Research Group, University Of Pennsylvania Law School Dec 2009

Report On Offense Grading In Pennsylvania, Paul H. Robinson, Criminal Law Research Group, University Of Pennsylvania Law School

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

The Pennsylvania Legislature's Senate Judiciary Committee and House Judiciary Committee jointly commissioned this study of the criminal offense grading scheme contained in Pennsylvania criminal statutes. This Final Report, which was presented to a joint session of the two Committees on December 15, 2009, examines the extent to which current Pennsylvania law defines offenses with offense grades that are inconsistent with the relative seriousness of the offense as compared to other offenses, based upon an empirical survey of Pennsylvania residents. It also examines whether some offenses include within a single grade forms of conduct of very different degrees of seriousness, for …


Regulatory Theory, Matthew D. Adler Dec 2009

Regulatory Theory, Matthew D. Adler

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

This chapter reviews a range of topics connected to the justification of government regulation, including: the definition of “regulation”; welfarism, Kaldor-Hicks efficiency, and the Pareto principles; the fundamental theorems of welfare economics and the “market failure” framework for justifying regulation, which identifies different ways in which the conditions for those theorems may fail to hold true (such as externalities, public goods, monopoly power, and imperfect information); the Coase theorem; and the different forms of regulation.


The Convergence Of Broadcasting And Telephony: Legal And Regulatory Implications, Christopher S. Yoo Dec 2009

The Convergence Of Broadcasting And Telephony: Legal And Regulatory Implications, Christopher S. Yoo

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

This article, written for the inaugural issue of a new journal, analyzes the extent to which the convergence of broadcasting and telephony induced by the digitization of communications technologies is forcing policymakers to rethink their basic approach to regulating these industries. Now that voice and video are becoming available through every transmission technology, policymakers can no longer define the scope of regulatory obligations in terms of the mode of transmission. In addition, jurisdictions that employ separate agencies to regulate broadcasting and telephony must reform their institutional structures to bring both within the ambit of a single regulatory agency. The emergence …


Tiered Originality And The Dualism Of Copyright Incentives, Shyamkrishna Balganesh Nov 2009

Tiered Originality And The Dualism Of Copyright Incentives, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

Professor Balganesh responds to Gideon Parchomovsky & Alex Stein, Originality, 95 Va. L. Rev. 1505 (2009), arguing that their proposal can perhaps be accommodated under current copyright doctrine.


Treaty Compliance And Violation, Beth A. Simmons Nov 2009

Treaty Compliance And Violation, Beth A. Simmons

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

International law has enjoyed a recent renaissance as an important subfield of study within international relations. Two trends are evident in the recent literature. First, the obsession with theoretical labels is on the decline. Second, empirical, especially quantitative, work is burgeoning. This article reviews the literature in four issues areas — security, war, and peace; international trade; protection of the environment; and human rights — and concludes we have a much stronger basis for assessing claims about compliance and violation now than was the case only a few years ago. Still, the literature suffers from a few weaknesses, including problems …


Product Life Cycle Theory And The Maturation Of The Internet, Christopher S. Yoo Nov 2009

Product Life Cycle Theory And The Maturation Of The Internet, Christopher S. Yoo

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

Much of the recent debate over Internet policy has focused on the permissibility of business practices that are becoming increasingly common, such as new forms of network management, prioritization, pricing, and strategic partnerships. This Essay analyzes these developments through the lens of the management literature on the product life cycle, dominant designs, technological trajectories and design hierarchies, and the role of complementary assets in determining industry structure. This analysis suggests that many of these business practices may represent nothing more than a reflection of how the nature of competition changes as industries mature. This in turn suggests that network neutrality …


The Future Of Shareholder Democracy, Lisa Fairfax Oct 2009

The Future Of Shareholder Democracy, Lisa Fairfax

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

This Article seeks to ascertain the impact of the Securities and Exchange Commission's rejection in 2007 of a proxy access rule, a rule that would have required corporations to include shareholder-nominated candidates on the ballot. On the one hand, the SEC's rejection appears to be a stunning blow to the shareholders' rights campaign because many shareholders' rights advocates have long considered access to the corporate ballot as the "holy grail" of their campaign for increased shareholder power. On the other hand, some corporate experts maintain that characterizing proxy access as the indispensable ingredient for sufficient shareholder influence fails to appreciate …


Free Speech And The Myth Of The Internet As An Unintermediated Experience, Christopher S. Yoo Sep 2009

Free Speech And The Myth Of The Internet As An Unintermediated Experience, Christopher S. Yoo

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

In recent years, a growing number of commentators have raised concerns that the decisions made by Internet intermediaries — including last-mile network providers, search engines, social networking sites, and smartphones — are inhibiting free speech and have called for restrictions on their ability to prioritize or exclude content. Such calls ignore the fact that when mass communications are involved, intermediation helps end users to protect themselves from unwanted content and allows them to sift through the avalanche of desired content that grows ever larger every day. Intermediation also helps solve a number of classic economic problems associated with the Internet. …


State Finance In Times Of Crisis, Brian Galle, Jonathan Klick Sep 2009

State Finance In Times Of Crisis, Brian Galle, Jonathan Klick

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

As recent events illustrate, state finances are pro-cyclical: during recessions, state revenues crash, worsening the effects of economic downturns. This problem is well-known, yet persistent. We argue here that, in light of predictable federalism and political economy dynamics, states will be unable to change this situation on their own. Additionally, we note that many possible federal remedies may result in worse problems, such as creating moral hazard that would induce states to take on excessively risky policy, both fiscal and otherwise. Thus, we argue that policy makers should consider so-called “automatic” stabilizers, such as are found in the federal tax …


Future Generations: A Prioritarian View, Matthew D. Adler Sep 2009

Future Generations: A Prioritarian View, Matthew D. Adler

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

Should we remain neutral between our interests and those of future generations? Or are we ethically permitted or even required to depart from neutrality and engage in some measure of intergenerational discounting? This Article addresses the problem of intergenerational discounting by drawing on two different intellectual traditions: the social welfare function (“SWF”) tradition in welfare economics, and scholarship on “prioritarianism” in moral philosophy. Unlike utilitarians, prioritarians are sensitive to the distribution of well-being. They give greater weight to well-being changes affecting worse-off individuals. Prioritarianism can be captured, formally, through an SWF which sums a concave transformation of individual utility, rather …


Private Litigation In A Public Law Sphere:The Standard Of Review In Investor-State Arbitrations, William W. Burke-White, Andreas Von Staden Aug 2009

Private Litigation In A Public Law Sphere:The Standard Of Review In Investor-State Arbitrations, William W. Burke-White, Andreas Von Staden

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

International arbitration and, particularly, investor-state arbitration is rapidly shifting to include disputes of a public law nature. Yet, arbitral tribunals continue to apply standards of review derived from the private law origins of international arbitration, have not recognized the new public law context of these disputes, and have failed to develop a coherent jurisprudence with regard to the applicable standard for reviewing a state's public regulatory activities. This problematic approach is evidenced by a recent series of cases brought by foreign investors against Argentina challenging the economic recovery program launched after a massive financial collapse and has called into question …


Bankruptcy Phobia, David A. Skeel Jr. Jul 2009

Bankruptcy Phobia, David A. Skeel Jr.

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

As the recent economic crisis has unfolded, bankruptcy has offered possible solutions at several key junctures. The first of these solutions, often referred to as mortgage modification, was geared toward homeowners who faced the loss of their homes in the months—now several years—since the start of the subprime crisis On the corporate side, Chapter 11 was an obvious alternative when large nonbank financial institutions like Bear Stearns and AIG stumbled in 2008. But regulators repeatedly balked, and the one exception to the avoidance of bankruptcy at all costs—Lehman Brothers—was anomalous. This aversion to bankruptcy, which seems to pervade all sides …


Book Review (Judith Kilpatrick's There When We Needed Him: Wiley Austin Branton, Civil Rights Warrior), Sophia Z. Lee Jul 2009

Book Review (Judith Kilpatrick's There When We Needed Him: Wiley Austin Branton, Civil Rights Warrior), Sophia Z. Lee

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

No abstract provided.


The Transparency President? The Obama Administration And Open Government, Cary Coglianese Jun 2009

The Transparency President? The Obama Administration And Open Government, Cary Coglianese

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

President Obama has trumpeted transparency as a major part of his reform agenda, promising an "unprecedented" degree of governmental openness and overseeing a variety of open government reforms, from changes in Freedom of Information Act policies to the creation of new websites like Recovery.Gov. Although transparency is politically popular, and the Obama Administration benefits in the short run by contrasting itself with the Bush Administration's reputation for secrecy, in the long run President Obama's rhetoric on openness in government may backfire politically. Too much emphasis on making government a fishbowl will only raise expectations about an unattainable or undesirable level …


Transparency And Public Participation In The Rulemaking Process: Recommendations For The New Administration, Cary Coglianese, Heather Kilmartin, Evan Mendelson Jun 2009

Transparency And Public Participation In The Rulemaking Process: Recommendations For The New Administration, Cary Coglianese, Heather Kilmartin, Evan Mendelson

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

Each year, federal regulatory agencies create thousands of new rules that affect the economy. When these agencies insulate themselves too much from the public, they are more likely to make suboptimal decisions and decrease public acceptance of their resulting rules. A nonpartisan Task Force on Transparency and Public Participation met in 2008 to identify current deficiencies in agency rulemaking procedures and develop recommendations for the next presidential administration to improve the quality of regulations and the legitimacy of regulatory proceedings. This report summarizes the Task Force's deliberations, indicating ways that federal agencies could do a better job of seeking citizen …


Nonrivalry And Price Discrimination In Copyright Economics, John P. Conley, Christopher S. Yoo May 2009

Nonrivalry And Price Discrimination In Copyright Economics, John P. Conley, Christopher S. Yoo

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

The literature on the economics of copyright proceeds from the premise that copyrightable works constitute pure public goods, which is generally modeled by assuming that such works are nonexcludable and that the marginal cost of making additional copies is essentially zero. A close examination of the foundational literature on public goods theory reveals that the defining characteristic of public goods is instead the optimality criterion known as the “Samuelson condition,” which implies that the systematic bias toward underproduction is the result of the inability to induce consumers to reveal their preferences rather than the inability to exclude or price at …


Debunking Blackstonian Copyright, Shyamkrishna Balganesh Apr 2009

Debunking Blackstonian Copyright, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

This is a review of Neil Weinstock Netanel’s Copyright’s Paradox (2008).


Custom, Comedy, And The Value Of Dissent, Jennifer Rothman Apr 2009

Custom, Comedy, And The Value Of Dissent, Jennifer Rothman

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

In this essay, I comment on Dotan Oliar and Christopher Sprigman's article, There's No Free Laugh (Anymore): The Emergence of Intellectual Property Norms and the Transformation of Stand-Up Comedy, 94 Va. L. Rev. 1787 (2008). Their study of the quasi-intellectual property norms in the stand-up comedy world provides yet another compelling example of the phenomenon that I have explored in which the governing intellectual property regime takes a backseat to social norms and other industry customs that dominate the lived experiences of many in creative fields. The microcosm of stand-up comedy reinforces my concern that customs are being used to …


Foreseeability And Copyright Incentives, Shyamkrishna Balganesh Apr 2009

Foreseeability And Copyright Incentives, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

Copyright law’s principal justification today is the economic theory of creator incentives. Central to this theory is the recognition that while copyright’s exclusive rights framework provides creators with an economic incentive to create, it also entails large social costs, and that creators therefore need to be given just enough incentive to create in order to balance the system’s benefits against its costs. Yet, none of copyright’s current doctrines enable courts to circumscribe a creator’s entitlement by reference to limitations inherent in the very idea of incentives. While the common law too relies on providing actors with incentives to behave in …


The Indivisible Constitution, Kermit Roosevelt Apr 2009

The Indivisible Constitution, Kermit Roosevelt

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

In The Invisible Constitution, Laurence Tribe argues that many of our most deeply-held constitutional convictions are not to be found in the words of the Constitution itself. They are, instead, part of what he calls the invisible Constitution. This review essay argues that although that claim is true, it is not worth spending a book on. Moreover, its very truth—the fact that certain “invisible” constitutional propositions are as central and well-established as textual ones—undermines the value of treating the “invisible” Constitution as a qualitatively different entity.


Prosecutorial Regulation Versus Prosecutorial Accountability, Stephanos Bibas Apr 2009

Prosecutorial Regulation Versus Prosecutorial Accountability, Stephanos Bibas

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

No government official has as much unreviewable power or discretion as the prosecutor. Few regulations bind or even guide prosecutorial discretion, and fewer still work well. Most commentators favor more external regulation by legislatures, judges, or bar authorities. Neither across-the-board legislation nor ex post review of individual cases has proven to be effective, however. Drawing on management literature, this article reframes the issue as a principal-agent problem and suggests corporate strategies for better serving the relevant stakeholders. Fear of voters could better check prosecutors, as could victim participation in individual cases. Scholars have largely neglected the most promising avenue of …


Book Review (Risa L. Goluboff's The Lost Promise Of Civil Rights), Sophia Z. Lee Apr 2009

Book Review (Risa L. Goluboff's The Lost Promise Of Civil Rights), Sophia Z. Lee

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

No abstract provided.


Analyzing Horizontal Mergers: Unilateral Effects In Product-Differentiated Markets, Herbert J. Hovenkamp Mar 2009

Analyzing Horizontal Mergers: Unilateral Effects In Product-Differentiated Markets, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

This essay offers a brief, non-technical exposition of the antitrust analysis of horizontal mergers in product differentiated markets where the resulting price increase is thought to be unilateral - that is, only the post-merger firm increases its prices while other firms in the market do not. More realistically, non-merging firms who are reasonably close in product space to the merging firm will also be able to increase their prices when the post-merger firm's prices rise. The unilateral effects theory is robust and has become quite conventional in merger analysis. There is certainly no reason for thinking that it involves any …


The Relation Between Regulation And Class Actions: Evidence From The Insurance Industry, Eric Helland, Jonathan Klick Mar 2009

The Relation Between Regulation And Class Actions: Evidence From The Insurance Industry, Eric Helland, Jonathan Klick

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

Standard law and economics models imply that regulation and litigation serve as substitutes. We test this by looking at the incidence of insurance class actions as a function of measures of regulatory enforcement. We also look specifically at whether states with clear regulatory standards regarding the use of OEM parts experience less litigation over this issue. We find no evidence of substitution between regulation and litigation. We also examine the possibility that litigation is more frequent in states where regulators are more likely to be captured by industry interests, finding no support for this hypothesis either. Instead, litigation is more …


Does Anyone Get Stopped At The Gate? An Empirical Assessment Of The Daubert Trilogy In The States, Eric Helland, Jonathan Klick Mar 2009

Does Anyone Get Stopped At The Gate? An Empirical Assessment Of The Daubert Trilogy In The States, Eric Helland, Jonathan Klick

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

The Supreme Court’s trilogy of evidence cases, Daubert, Joiner, and Kumho Tire appear to mark a significant departure in the way scientific and expert evidence is handled in federal court. By focusing on the underlying methods used to generate the experts’ conclusions, Daubert has the potential to impose a more rigorous standard on experts. Given this potential, some individuals have called for states to adopt the Daubert standards to purge “junk science” from state courts. However, there is relatively little empirical support for the notion that Daubert affects the quality of expert evidence. Using a large dataset of state court …


The Myth Of Equality In The Employment Relation, Aditi Bagchi Mar 2009

The Myth Of Equality In The Employment Relation, Aditi Bagchi

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

Although it is widely understood that employers and employees are not equally situated, we fail adequately to account for this inequality in the law governing their relationship. We can best understand this inequality in terms of status, which encompasses one’s level of income, leisure and discretion. For a variety of misguided reasons, contract law has been historically highly resistant to the introduction of status-based principles. Courts have preferred to characterize the unfavorable circumstances that many employees face as the product of unequal bargaining power. But bargaining power disparity does not capture the moral problem raised by inequality in the employment …


The Neal Report And The Crisis In Antitrust, Herbert J. Hovenkamp Mar 2009

The Neal Report And The Crisis In Antitrust, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

The Neal Report, which was commissioned by Lyndon Johnson and published in 1967, is rightfully criticized for representing the past rather than the future of antitrust. Its authors completely embraced a theory of competition and industrial organization that had dominated American economic thinking for forty years, but was just in the process of coming to an end. The structure-conduct-performance (S-C-P) paradigm that the Neal Report embodied had in fact been one of the most elegant and most tested theories of industrial organization. The theory represented the high point of structuralism in industrial organization economics, resting on the proposition that certain …


Bankruptcy Or Bailouts?, Kenneth M. Ayotte, David A. Skeel Jr. Mar 2009

Bankruptcy Or Bailouts?, Kenneth M. Ayotte, David A. Skeel Jr.

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

The usual reaction if one mentions bankruptcy as a mechanism for addressing a financial institution’s default is incredulity. Those who favor the rescue of troubled financial institutions, and even those who prefer that their assets be promptly sold to a healthier institution, treat bankruptcy as anathema. Everyone seems to agree that nothing good can come from bankruptcy. Indeed, the Chapter 11 filing by Lehman Brothers has been singled out by many the primary cause of the severe economic and financial contraction that followed, and proof that bankruptcy is disorderly and ineffective. As a result, ad-hoc rescue lending to avoid bankruptcy …


Originality, Gideon Parchomovsky, Alex Stein Mar 2009

Originality, Gideon Parchomovsky, Alex Stein

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

In this Essay we introduce a model of copyright law that calibrates authors’ rights and liabilities to the level of originality in their works. We advocate this model as a substitute for the extant regime that unjustly and inefficiently grants equal protection to all works satisfying the “modicum of creativity” standard. Under our model, highly original works will receive enhanced protection and their authors will also be sheltered from suits by owners of preexisting works. Conversely, authors of less original works will receive diminished protection and incur greater exposure to copyright liability. We operationalize this proposal by designing separate rules …


A Theory Of Discipline For Professional Misconduct, Nadia N. Sawicki Mar 2009

A Theory Of Discipline For Professional Misconduct, Nadia N. Sawicki

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Carey Law

State medical boards derive their licensure and disciplinary authority from the police powers reserved to the states under the 10th Amendment. Though it is clear that public health, safety, and welfare are well-served by the educational and examination requirements uniformly imposed upon medical professionals, many medical practice acts also authorize discipline for professional misconduct that does not directly implicate clinical competence or patient safety - for example, being convicted of a felony or a crime of moral turpitude, failing to comply with a child support order, providing expert opinion to a court without reasonable investigation, ordering unnecessary laboratory tests, engaging …