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Full-Text Articles in Law
Going Concerns And Environmental Concerns: Mitigating Climate Change Through Bankruptcy Reform, Alexander Gouzoules
Going Concerns And Environmental Concerns: Mitigating Climate Change Through Bankruptcy Reform, Alexander Gouzoules
Faculty Publications
This article examines how legislative reforms to the Bankruptcy Code could mitigate the effects of climate change, speed the adoption of renewable energy, and contribute to U.S. compliance with the Paris Agreement of 2015. It analyzes the benefits derived by the fossil fuel industry from Chapter 11, which allows extractive firms to survive boom-and-bust cycles caused by volatile oil and gas prices. Insolvent polluters are preserved as going concerns during price collapses, only to resume and expand production as prices recover.
This article proposes novel legislative reforms to the Bankruptcy Code that would require insolvent fossil fuel producers to liquidate …
Health Inflation, Wealth Inflation, And The Discounting Of Human Life, Ben L. Trachtenberg
Health Inflation, Wealth Inflation, And The Discounting Of Human Life, Ben L. Trachtenberg
Faculty Publications
This article presents two new arguments against “discounting” future human lives during cost-benefit analysis, arguing that even absent ethical objections to the disparate treatment of present and future humanity, the economic calculations of cost-benefit analysis itself - if properly calculated - counsel against discounting lives at anything close to current rates. In other words, even if society sets aside all concerns with the discounting of future generations in principle, current discounting of future human lives cannot be justified even on the discounters’ own terms. First, because cost-benefit analysis has thus far ignored evidence of rising health care expenditures, it underestimates …