Law Commons^™

Securities Class Actions As Pragmatic Ex Post Regulation, Elizabeth Chamblee Burch

Scholarly Works

Securities class actions are on the chopping block-again. Traditional commentators continue to view class actions with suspicion; they see class suits as nonmeritorious byproducts of self-interest and the attorneys who bring them as rent-seekers. Their conventional approach has popularized securities class actions' negative effects. High-profile commissions capitalizing on this rhetoric, such as the Committee on Capital Markets Regulation, have recently recommended eliminating or severely curtailing securities class actions. But this approach misses the point: in the ongoing push and pull of securities regulation, corporations are winning the battle.

Thus, understanding the full picture and texture of securities class actions necessitates …

Slides: The Big Questions, Doug Kenney

Shifting Baselines and New Meridians: Water, Resources, Landscapes, and the Transformation of the American West (Summer Conference, June 4-6)

Presenter: Doug Kenney, Natural Resources Law Center, University of Colorado Law School

7 slides

Slides: Linking Growth, Land Use And Water, Jim Holway

Shifting Baselines and New Meridians: Water, Resources, Landscapes, and the Transformation of the American West (Summer Conference, June 4-6)

Presenter: Jim Holway, Global Institute of Sustainability, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Arizona Water Institute, Arizona State University

29 slides

Public-Private Partnerships And Insurance Regulation, Alexander A. Boni-Saenz

All Faculty Scholarship

A public-private partnership (PPP) is an institutional arrangement that embodies a collaborative approach to policy and regulation; it is a joint venture between the government and one or more private sector entities. Joint financing partnerships link public financing and private insurance to pay for certain social goods. Where the financing for social goods is fragmented and overlapping, as it is for health and social care, joint financing PPPs may help organize existing financing streams. This piece argues that partnerships of this type also present an opportunity for consumer-protective regulation of the insurance industry if certain conditions are met. Private insurers …

Another Approach To Corporate Stock Basis, Alan L. Feld

Faculty Scholarship

Gordon Warnke's article makes a significant contribution. It helps to map a largely unexplored continent of tax law, the use and determination of adjusted basis in corporate shares in connection with certain nonrecognition transactions, recently elaborated in Reg. §1.358-2.2 The regulation provides guidance of particular relevance to the allocation of basis when the shareholder owns two or more batches of stock with differing adjusted bases. As Gordon's article makes clear, apparently simple tax law directives concerning the treatment of adjusted basis raise difficult questions and choices, often in common situations. In this article, I propose to make explicit some of …

The Virtues Of Medicare, Jill R. Horwitz

Reviews

Most of us look forward to a heaven where people don't get sick. But if they do, health care would be traded among fully informed patients and providers in perfectly competitive and frictionless markets. In that perfect world, sick citizens simply shop for doctors the way they shop for other consumer goods. The better doctors, like the most elegant hotel rooms and fanciest cars, would cost more than inferior doctors. Patients would consult their utility meters and, with appropriate attention to discounting over an infinite lifetime, choose accordingly. After each treatment, the patients would know the quality of their outcome …

An Opt-Out Home Mortgage System, Michael S. Barr, Sendhil Mullainathan, Eldar Shafir

Other Publications

The current housing and financial crisis has led to significant congressional and executive action to manage the crisis and stem the harms from it, but the fundamental problems that caused the crisis remain largely unaddressed. The central features of the industrial organization of the mortgage market with its misaligned incentives, and the core psychological and behavioral phenomena that drive household financial decisionmaking remain. While the causes of the mortgage meltdown are myriad and the solutions likely to be multifaceted, a central problem that led to the crisis was that brokers and lenders offered loans that looked much less expensive and …

A Single-License Approach To Regulating Insurance, Henry N. Butler, Larry E. Ribstein

Faculty Working Papers

State regulation of insurance companies has been criticized for many years because of the burden imposed on insurers by having to comply with the laws of many jurisdictions. These higher costs are passed on to consumers. The problems with the current regulatory structure are prompting calls for increased federal regulation of insurance. However, all proposals to federalize insurance regulation create opportunities for abuse at the hands of the federal government and fail to utilize the benefits of a federal system. This article shows how many of the problems of the current system can be addressed without resorting to a large …

Internet Nondiscrimination Principles: Commercial Ethics For Carriers And Search Engines, Frank Pasquale

Faculty Scholarship

Unaccountable power at any layer of online life can stifle innovation elsewhere. Dominant search engines rightly worry that carriers will use their control of the physical layer of internet infrastructure to pick winners among content and application providers. Though they advocate net neutrality, they have been much less quick to recognize the threat to openness and fair play their own practices may pose.

Just as dominant search engines fear an unfairly tiered online world, they should be required to provide access to their archives and indices in a nondiscriminatory manner. If dominant search engines want carriers to disclose their traffic …

Legacy Of The Clinton Bubble, Timothy Canova

Law Faculty News Articles, Editorials, and Blogs

This article looks at the economy following the Clinton administration period in the White House.

Protecting The Diversity Of The Depths: Environmental Regulation Of Bioprospecting And Marine Scientific Research Beyond National Jurisdiction, Robin M. Warner

Faculty of Law - Papers (Archive)

As scientific knowledge of marine areas beyond national jurisdiction increases and developments in oceans technology permit greater access to the high seas water column and the deep seabed, new and more intensive uses of these areas occur with consequential impacts on the marine environment. The discovery of hydrothermal vents in 1977 revealed communities of organisms with unique genetic and biochemical properties which can be used for a seemingly limitless catalogue of medical, pharmaceutical and industrial applications. Similar repositories of genetic and biochemical resources have been discovered in other deep sea environments such as cold water seeps and it is expected …

Pornography, Coercion, And Copyright Law 2.0, Ann Bartow

Law Faculty Scholarship

The lack of regulation of the production of pornography in the United States leaves pornography performers exposed to substantial risks. Producers of pornography typically respond to attempts to regulate pornography as infringements upon free speech. At the same time, large corporations involved in the production and sale of pornography rely on copyright law's complex regulatory framework to protect their pornographic content from copying and unauthorized distribution. Web 2.0 also facilitates the production and distribution of pornography by individuals. These user-generators produce their own pornography, often looking to monetize their productions themselves via advertising revenues and subscription models. Much like their …

There Are Plaintiffs And . . . There Are Plaintiffs: An Empirical Analysis Of Securities Class Action Settlements, Randall Thomas, James D. Cox, Lynn Bai

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

In this paper, we examine the impact of the PSLRA and more particularly the impact the type of lead plaintiff on the size of settlements in securities fraud class actions. We thus provide insight into whether the type of plaintiff that heads the class action impacts the overall outcome of the case. Furthermore, we explore possible indicia that may explain why some suits settle for extremely small sums - small relative to the "provable losses" suffered by the class, small relative to the asset size of the defendant-company, and small relative to other settlements in our sample. This evidence bears …

Let My People Go: Human Capital Investment And Community Capacity Building Via Meta/Regulation In A Deliberative Democracy - A Modest Contribution For Criminal Law And Restorative Justice, Bruce P. Archibald

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Globalization and the new information economy are putting great stress on western high-wage economies of which Canada is an exemplar. As individuals and together as a society, Canadians are being forced to become more flexible and strategic in adjusting to changing employment opportunities and economic challenges. Meanwhile, governments have shifted from being purveyors of welfare to being supervisors of both markets and decentralized/ privatized public services. Key roles for the government in this new political environment are the sponsorship of mechanisms for autonomous, individual human capital investment as well as for community responses to these emerging economic and social challenges. …

Issue Brief: Overcoming Legal Barriers To The Bulk Sale Of At-Risk Mortgages, Michael S. Barr, James A. Feldman

Other Publications

This memorandum argues that the sale of loans and loan pools to new owners would help to stabilize housing prices, and that such a modification to the REMIC rules would be desirable and well within Congress’ constitutional authority. Furthermore, it would not lead to successful legal claims by investors in securitized loan pools under the Just Compensation or Due Process clauses, which provide the primary constitutional protections for property interests.

Behaviorally Informed Financial Services Regulation, Michael S. Barr, Sendhil Mullainathan, Eldar Shafir

Other Publications

Financial services decisions can have enourmous consequences for household well-being. Households need a range of financial services - to conduct basic transactions, such as receiving their income, storing it, and paying bills; to save for emergency needs and long-term goals; to access credit; and to insure against life's key risks. But the financial services system is exceedingly complicated and often not well-designed to optimize house-hold behavior. In response to the complexity of out financial system, there has been a long running debate about the appropriate role and form of regulation. Regulation is largely stuck in two competing models - disclosure, …

Limiting Federal Agency Preemption: Recommendations For A New Federalism Executive Order, William Funk, Thomas Mcgarity, Nina A. Mendelson, Sidney Shapiro, David Vladeck, Matthew Shudtz, James Goodwin

Other Publications

The structure of the U.S. Constitution reflects a profound respect for the principles of federalism and state sovereignty. These principles require the federal government to recognize and encourage opportunities for state and local governments to exercise their authority, especially in areas of traditional state concern such as the protection of the health, safety, and welfare of their citizens. However, over the last six years there has been a coordinated Executive Branch effortto use the regulatory process to shield certain product manufacturers from state tort liability. The Food and Drug Administration, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and Consumer Product Safety Commission, …

Much Ado About Nothing?, Cary Coglianese

All Faculty Scholarship

Policy scholars and decision makers should be careful before concluding that President Bush's recent Executive Order 13422 will result in "paralysis by analysis." That lament has been heard about other changes to rule making procedures over the last seven decades, yet steady increases in the cost and volume of federal regulations during that time period clearly indicate that paralysis has yet to set in. Administrative procedures are embedded within a complex web of politics, institutions, and organizational behavior. Within that web, procedures are but one factor influencing government agencies.

Policies To Expand Minority Entrepreneurship: Closing Comments, Michael S. Barr

Book Chapters

This essay is based on comments delivered at the Conference on on Entrepreneurship in Low- and Moderate-Income Communities, November 3-4, 2005. This has been a productive conversation. In my closing comments, I want to shift our focus somewhat, from entrepreneurship in low-income communities to minority entrepreneurship generally. I want to do so because many minority entrepreneurs are connected to or hire from low-income communities, and because minority entrepreneurs face critical barriers even when they attempt to create and grow firms outside of distressed communities. In this comment, I want to highlight key barriers and suggest five steps for Congress, the …

A Presumption Against Agency Preemption, Nina A. Mendelson

Articles

Federal agencies are increasingly taking aim at state law, even though state law is not expressly targeted by the statutes the agencies administer. Starting in 2001, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) issued several notices saying that state laws would apply to national bank operating subsidiaries (incorporated under state law) to the same extent as those laws applied to the parent national bank. In 2003, the OCC specifically mentioned state consumer protection laws and took the position that the state laws were preempted and did not apply to mortgage lenders owned by national banks. In December 2006, …

The California Greenhouse Gas Waiver Decision And Agency Interpretation: A Response To Galle And Seidenfeld, Nina A. Mendelson

Articles

Professors Brian Galle and Mark Seidenfeld add some important strands to the debate on agency preemption, particularly in their detailed documentation of the potential advantages agencies may possess in deliberating on preemption compared with Congress and the courts. As they note, the quality of agency deliberation matters to two different debates. First, should an agency interpretation of statutory language to preempt state law receive Chevron deference in the courts, as other agency interpretations may, or should some lesser form of deference be given? Second, should a general statutory authorization to an agency to administer a program and to issue rules …

The Problems Of Securitizing Sub-Prime Loans, Tamar Frankel

Faculty Scholarship

In October 2007, the board of directors of Merrill-Lynch, Smith & Fenner, one of the largest if not the largest brokerage houses in the United States, accepted the request for early retirement of its Chief Executive Officer. The brokerage firm disclosed that it has lost over $8 billion on its investments in sub-prime mortgage loans.¹ Merrill Lynch was not the only financial giant to sustain enormous losses. The losses caused market liquidity to dry up. The U.S. government took steps to ease the pressure.² But the high leverage of the system is still unravelling. The effect of these …

The Future Regulation Of The Legal Profession: The Impact Of Treating The Legal Profession As Service Providers, Laurel Terry

Faculty Scholarly Works

In the past fifty years, one has heard debates about whether law is a business, a profession, or both, what these terms mean and whether it matters. Regardless of what one thinks about these debates, there is a new paradigm that must be added to the mix, which is the paradigm of lawyers as "service providers." In the "service providers" paradigm, the legal profession is not viewed as a separate, unique profession entitled to its own individual regulations, but is included in a broader group of "service providers," all of whom can be regulated together. This new paradigm represents a …

'Babushka Said Two Things - It Will Either Rain Or Snow; It Either Will Or Will Not': An Analysis Of The Provisions And Human Rights Implications Of Russia's New Law On Nongovernmental Organizations As Told Through Eleven Russian Proverbs, Robert C. Blitt

Scholarly Works

Longtime observers of Russia increasingly have called attention to and expressed profound concern for the direction the Russian Federation has taken in recent years. In advancing President Putin's vision of "dictatorship of law" and "managed democracy," the Russian government has retreated from key democratic reforms, undermining the transition away from Soviet rule and imperiling significant gains in fundamental human rights.

It is against this backdrop that, in January 2006, President Putin ratified major amendments to the 1996 Law on Nonprofit Organizations, which regulates the creation, reorganization, activity, and liquidation of NGOs in Russia. Putin has claimed that the amendments to …

"Goin' 'Round In Circles" ... And Letting The Bad Loans Win: When Subprime Lending Fails Borrowers: The Need For Uniform Broker Regulation, Cassandra Jones Havard

All Faculty Scholarship

This Article provides a framework for regulating mortgage brokers. After introductory comments about the prevalence of this industry and its functional importance in today's consumer mortgage finance market, the article briefly explores the underlying structural framework of the mortgage broker industry. Explaining the market in which mortgage brokers make sub-prime loans as a largely unregulated one, it examines the economics of the mortgage loan transaction from the perspective of the borrower and concludes that lenders are comfortable with the reckless nature of sub-prime home lending. Next, the article examines the dual banking system and its attendant concern of federalism. It …

Are We All Dopes? A Behavioral Law & Economics Approach To Legal Regulation Of Doping In Sports, Shawn Crincoli

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.