Law Commons^™

The Law And Economics Of Entrenchment, Michael D. Gilbert

Georgia Law Review

Should law respond readily to society’s evolving views, or should it remain fixed? This is the question of entrenchment, meaning the insulation of law from change through supermajority rules and other mechanisms. Entrenchment stabilizes law, which promotes reliance and predictability, but it also frustrates democratic majorities. Legal scholars have long studied this tension but made little progress in resolving it.

This Article considers the problem from the perspective of law and economics. Three arguments follow. First, majority rule can systematically harm society—even when voters are rational (i.e., not passionate) and no intense minority is present. This is because of a …

Decolonizing Reservation Economies: Returning To Private Enterprise And Trade, Adam Crepelle

The Journal of Business, Entrepreneurship & the Law

Tribes can solve many of their socioeconomic problems by embracing their traditional economic practices. Transforming reservation conditions begins by tribes enacting laws and developing institutions that are conducive to private enterprise. Similarly, tribes must embrace trade—both with foreign nations and other tribes. By returning to trade-based economies and adopting laws that facilitate private enterprise, tribes can decolonize reservation economies. The rest of the article proceeds as follows. Part I discusses Indian economic practices prior to European contact and examines the United States’ various Indian policies, removal to the present-day self-determination era. Part II of the paper analyzes various federal, state, …

The Modern Corporation And Private Property Revisited: Gardiner Means And The Administered Price, William W. Bratton

Seattle University Law Review

This essay casts additional light on The Modern Corporation’s corporatist precincts, shifting attention to the book’s junior coauthor, Gardiner C. Means. Means is accurately remembered as the generator of Book I’s statistical showings—the description of deepening corporate concentration and widening separation of ownership and control. He is otherwise more notable for his absence than his presence in today’s discussions of The Modern Corporation. This essay fills this gap, describing the junior coauthor’s central concern—a theory of administered prices set out in a Ph.D. dissertation Means submitted to the Harvard economics department after the book’s publication.

Collected Lectures And Talks On Corporate Law, Legal Theory, History, Finance, And Governance, William W. Bratton

Seattle University Law Review

A collection of eighteen speeches and lectures, from 2003 to 2018, discussing and expanding on the writings and theories of Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means.