Law Commons^™

Dual Taxation - Unbalanced And Arbitrary, Benjamin M. Simon

American Indian Law Journal

"Dual Taxation" in Indian Country happens when a state assesses taxes on private, non-tribal activities or transactions on tribal land in addition to taxes assessed by a tribe. Some analysts suggest that dual (or double) taxation puts tribal governments and citizens at a disadvantage, but the situation may be more nuanced. While dual taxation has been analyzed in depth from a legal perspective, this paper analyzes its economic consequences. With taxation, the stakes can be high. State tax revenues generated on tribal lands are revenues that tribes forgo collecting, limiting the tribal resources available for economic development and social programs. …

Freedom To Choose: The Economic Impact Of Reduced Abortion Access On Women’S Labor Market Outcomes, Zaara A. Masud

Senior Projects Spring 2023

This project aims to look at the economic impact of a reduction in abortion access on women's labor market outcomes. To do this, I use Sen and Nussbaum's capabilities approach to analyze the different capabilities that would be impacted and find that women's educational attainment, income, and labor force participation rates are all lower without access to abortion.

The Fuel For Neo-Nazism, Brandon M. Rubsamen

Global Tides

This paper attempts to explain the cause of support for far-right extremism movements in Europe. It takes a comparative approach in explaining that support by first analyzing Germany and Luxembourg. In each country, politics, history, economics, and society are explored in order to elicit a root cause. Once that main factor is found, Norway and Greece are also analyzed to see if the hypothesis holds. Political stability is hypothesized to be the root cause in far-right support in Germany (and lack thereof in Luxembourg), and the examples of Norway and Greece support this hypothesis. By comparing and contrasting aspects of …

The Progressives' Antitrust Toolbox, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

The period 1900 to 1930 was the Golden Age of antitrust theory, if not of enforcement. During that period courts and scholars developed nearly all of the tools that we use to this day to assess anticompetitive practices under the federal antitrust laws. In subsequent years antitrust policy veered to both the left and the right, but today seems to be returning to a position quite similar to the one that these Progressive adopted. Their principal contributions were (1) partial equilibrium analysis, which became the basis for concerns about economic concentration, the distinction between short- and long-run analysis, and later …

Antitrust Error Costs, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

The idea that consideration of error costs should inform judgments about actions with uncertain consequences is well established. When we act on imperfect information, we consider not only the probability of an event, but also the expected costs of making an error. In 1984 Frank Easterbrook used this idea to rationalize an anti-enforcement bias in antitrust, reasoning that markets are likely to correct monopoly in a relatively short time while judicial errors are likely to persist. As a result, false positives (recognizing a problem when there is none) are more costly than false negatives. While the problem of error cost …

A Workers' Paradise: Re-Integrating Newfoundland Into Colonial American History, Elena Hynes

Electronic Theses & Dissertations

The island of Newfoundland is conspicuous in colonial British and North American histories, most particularly and paradoxically, in its absence, a state of affairs which this study aims to help address. Multiple factors, including a paucity of documentary sources and various historiographic trends, have traditionally contributed to Newfoundland’s marginalization within colonial historical narratives. However, developments in recent years have made Newfoundland’s potential integration into the broader colonial dialogue more feasible including the advent of the Atlantic perspective, the expansion of available sources, and the work of multiple regional historians who have challenged enduring historiographic trends characterizing Newfoundland colonial settlements as …

The Data Market: A Proposal To Control Data About You, David Shaw, Daniel W. Engels

SMU Data Science Review

The current legal and economic infrastructure facilitating data collection practices and data analysis has led to extreme over-collection of data and the overall loss of personal privacy. Data over-collection has led to a secondary market for consumer data that is invisible to the consumer and results in a person's data being distributed far beyond their knowledge or control. In this paper, we propose a Data Market framework and design for personal data management and privacy protection in which the individual controls and profits from the dissemination of their data. Our proposed Data Market uses a market-based approach utilizing blockchain distributed …

A Taxing Feminism, Anthony C. Infanti, Bridget J. Crawford

Book Chapters

Feminist perspectives are not new to tax law. The first academic piece bringing a feminist perspective to bear on tax law dates to the early 1970s, when Grace Blumberg published “Sexism in the Code: A Comparative Study of Income Taxation of Working Wives and Mothers.” Contemporaneously, none other than Ruth Bader Ginsburg (along with her tax lawyer husband Marty Ginsburg) brought a feminist perspective to bear on tax law when she argued Moritz v. Commissioner before the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, as depicted in the movie On the Basis of Sex. Since then, numerous other contributions have been …

Antitrust In Times Of Information Technology: An Analysis Of Big Tech Monopoly Cases, Shamayeta Rahman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The information technology industry is one of the most rapidly growing yet concentrated markets existing today. Big Tech monopolies and their increasingly anticompetitive behavior posits risks for competition, technological innovation and consumer welfare. This ranges from price discrimination, limiting consumer choices to the unethical use of data. The particular nature of information technology, with its network effects and negligible marginal costs, incentivizes and facilitates predatory market practices making antitrust analysis in this industry extremely complex. Certain schools of antitrust thought are more sensitive (namely the post-Chicago school) to these implications than others, though antitrust application is still lacking in both …

Framing The Chicago School Of Antitrust Analysis, Herbert J. Hovenkamp, Fiona Scott Morton

All Faculty Scholarship

The Chicago School of antitrust has benefited from a great deal of law office history, written by admiring advocates rather than more dispassionate observers. This essay attempts a more neutral stance, looking at the ideology, political impulses, and economics that produced the Chicago School of antitrust policy and that account for its durability.

The origins of the Chicago School lie in a strong commitment to libertarianism and nonintervention. Economic models of perfect competition best suited these goals. The early strength of the Chicago School of antitrust was that it provided simple, convincing answers to everything that was wrong with antitrust …

Price Theory And Vertical Restraints: A Misunderstood Relation, Alan J. Meese

Alan J. Meese

The Chicago School of antitrust analysis has exerted a strong influence over the law of vertical restraints in the past two decades, leading the Supreme Court to abandon much of its traditional hostility toward such agreements. Chicago's success has provoked a vigorous response from Populists, who support the traditional approach. Chicago, Populists claim, has improperly relied upon neoclassical price theory to inform the normative and descriptive assumptions that drive its analysis of trade restraints generally and of vertical restraints in particular. This reliance is misplaced, Populists assert, because the real world departs from that portrayed by price-theoretic models and, at …

Economic Theory, Trader Freedom And Consumer Welfare: State Oil Co. V. Khan And The Continuing Incoherence Of Antitrust Doctrine, Alan J. Meese

Alan J. Meese

No abstract provided.

When Y2k Causes "Economic Loss" To "Other Property", Peter A. Alces, Aaron S. Book

Peter A. Alces

No abstract provided.

Avoiding Takings “Accidents”: A Torts Perspective On Takings Law, Eric Kades

Eric A. Kades

Viewing the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment as a form of insurance appeals to our intuition. The government, like fire, does not often "take" property, but when faced with extraordinary risk property owners naturally desire compensation. Recent scholarship, however, has dissolved the attractiveness of this perspective. This literature, through economic analysis, claims that the Takings Clause should be repealed and replaced with private takings insurance. This is the "no-compensation" result. This article argues that the insurance-based understanding of the just compensation requirement can be preserved without reaching the surprising no-compensation result. The intuitive appeal of understanding the Takings Clause …

Will Marriage Promotion Work?, Vivian E. Hamilton

Vivian E. Hamilton

No abstract provided.

British Government Information Resources, Bert Chapman

Libraries Faculty and Staff Creative Materials

Provides an overview of British Government information resources. Contents include basic British economic and political background and information from British Government websites including the Department of Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), Brexit related material produced by British government agencies such as the Department for Exiting the European Union,, the Ministry of Defence, the National Museum of the Royal Navy, the Home Office Visas and Immigration Section, the Office of National Statistics, Her Majesty's Treasury, the British Parliament including parliamentary committees and research agencies, the website of Member of Parliament (MP) Jacob Rees-Mogg (Conservative-North East Somerset), a webcast of House …

Endowment Effects In Chimpanzees, Owen D. Jones, Sarah F. Brosnan, Susan P. Lambeth, Mary Catherine Mareno, Amanda S. Richardson, Steven Schapiro

Owen Jones

Human behavior is not always consistent with standard rational choice predictions. The much-investigated variety of apparent deviations from rational choice predictions provides a promising arena for the merger of economics and biology. Although little is known about the extent to which other species also exhibit these seemingly irrational patterns of human decision-making and choice behavior, similarities across species would suggest a common evolutionary root to the phenomena.

The present study investigated whether chimpanzees exhibit an endowment effect, a seemingly paradoxical behavior in which humans tend to value a good they have just come to possess more than they would have …

Law, Biology, And Property: A New Theory Of The Endowment Effect, Owen D. Jones, Sarah F. Brosnan

Owen Jones

Recent work at the intersection of law and behavioral biology has suggested numerous contexts in which legal thinking could benefit by integrating knowledge from behavioral biology. In one of those contexts, behavioral biology may help to provide theoretical foundation for, and potentially increased predictive power concerning, various psychological traits relevant to law. This Article describes an experiment that explores that context.

The paradoxical psychological bias known as the endowment effect puzzles economists, skews market behavior, impedes efficient exchange of goods and rights, and thereby poses important problems for law. Although the effect is known to vary widely, there are at …

Health Care's Market Bureaucracy, Allison K. Hoffman

All Faculty Scholarship

The last several decades of health law and policy have been built on a foundation of economic theory. This theory supported the proliferation of market-based policies that promised maximum efficiency and minimal bureaucracy. Neither of these promises has been realized. A mounting body of empirical research discussed in this Article makes clear that leading market-based policies are not efficient — they fail to capture what people want. Even more, this Article describes how the struggle to bolster these policies — through constant regulatory, technocratic tinkering that aims to improve the market and the decision-making of consumers in it — has …

Is Antitrust's Consumer Welfare Principle Imperiled?, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

Antitrust’s consumer welfare principle stands for the proposition that antitrust policy should encourage markets to produce output as high as is consistent with sustainable competition, and prices that are accordingly as low. Such a policy does not protect every interest group. For example, it opposes the interests of cartels or other competition-limiting associations who profit from lower output and higher prices. It also runs counter to the interest of less competitive firms that need higher prices in order to survive. Market structure is relevant to antitrust policy, but its importance is contingent rather than absolute – that is, market structure …

Whatever Did Happen To The Antitrust Movement?, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

Antitrust in the United States today is caught between its pursuit of technical rules designed to define and implement defensible economic goals, and increasing calls for a new antitrust “movement.” The goals of this movement have been variously defined as combating industrial concentration, limiting the economic or political power of large firms, correcting the maldistribution of wealth, control of high profits, increasing wages, or protection of small business. High output and low consumer prices are typically unmentioned.

In the 1960s the great policy historian Richard Hofstadter lamented the passing of the antitrust “movement” as one of the “faded passions of …

The Retirement Strategy Of Supreme Court Justices: An Economic Approach, Kayla M. Joyce

Honors Scholar Theses

Previous research has identified strategic behavior in the nomination, confirmation, and retirement processes of the Supreme Court, each independently. This paper analyzes the interaction between the justices, the president, and the Senate in these processes. I constructed a game theoretic model to consider the nomination and approval process of Supreme Court justices and the change in dynamics that might result from an impending election. I hypothesize that sitting justices take into account the party affiliations of the president and the Senate when they are deciding whether it is the optimal time to retire to achieve their own strategic objectives. The …

Merger Simulation: A Simplified Approach With New Applications, Roy J. Epstein, Daniel L. Rubinfeld

Daniel L. Rubinfeld

Merger simulation is growing in importance as a tool to evaluate the unilateral competitive effects of mergers. This paper offers a relatively non-technical description of the principles of merger simulation. In addition, it introduces PCAIDS, a new and highly flexible "calibrated-demand" merger simulation methodology that is based on a simplified version of AIDS. PCAIDS can be implemented using market shares and two price elasticities; scanner or transaction-level data are not required. The paper offers some applications of merger simulation with PCAIDS that include comparisons with other simulation models. It also shows how PCAIDS can be applied to the analysis of …

Antitrust Enforcement In Dynamic Network Industries, Daniel L. Rubinfeld

Daniel L. Rubinfeld

No abstract provided.

Capturing Regulatory Reality: Stigler’S The Theory Of Economic Regulation, Christopher Carrigan, Cary Coglianese

All Faculty Scholarship

This paper offers a retrospective assessment of economist George Stigler’s classic article, The Theory of Economic Regulation. Stigler argued that regulation is a product that, just like any other product, is produced in a market, and that it can be acquired from the governmental “marketplace” by business firms to serve their private interests and create barriers to entry for potential competitors. He challenged the idea that regulation arises solely to serve the public interest and demonstrated that important political advantages held by businesses can contribute to industry capture of the regulatory process. Although his argument was largely based on …

Defending A Mixed Economy, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

This essay reviews Jacob S. Hacker's and Paul Pierson's very engaging book, American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget what Made America Prosper (2016).

3d Printing And Healthcare: Will Laws, Lawyers, And Companies Stand In The Way Of Patient Care?, Evan R. Youngstrom

Evan R. Youngstrom

Today, our society is on a precipice of significant advancement in healthcare because 3D printing will usher in the next generation of medicine. The next generation will be driven by customization, which will allow doctors to replace limbs and individualize drugs. However, the next generation will be without large pharmaceutical companies and their justifications for strong intellectual property rights. However, the current patent system (which is underpinned by a social tradeoff made from property incentives) is not flexible enough to cope with 3D printing’s rapid development. Very soon, the social tradeoff will no longer benefit society, so it must be …

The Progressives: Economics, Science, And Race, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

This essay is a brief review of Thomas C. Leonard, Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era (Princeton Univ. Press 2016).

From Bards To Search Engines: Finding What Readers Want From Ancient Times To The World Wide Web, Stephen Maurer

Stephen M. Maurer

Copyright theorists often ask how incentives can be designed to create better books, movies, and art. But this is not the whole story. As the Roman satirist Martial pointed out two thousand years ago, markets routinely ignore good and even excellent works. The insight reminds us that incentives to find content are just as necessary as incentives to make it. Recent social science research explains why markets fail and how timely interventions can save deserving titles from oblivion. This article reviews society’s long struggle to fix the vagaries of search since the invention of literature. We build on this history …

Laying Down The "Brics": Enhancing The Portability Of Awards In International Commercial Arbitration, Benjamin C. Mccarty

Benjamin C McCarty

The drafters of the 1958 New York Convention intended Article V(2)(b) to be interpreted narrowly, and while most pro-arbitration national courts do maintain narrowly defined areas of public policy that are sufficient for refusal of the recognition and enforcement of a foreign arbitral award, this is not always the case. Developing states and jurisdictions that maintain corrupt or inefficient judicial systems have shown a greater willingness to invoke the public policy exception for a broader, amorphous variety of reasons. This phenomenon has created a sense of unpredictability among international investors, arbitrators, and business executives as to the amount of deference …