Law Commons^™

Decentralized Finance Oracles, Lucia Suarez Barcia

Journal of New Finance

Financial markets have recently suffered from an increased interest of users of cryptocurrencies and decentralized finance solutions. Although Decentralized Finance (DeFi) has been designed based on smart contracts and leave out third-party intermediaries, these platforms sometimes require information from the outside world, such as exchange rates or prices. DeFi Oracles are the link solution between the on-chain world and the off-chain universe. This article describes the oracles, including taxonomy, governance and use cases. Thereafter, it considers their potential and, at the same time, addresses the possible risk that they present, which could impact the future DeFi space.

Standards And The Law, Cary Coglianese

All Faculty Scholarship

The world of standards and the world of laws are often seen as separate, but they are more closely intertwined than many professionals working with laws or standards realize. Although standards are typically considered to be voluntary and non-binding, they can intersect with and affect the law in numerous ways. They can serve as benchmarks for determine liability in tort or contract. They can facilitate domestic and international transactions. They can prompt negotiations over the licensing of patents. They can govern the development of forensic evidence admissible in criminal courts. And standards can even become binding law themselves when they …

Strengthening A One Health Approach To Emerging Zoonoses, Samira Mubareka, John Amuasi, Arinjay Banerjee, Hélène Carabin, Joe Copper Jack, Claire Jardine, Bogdan Jaroszewicz, Greg Keefe, Jonathon Kotwa, Susan Kutz, Deborah Mcgregor, Anne Mease, Lily Nicholson, Katarzyna Nowak, Brad Pickering, Maureen Reed, Johanne Saint-Charles, Katarzyna Simonienko, Trevor Smith, J. Scott Weese, E. Jane Parmley

Articles & Book Chapters

Given the enormous global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, outbreaks of highly pathogenic avian influenza in Canada, and manifold other zoonotic pathogen activity, there is a pressing need for a deeper understanding of the human-animal-environment interface and the intersecting biological, ecological, and societal factors contributing to the emergence, spread, and impact of zoonotic diseases. We aim to apply a One Health approach to pressing issues related to emerging zoonoses, and propose a functional framework of interconnected but distinct groups of recommendations around strategy and governance, technical leadership (operations), equity, education and research for a One Health approach and Action Plan …

International Law In The Boardroom, Kishanthi Parella

Scholarly Articles

Conventional wisdom expects that international law will proceed through a “state pathway” before regulating corporations: it binds national governments that then bind corporations. But recent corporate practices confound this story. American corporations complied with international laws even when the state pathway broke down. This unexpected compliance leads to three questions: How did corporations comply? Why did they do so? Who enforced international law? These questions are important for two reasons. First, many international laws depend on corporate cooperation in order to succeed. Second, the state pathway is not robust, then or now. It is therefore vital to identify alternatives to …

Governing Smart Cities As Knowledge Commons - Introduction, Chapter 1 & Conclusion, Brett M. Frischmann, Michael J. Madison, Madelyn Sanfilippo

Book Chapters

Smart city technology has its value and its place; it isn’t automatically or universally harmful. Urban challenges and opportunities addressed via smart technology demand systematic study, examining general patterns and local variations as smart city practices unfold around the world. Smart cities are complex blends of community governance institutions, social dilemmas that cities face, and dynamic relationships among information and data, technology, and human lives. Some of those blends are more typical and common. Some are more nuanced in specific contexts. This volume uses the Governing Knowledge Commons (GKC) framework to sort out relevant and important distinctions. The framework grounds …

Family Moves And The Future Of Public Education, Elizabeth Chu, James S. Liebman, Madeleine Sims, Tim Wang

Faculty Scholarship

State laws compel school-aged children to attend school while fully funding only public schools. Especially following the COVID-19 pandemic, this arrangement is under attack — from some for unconstitutionally coercing families to expose their children to non-neutral values to which they object and from others for ignoring the developmental needs of students, particularly students of color and in poverty whom public schools have long underserved. This Article argues that fully subsidized public education is constitutional as long as public schools fulfill their mission to model and commit people to liberal democratic values of tolerance and respect for all persons as …

Recommendations For Sustainable Tourism In Patagonia: An Exploratory Analysis Of Sustainable Tourism In Costa Rica, The Nordic Region, And Thailand’S Communities, Julia K. Lowery

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis explores different levels of governance and its role towards actualizing sustainable tourism in Patagonia. With the growing threat of climate change, international destinations such as Patagonia are looking to continue building their tourism industries in a sustainable way. Through analyzing case studies of national governance in Costa Rica, multi-national governance in the Nordic region, and community-based tourism in Thailand, we can better understand how each form of governance has the potential to create a sustainable tourism industry. With this understanding of successful governance in my case studies, as well as understanding the historical and political forces that have …

Jaminan Keamanan Data Pribadi Warga Negara Dalam Penyelenggaraan Urusan Pemerintahan Berbasis Elektronik (E-Government), Bunga Asoka Iswandari

"Dharmasisya” Jurnal Program Magister Hukum FHUI

Indonesia has now entered the industrial revolution 4.0 which has introduced many work system procedures and procedures that use technology. Technology is here to make it easier for humans to complete all work quickly and efficiently. Technology is also present in the government system in Indonesia. The growth and development of technology in Indonesia provides a great opportunity for the bureaucracy to be able to carry out reforms to deal with bureaucratic weaknesses so far. To make the implementation of the bureaucracy in Indonesia efficient and optimal with the help of technology, the government implements an electronic-based government system, also …

Insurance And Enterprise: Cyber Insurance For Ransomware, Tom Baker, Anja Shortland

All Faculty Scholarship

Selling insurance gives insurers an incentive to manage insured risks. The “insurance as governance” literature demonstrates that insurers often make insurance conditional on ex ante risk reduction or mitigation. But insurance governs in support of enterprise, not security for its own sake. Tight underwriting inhibits enterprise – not only for insured businesses but also the business of insurance. This paper highlights ex post loss reduction as a form of insurance-based governance. Drawing on interviews with industry insiders, we explore how insurers addressed the evolving problems of moral hazard, uncertainty, and correlated losses since the 1990s. We find that cyber insurance …

The Government Behind Insurance Governance: Lessons For Ransomware, Tom Baker, Anja Shortland

All Faculty Scholarship

The insurance as governance literature focuses on the ability of private enterprises to collectively regulate, pool, and distribute risks. This paper analyzes how governments support insurance markets to maintain insurability and limit risks to society. We propose a new conceptual framework grouping government interventions into three dimensions: regulation of risky activity, public investment in risk reduction, and co-insurance. We apply this framework to six case studies, describing insurance markets’ reliance on public support in more analytically precise terms. We analyze how mature insurance markets overcame insurability challenges akin to those currently presented by extortive cybercrime. Private governance struggled when markets …

Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (Spacs) And The Sec, Neal Newman, Lawrence J. Trautman

Faculty Scholarship

Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPACs) are simply enterprises that raise money from the public with the intention of purchasing an existing business and becoming publicly traded in the securities markets. If the SPAC is successful in raising money and the acquisition takes place, the target company takes the SPAC’s place on a stock exchange in a transaction that resembles a public offering. Also known as “blank-check” or “reverse merger” companies, this process avoids many of the pitfalls of a traditional initial public offering.

During late 2020 and 2021 an unprecedented surge in the popularity and issuance of Special Purpose Acquisition …

Pandemic Governance, Yanbai Andrea Wang, Justin Weinstein-Tull

All Faculty Scholarship

The COVID-19 pandemic created an unprecedented need for governance by a multiplicity of authorities. The nature of the pandemic—globally communicable, uncontrolled, and initially mysterious—required a coordinated response to a common problem. But the pandemic was superimposed atop our decentralized domestic and international governance structures, and the result was devastating: the United States has a death rate that is eighteenth highest in the world, and the pandemic has had dramatically unequal impacts across the country. COVID-19’s effects have been particularly destructive for communities of color, women, and intersectional populations.

This Article finds order in the chaos of the pandemic response by …

The Law Of Employee Data: Privacy, Property, Governance, Matthew T. Bodie

Indiana Law Journal

The availability of data related to the employment relationship has ballooned into an unruly mass of performance metrics, personal characteristics, biometric recordings, and creative output. The law governing this collection of information has been awkwardly split between privacy regulations and intellectual property rights, with employees generally losing on both ends. This Article rejects a binary approach that either carves out private spaces ineffectually or renders data into isolated pieces of ownership. Instead, the law should implement a hybrid system that provides workers with continuing input and control without blocking efforts at joint production. In addition, employers should have fiduciary responsibilities …

The Covid–19 Pandemic Highlighted The Need For Mandated Esg Disclosures: Now What?, Nicholas P. Mack

University of Miami Business Law Review

This is not simply your run–of–the–mill COVID–19 article. Instead, this article highlights a salient issue that has been right in front of our eyes this whole time and COVID–19 simply took our blinders off. ESG—short for environmental, social, and governance—is gaining significant momentum both at the firm level and in investment strategy, yet the SEC is trailing behind in ensuring the market is adequately informed of firms’ ESG information. It is important to note that the COVID–19 pandemic initially threw the market into an unanticipated downward spiral; however, many ESG funds still managed to outperform the market in the midst …

Distributed Governance Of Medical Ai, W. Nicholson Price Ii

Law & Economics Working Papers

Artificial intelligence (AI) promises to bring substantial benefits to medicine. In addition to pushing the frontiers of what is humanly possible, like predicting kidney failure or sepsis before any human can notice, it can democratize expertise beyond the circle of highly specialized practitioners, like letting generalists diagnose diabetic degeneration of the retina. But AI doesn’t always work, and it doesn’t always work for everyone, and it doesn’t always work in every context. AI is likely to behave differently in well-resourced hospitals where it is developed than in poorly resourced frontline health environments where it might well make the biggest difference …

Distributed Governance Of Medical Ai, W. Nicholson Price Ii

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to democratize expertise in medicine, bring expertise previously limited to specialists to a variety of health-care settings. But AI can easily falter, and making sure that AI works well across that variety of settings is a challenging task. Centralized governance, such as review by the Food and Drug Administration, can only do so much, since system performance will depend on the particular health-care setting and how the AI system is integrated into setting-specific clinical workflows. This Essay presents the need for distributed governance, where some oversight tasks are undertaken in localized settings. It points …

Nonprofit Board Composition, Atinuke O. Adediran

Faculty Scholarship

This Article addresses a critical gap in the literature and current debates about the composition of nonprofit boards. The law of fiduciary duties and nonprofit governance best practices do not provide sufficient guidance on how to compose boards to empower the communities they serve. And even as the corporate sector is seizing on current important moments to debate the inclusion of employees and racial and ethnic minorities on corporate boards, nonprofit boards are largely left out of these debates. The Article introduces the concept of board capital, which originated from the for-profit management literature, but has gained a stronghold in …

Global Scripts In Transnational Legal Orders And Governance, Susan Block-Lieb

Faculty Scholarship

Global scripts—the rules, norms, and standards in international texts, and the tacit assumptions that surround and give meaning to them—exist on numerous issues (finance, trade, economic development, climate change, education, human rights, and gender equality), at every level of engagement (international, national, local), and at every phase of recursive norm construction and contestation. Case studies involving global scripts appear across a wide range of scholarship—considering sociological, anthropological, or sociolegal perspectives, or on international political economy, international organizations, international relations, or law and development—but because they are focused on one piece of the puzzle at a time, variation exists regarding the …

Education Policy Reform In Ghana And The Role Of Avatime Traditional Leaders, Hubert Kwami Akrong

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

AbstractWith declining academic standards in Ghana, public attention has been focused on education policies. In 1992, the amended constitution excluded traditional village leaders from being involved in formulating education policies in Ghana. The exclusion of grassroots leaders from education policy reform resulted in low expectations and poor student outcomes in the towns and villages of Ghana’s Avatime Traditional Area. This case study was an investigation into how traditional chiefs in the Avatime Traditional Area participate in democratic governance to improve education in the region. Joshee and Goldberg’s social justice theory in policy making was used to ground the study. Data …

The Kind Of Solution A Smart City Is: Knowledge Commons And Postindustrial Pittsburgh, Michael J. Madison

Book Chapters

This case study brings new attention to a critical but under-appreciated dimension of so-called “smart” cities: how smart city governance builds and relies on institutionalized sharing of data, information, and other forms of knowledge across all sectors of public administration. Those smart city practices are referred to here as knowledge commons and systematized using the Governing Knowledge Commons (GKC) research framework. That framework extends and modifies Ostrom’s research tradition as to community-based resource governance. As with other GKC-focused research, this work relies on a qualitative case study. It draws a detailed, context-specific portrait of a smart city as knowledge commons …

A Pandemic Instrument Can Start Turning Collective Problems Into Collective Solutions By Governing The Common-Pool Resource Of Antimicrobial Effectiveness, Isaac Weldon, Kathy Liddell, Susan Rogers Van Katwyk, Steven J. Hoffman, Timo Minssen, Kevin Outterson, Stephanie Palmer, A. M. Viens, Jorge Viñuales

Faculty Scholarship

To address the complex challenge of global antimicrobial resistance (AMR), a pandemic treaty should include mechanisms that 1) equitably address the access gap for antimicrobials, diagnostic technologies, and alternative therapies; 2) equitably conserve antimicrobials to sustain effectiveness and access across time and space; 3) equitably finance the investment, discovery, development, and distribution of new technologies; and 4) equitably finance and establish greater upstream and midstream infection prevention measures globally. Biodiversity, climate, and nuclear governance offer lessons for addressing these challenges.

Transformative Governance Of Biodiversity: Insights For Sustainable Development, J. Visseren-Hamakers Ingrid, Jona Razzaque, Pamela Mcelwee, Esther Turnhout, Eszter Kelemen, Graciela M. Rusch, Álvaro Fernández-Llamazares, Ivis Chan, Michelle Mei Ling Lim, Et Al.

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

While there is much debate on transformative change among academics and policymakers, the discussion on how to govern such change is still in its infancy. This article argues that transformative governance is needed to enable the transformative change necessary for achieving global sustainability goals. Based on a literature review, the article unpacks this concept of transformative governance. It is: integrative, to ensure local solutions also have sustainable impacts elsewhere (across scales, places, issues and sectors); inclusive, to empower those whose interests are currently not being met and represent values embodying transformative change for sustainability; adaptive, enabling learning, experimentation, and reflexivity, …

How To Make The Perfect Citizen? Lessons From China's Social Credit System, Liav Orgad, Wessel Reijers

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

"How to make the perfect citizen?" This has been one of the questions driving the construction of the Chinese Social Credit System: a technology-driven project that aims to assess, evaluate, and steer the behavior of Chinese citizens. After presenting social credit systems in China's public and private sectors (Part II), the Article provides normative standards to distinguish the Chinese system from comparable systems in liberal democracies (Part III). It then discusses the concept of civic virtue, as implemented by the Social Credit System, claiming that it creates a new form of governance, "cybernetic citizenship," which fundamentally changes the essence of …

The Reality Of Applying Governance Within The Criteria Of Quality Assurance At Schools Of Sport Science At Jordanian Universities, Sari Ahmad Hamdan, Fatima Marof Al-Khrisat

Al-Balqa Journal for Research and Studies البلقاء للبحوث والدراسات

This study examines the reality of applying governance within The Criteria of Quality Assurance at schools of Sport Science at Jordanian Universities from their members perspective. It also aims at finding out the differences in the schools' members perspective. The sample of the study consisted of (86) school members who work in (University of Jordan, Yarmouk University, Mu'tah University, Hashemite University, and Al-Ahliyya Amman University). To achieve the objectives of the study, the Descriptive approach was used. The results showed that the reality of applying governance came to a high degree, and they were statistically significant in the perspective of …

What Is "United" About The United States?, Gary S. Lawson

Faculty Scholarship

Jack Balkin’s The Cycles of Constitutional Time aims, among other things, to preserve and promote what Jack regards as “democracy and republicanism,” understood as “a joint enterprise by citizens and their representatives to pursue and promote the public good.” My question is whether and how this normative project is possible in a world full of perceptions of social, political, and moral phenomena akin to the white dress/blue dress internet controversy of 2015. Even if Madison had the better of Montesquieu in 1788 (and that is questionable), the United States has grown dramatically since the founding era, in a patchwork, and …

Peran Negara D Alam Menjaga Kedaulatan Pada Ruang Maya (Cyberspace) Sebagai Upaya Perlindungan Terhadap Masyarakat, Nurharis Wijaya

"Dharmasisya” Jurnal Program Magister Hukum FHUI

Development of Internet technology has the potential to boost economic growth of a country. On the other hand, Internet technology also increases the amount and form of threat to the sovereignty of a state in the virtual world. Sovereignty in cyberspace become an important topic in the discussion of national and international security. In the context of the definition of space was no longer relevant in the light confined to the Regional Land, Sea, and Air. Developments Period increasingly cradles State with indulgence will ease in accessing information technology, which is certainly without successfully taking on the role that space-Maya …

Delegation At The Founding, Julian Davis Mortenson, Nicholas Bagley

Articles

This article refutes the claim that the Constitution was originally understood to contain a nondelegation doctrine. The founding generation didn’t share anything remotely approaching a belief that the constitutional settlement imposed restrictions on the delegation of legislative power---let alone by empowering the judiciary to police legalized limits. To the contrary, the overwhelming majority of Founders didn’t see anything wrong with delegations as a matter of legal theory. The formal account just wasn’t that complicated: Any particular use of coercive rulemaking authority could readily be characterized as the exercise of either executive or legislative power, and was thus formally valid regardless …

Transparency For Whom? Grounding Land Investment Transparency In The Needs Of Local Actors, Sam Szoke-Burke

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

Transparency is often seen as a means of improving governance and accountability of investment, but its potential to do so is hindered by vague definitions and failures to focus on the needs of key local actors.

In this new report focusing on agribusiness, forestry, and renewable energy projects (“land investments”), CCSI grounds transparency in the needs of project-affected communities and other local actors. Transparency efforts that seek to inform and empower communities can also help governments, companies, and other actors to more effectively manage operational risk linked to social conflict.

Troublingly, the report finds that:

• Disclosures around land investments continue …

Transparency Of Land-Based Investments: Cameroon Country Snapshot, Sam Szoke-Burke, Samuel Nguiffo, Stella Tchoukep

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

Despite a recent transparency law and participation in transparency initiatives, Cameroon’s investment environment remains plagued by poor transparency.

In a new report focusing on agribusiness projects in Cameroon, CCSI and the Centre pour l’Environnement et le Développement (CED) find that:

• Communities continue to be excluded from decision-making around investments.
• The government pursues a top-down approach to concession allocation and remains reluctant to recognize all legitimate tenure rights.
• The government faces threats to its legitimacy as the grievances of citizens and investors alike lead to the barring of roads by communities and investor withdrawals.

CCSI and CED therefore call for:

• A …

An Fsoc For Continuous Public Investment: The National Reconstruction And Development Council, Robert Hockett

Michigan Business & Entrepreneurial Law Review

The crisis our nation presently faces does not stem from COVID-19 alone. That was the match. The kindling was that we have forgotten for decades that “national development” both (a) is perpetual, and (b) requires national action to guide it, facilitate it, and keep it inclusive.

Hamilton and Gallatin, Wilson and Hoover and Roosevelt all understood this and built institutions to operationalize it. Although the institutions were imperfectly operated, they were soundly conceived and designed. Abandoning these truths and institutions these past fifty years has degenerated not only our public health but also our nation’s industrial and infrastructural muscle to …