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Full-Text Articles in Law
Prosecutorial Discretion And Environmental Crime Redux: Charging Trends, Aggravating Factors, And Individual Outcome Data For 2005-2014, David M. Uhlmann
Prosecutorial Discretion And Environmental Crime Redux: Charging Trends, Aggravating Factors, And Individual Outcome Data For 2005-2014, David M. Uhlmann
Law & Economics Working Papers
In a 2014 article entitled “Prosecutorial Discretion and Environmental Crime,” I presented empirical data developed by student researchers participating in the Environmental Crimes Project at the University of Michigan Law School. My 2014 article reported that 96 percent of defendants investigated by the United States Environmental Protection Agency and charged with federal environmental crimes from 2005 through 2010 engaged in conduct that involved at least one of the aggravating factors identified in my previous scholarship, namely significant harm, deceptive or misleading conduct, operating outside the regulatory system, and repetitive violations. On that basis, I concluded that prosecutors charged violations that …
The Limits Of Performance-Based Regulation, Cary Coglianese
The Limits Of Performance-Based Regulation, Cary Coglianese
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform
Performance-based regulation is widely heralded as a superior approach to regulation. Rather than specifying the actions regulated entities must take, performance-based regulation instead requires the attainment of outcomes and gives flexibility in how to meet them. Despite nearly universal acclaim for performance-based regulation, the reasons supporting its use remain largely theoretical and conjectural. Owing in part to a lack of a clear conceptual taxonomy, researchers have yet to produce much empirical research documenting the strengths and weaknesses of performance-based regulation. In this Article, I provide a much-needed conceptual framework for understanding and assessing performance-based regulation. After defining performance-based regulation and …
Regulating Secondary Markets In The High Frequency Age: A Principled And Coordinated Approach, Michael Morelli
Regulating Secondary Markets In The High Frequency Age: A Principled And Coordinated Approach, Michael Morelli
Michigan Business & Entrepreneurial Law Review
Technological developments in securities markets, most notably high frequency trading, have fundamentally changed the structure and nature of trading over the past 50 years. Policymakers both domestically and abroad now face many new challenges impacting the secondary market’s effectiveness as a generator of economic growth and stability. Faced with these rapid structural changes, many are quick to denounce high frequency trading as opportunistic and parasitic. This article, however, instead argues that while high frequency trading presents certain general risks to secondary market efficiency, liquidity, stability, and integrity, the practice encompasses a wide variety of strategies, many of which can enhance, …
Incentive Regulation, New Business Models, And The Transformation Of The Electric Power Industry, Inara Scott
Incentive Regulation, New Business Models, And The Transformation Of The Electric Power Industry, Inara Scott
Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law
The electric utility sector is in the midst of paradigmatic change. Market forces include decreased load growth, technological advances in distributed energy resources, pressures for decarbonization, and demands for increased efficiency and new utility services. Meanwhile, as the utility monopoly is undermined and profits slow, financial analysts signal increasing risk to potential utility investors. Suggestions for transforming the existing regulatory structure abound. At the broadest level, such proposals reflect an established divide between energy policy, which traditionally focuses on economics and markets, and environmental law, which is based in the protection of natural resources and ecosystems. To marry the two …
Economic Solutions To Nuclear Energy's Financial Challenges, Zachary Robock
Economic Solutions To Nuclear Energy's Financial Challenges, Zachary Robock
Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law
This Note presents a legal, economic, and regulatory roadmap to drive long-term innovation in sustainable energy generation. Next-generation nuclear power, which fundamentally mitigates many safety and nuclear waste issues, is the focus of this Note; however, the economic concepts can be applied to encourage solar, wind, advanced battery, and other sustainable technologies with high upfront costs and low long-term variable costs. Advanced nuclear energy generation is economically competitive on a long-term levelized cost basis, but suffers from a timing issue—a large amount of capital is needed upfront, with repayment over several decades, during which time significant capital costs can accrue …
Valuing Spectrum Allocations, Thomas W. Hazlett, Michael Honig
Valuing Spectrum Allocations, Thomas W. Hazlett, Michael Honig
Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review
Observing trends in which Wi-Fi and Bluetooth have become widely popular, some argue that unlicensed allocations hosting such wireless technologies are increasingly valuable and that administrative spectrum allocations should shift accordingly. We challenge that policy conclusion. A core issue is that the social value of a given spectrum allocation is widely assumed to equal the gains of the applications it is likely to host. This thinking is faulty, as vividly seen in what we deem the Broadcast TV Spectrum Valuation Fallacy – the idea that because wireless video, or broadcast network programs are popular, TV channels are efficiently defined. This …
The Perverse Effects Of Subsidized Weather Insurance, Omri Ben-Shahar, Kyle D. Logue
The Perverse Effects Of Subsidized Weather Insurance, Omri Ben-Shahar, Kyle D. Logue
Articles
This Article explores the role of insurance as a substitute for direct regulation of risks posed by severe weather. In pricing the risk of human activity along the predicted path of storms, insurance can provide incentives for efficient location decisions as well as for cost-justified mitigation efforts in building construction and infrastructure. Currently, however, much insurance for severe-weather risks is provided and heavily subsidized by the government. This Article demonstrates two primary distortions arising from the government’s dominance in these insurance markets. First, existing government subsidies are allocated differentially across households, resulting in a significant regressive redistribution favoring affluent homeowners …
In Praise Of (Some) Ex Post Regulation: A Response To Professor Galle, Kyle D. Logue
In Praise Of (Some) Ex Post Regulation: A Response To Professor Galle, Kyle D. Logue
Articles
According to modern law-and-economics (“L&E”) orthodoxy, the primary—maybe even the only—legitimate justification for government regulation is to correct a market failure. This conclusion is based on two key assumptions. First, when markets are functioning reasonably well, they are better at achieving efficiency than the government is. Second, most markets function reasonably well most of the time. Although there is probably evidence to support these assumptions (for example, the relative prosperity of market-based economies in comparison with the relative poverty of centrally planned economies), both assumptions are usually taken as articles of faith by mainstream L&E scholars. This is why scholarly …
Our Not-So-Great Depression, Craig Green
Our Not-So-Great Depression, Craig Green
Michigan Law Review
A Failure of Capitalism by Richard Posner is not a great book, and it does not pretend to be one. Posner summarizes the economic crisis of 2008-09 and considers proposals to reduce current suffering and avoid future recurrence (p. xvi). But when the book's final edits were made in February 2009, it was still too soon for authoritative solutions or full accounts of what had happened. Instead, Posner wrote a conspicuously contemporary-and thus incomplete-description of the crisis as it looked to him at the time (p. xvii). Now one year later, readers may need a reminder about the value of …
Has Corporate Law Failed? Addressing Proposals For Reform, Antony Page
Has Corporate Law Failed? Addressing Proposals For Reform, Antony Page
Michigan Law Review
Part I of this Review discusses the modem "nexus of contracts" approach to corporations and highlights how Greenfield's views differ. Part II examines corporate goals and purposes, suggesting that Greenfield overstates the impact of the shareholder-primacy norm and does not offer a preferable alternative. Part III critiques the means to the ends--Greenfield's proposals for changing the mechanics of corporate governance. Although several of his proposals are intriguing, they seem unlikely to achieve their pro-social aims. This Review remains skeptical, in part because-even given its problems-the U.S. "director-centric governance structure has created the most successful economy the world has ever seen." …
The Ghost Of Telecommunications Past, Philip J. Weiser
The Ghost Of Telecommunications Past, Philip J. Weiser
Michigan Law Review
When the canon for the field of information law and policy is developed, Paul Starr's The Creation of the Media will enjoy a hallowed place in it. Like Lawrence Lessig's masterful Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Starr's tour de force explains how policymakers have made a series of "constitutive choices" about how to regulate different information technologies that helped to shape the basic architecture of the information age. In so doing, Starr displays the same literary and analytical skill he used in writing the Pulitzer Prizewinning The Social Transformation of American Medicine, the firsthand experience he gained …
A Critique Of The Proposed National Tobacco Resolution And A Suggested Alternative, Jon D. Hanson, Kyle D. Logue
A Critique Of The Proposed National Tobacco Resolution And A Suggested Alternative, Jon D. Hanson, Kyle D. Logue
Articles
The first criticism is that the proposed resolution would not require manufacturers and, in tum, consumers to pay anything approaching the true total costs of cigarettes, costs that we estimate to be at least $7 per pack, a number that is considerably higher than other estimates that have been reported in the media. Our estimate includes some, but not all, of the costs borne ultimately by smokers themselves, by smokers' insurers, and by individuals injured by second-hand smoke. It includes only future costs and excludes many of those. So, for example, the figure includes neither the health-care costs that have …
Smokers' Compensation: Toward A Blueprint For Federal Regulation Of Cigarette Manufacturers, Jon D. Hanson, Kyle D. Logue, Michael S. Zamore
Smokers' Compensation: Toward A Blueprint For Federal Regulation Of Cigarette Manufacturers, Jon D. Hanson, Kyle D. Logue, Michael S. Zamore
Articles
Although nothing is certain in Washington, sweeping federal legislation in the cigarette area is more likely now than has ever been the case. Congress is currently considering several proposals for comprehensive federal regulation of the cigarette market, a market that has until now gone largely untouched by government intervention. Among those proposals, the one that has received the most attention, and the one that in fact motivated policy makers to look anew at the problems posed by cigarettes, is the proposed national tobacco resolution (the "Proposed Resolution"). The Proposed Resolution, which has been advanced by a coalition of state attorneys …