Law and Economics Commons^™

Crops, Guns & Commerce: A Game Theoretical Critique Of Gonzales V. Raich, Maxwell L. Stearns

George Mason University School of Law Working Papers Series

In Gonzales v. Raich, the Supreme Court sustained an application of the Controlled Substances Act (“CSA”), banning all private use of marijuana, as applied to two women who had cultivated or otherwise acquired marijuana for the treatment of severe pain pursuant to the California Compassionate Use Act. Writing for the majority, Justice Stevens placed Raich at the intersection of two landmark Commerce Clause precedents: Wickard v. Filburn, the notorious 1942 decision, which upheld a penalty under the Agriculture Adjustment Act of 1938 applied to a local farmer who violated his wheat quota but who had used the modest excess portion …

Principles Of Fairness For International Economic Treaties: Constructivism And Contractualism, John Linarelli

ExpressO

No legal system deserving of continued support can exist without an adequate theory of justice. This paper is about the elaboration of a theory of justice to underpin international economic law and international economic institutions. A world trade constitution cannot credibly exist without a clear notion of justice upon which to base a consensus. There is yet no consensus on the public reason underpinning the rules and the institutions. Economic efficiency concepts are widely used in the assessment of the welfare effects of world trade institutions and policies. Efficiency, however, is one of several standards that may be used, but …

How And Understanding Of The Second Personal Standpoint Can Change Our Understanding Of The Law: Hart's Unpublished Response To Exclusive Legal Positivism, Robin B. Kar

ExpressO

This Article describes recent developments in moral philosophy on the “second personal standpoint,” and argues that they will have important ramifications for legal thought. Moral, legal and political thinkers have, for some time now, understood important distinctions between the first personal perspective (of deliberation) and the third personal perspective (of observation, cause and effect), and have plumbed these distinctions to great effect in their thought. This distinction is, in fact, implicit the law and economics movement’s “rational actor” model of decision, which currently dominates much legal academic thought. Recent developments in value theory due to philosopher Stephen Darwall suggest, however, …

A Foundation For International Taxation: The Institutional Competence Of Nations, Eric T. Laity

ExpressO

This Article proposes a conceptual foundation for the field of international tax law. The Article refers to this foundation as the institutional competence of nations in global economic development. A nation’s institutional competence is its discretion to make decisions in pursuit of our collective goal of global economic development, discretion that is subject to a number of standards and limitations.

The Article constructs the institutional competence of nations in global economic development from institutional economics, simple game theory, and the literature on social norms. The Article expresses the institutional competence of nations through standards and limitations that reduce the abuse …

Strategic Judging Under The United States Sentencing Guidelines: Positive Political Theory And Evidence, Max M. Schanzenbach, Emerson Tiller

Public Law and Legal Theory Papers

We present a positive political theory of criminal sentencing and test it using data from the United States Sentencing Commission. The theory posits that, faced with appellate review, federal district court judges applying the Sentencing Guidelines strategically use "sentencing instruments" -- fact-based and law-based determinations made during the sentencing phase -- to maximize the judges' sentencing preferences subject to the Guideline’s constraints. Specifically, district court judges are more likely to use law-based departures when they share the same party ideology with the overseeing circuit court than when there is no party alignment between the two courts. Fact-based adjustments, on the …

Food Democracy Ii: Revolution Or Restoration?, Neil D. Hamilton

Journal of Food Law & Policy

Author's Note: This essay is a companion to the essay 'Food Democracy, "which appears in 9 Drake Journal of Agricultural Law 9 (2004). In that essay, the author discussed many of the progressive trends that are helping reshape America's food system. These trends have a common denominator in their reflection of the democratic tendencies of the American populace. The desire of an increasing number of consumers to eat better food and to have access to the information, choices, and alternatives that make better food available are helping drive shifts in food production and marketing. Accompanying these shifts are political and …

Are Public Sector Assets By Nature Insuitable For Financing Transnational Investments? , Lucien A. Rapp

ExpressO

Does the legal regime applicable to publicly owned assets constitute a policy instrument to protect public investment? In what way can this benefit public sector property ? Are the structures of the regime sufficiently well established to provide investors with enough certainty?

This paper aims to answer these questions by taking a trans-national perspective. The main concern is to resolve the problems of ownership or non-ownership of public sector assets in the context of financing trans-national investments.

This paper responds to this issue by examining (in two stages) the various consequences for trans-national investment; the first regarding the acquisition of …

Book Review, Jay M. Feinman

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

Book Review, Lee Anne Fennell

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

The North Korean Nuclear Crisis: Past Failures And Present Solutions, Morse Tan

ExpressO

North Korea has recently announced that it has developed nuclear weapons and has pulled out of the six-party talks. These events do not emerge out of a vacuum, and this article lends perspective based on an interdisciplinary lens that seeks to grapple with the complexities and provide constructive approaches based on this well-researched understanding. This article analyzes political, military, historical, legal and other angles of this international crisis.

Past dealings with North Korea have been unfruitful because other nations do not recognize the ties between North Korean acts and its ideology and objectives. For a satisfactory resolution to the current …

Why "Bad" Patents Survive In The Market And How Should We Change?--The Private And Social Costs Of Patents, Jay P. Kesan

ExpressO

In this paper, we formally demonstrate that incorrectly issued patents can survive in the market without judicial review, even when the invention is neither novel nor non-obvious. We support this contention by presenting a game theoretic model that studies the interaction between the patentee and an alleged infringer/challenger. Using this model, we demonstrate the impact of the transaction costs in the patent system at the administrative stage in the Patent Office and at the enforcement stage in the courts, and highlight the inability in our current system to mount effective challenges to improperly granted patents in the current system. We …

The Deep Structure Of Law And Morality, Robin B. Kar

ExpressO

This Article argues that morality and law share a deep and pervasive structure, an analogue of what Noam Chomsky calls the “deep structure” of language. This structure arises not to resolve linguistic problems of generativity, but rather from the fact that morality and law engage psychological adaptations with the same natural function: to allow us to resolve social contract problems flexibly. Drawing on and extending a number of contemporary insights from evolutionary psychology and evolutionary game theory, this Article argues that we resolve these problems by employing a particular class of psychological attitudes, which are neither simply belief-like states nor …

What Is A Tragedy Of The Commons? Overfishing And The Campaign Spending Problem, Shi-Ling Hsu

ExpressO

Over the thirty-seven years since its publication, Garden Hardin's "Tragedy of the Commons" has clearly become one of the most influential writings of all time. The tragedy of the commons is one of those rare scholarly ideas that has had an enormous impact in academia and is also commonly used outside of academia. In legal scholarship, the tragedy of the commons has been used to characterize a wide variety of resource problems, including intellectual property rights, overcrowding of telecommunications spectra, air and water pollution, and of course, the classic environmental commons problem, overfishing. But I suggest this embarrassment of citation …

World Trade Organization’S Identity Crisis: Institutional Legitimacy And Growth Potential In The Developing World, Jason Wiener

ExpressO

No abstract provided.

The Practical Soul Of Business Ethics: The Corporate Manager's Dilemma And The Social Teaching Of The Catholic Church, Leo L. Clarke, Bruce P. Frohnen, Edward C. Lyons

Seattle University Law Review

This Article focuses on and attempts to dispel an overly narrow view of the moral responsibilities of corporations and their managers. Many businessmen and lawyers, relying on prevailing approaches to business ethics, labor under the misperception that the moral ladder in the business world has only one rung: "Be honest." Americans, however, should, can and do expect more from the managers of our large corporations, and virtually every Fortune 100 company publicly espouses a "social responsibility" far exceeding mere honesty. Further, as is demonstrated, American jurisprudence is consistent with those expectations. This Article's thesis is that Catholic Social Teaching provides …

Legal Durability, Omri Ben-Shahar

Articles

This paper develops a framework to study the effects of the durability of legal allocation decisions, such as trial outcomes, regulatory enactments and property entitlements. For a party favored by the legal allocation, a more durable decision is also more costly to secure, ex-ante. Thus, it is not the greater durability of the allocation that determines whether the “winner” is better-off, but other factors that are affected by the durability attribute, such as the cost of securing a favorable outcome and the ability of contesting parties to affect this cost. The paper develops conditions under which greater durability is irrelevant, …

Good Faith In The Cisg: Interpretation Problems In Article 7, Benedict C. Sheehy

ExpressO

ABSTRACT: This article examines the dispute concerning the meaning of Good Faith in the CISG. Although there are good reasons for arguing a more limited interpretation or more limited application of Good Faith, there are also good reasons for a broader approach. Regardless of the correct interpretation, however, practitioners and academics need to have a sense of where the actual jurisprudence is going. This article reviews every published case on Article 7 since its inception and concludes that while there is little to suggest a strong pattern is developing, a guided pattern while incorrect doctrinally is preferable to the current …

“Politics As Markets” Reconsidered: Economic Theory, Competitive Democracy And Primary Ballot Access , David N. Schleicher

ExpressO

No abstract provided.

What Is Fiscal Responsibility? Long-Term Deficits, Generational Accounting, And Capital Budgeting, Neil H. Buchanan

Rutgers Law School (Newark) Faculty Papers

This article assesses three basic approaches to assessing the future effects of the government’s fiscal policies: traditional measures of the deficit, measures associated with Generational Accounting, and measures derived from applying Capital Budgeting to the federal accounts. I conclude that Capital Budgeting is the best of the three approaches and that Generational Accounting is the least helpful. Acknowledging that there might be some value in learning what we can from a variety of approaches to analyzing fiscal policy, I nevertheless conclude that Generational Accounting is actually a misleading or--at best--empty measure of future fiscal developments. The best approach to providing …

The Law Of Duress And The Economics Of Credible Threats, Oren Bar-Gill, Omri Ben-Shahar

Articles

This paper argues that enforcement of an agreement, reached under a threat to refrain from dealing, should be conditioned solely on the threat's credibility. When a credible threat exists, enforcement promotes social welfare and the threatened party's interests. If agreements backed by credible threats were not enforceable, the threatening party would not extort them and would instead refrain from deaing-to the threatened party's detriment. The doctrine of duress, which invalidates such agreements, hurts the coerced party. By denying enforcement when a credible threat exists, the duress doctrine precludes the threatened party from making the commitment necessary to reach agreement. Paradoxically, …

Social Security Reform: An Expository Report, Nathan J. Voss

Honors Capstones

Capstone submitted as a graduation requirement for the BSU Honors Program.

Pragmatism Regained, Christopher Kutz

Michigan Law Review

Jules Coleman's The Practice of Principle serves as a focal point for current, newly intensified debates in legal theory, and provides some of the deepest, most sustained reflections on methodology that legal theory has seen. Coleman is one of the leading legal philosophers in the Anglo-American world, and his writings on tort theory, contract theory, the normative foundations of law and economics, social choice theory, and analytical jurisprudence have been the point of departure for much of the most interesting activity in the field for the last three decades. Indeed, the origin of this book lies in Oxford University's invitation …

Deterrence: The Legitimate Function Of The Public Tort, Thomas C. Galligan, Jr.

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Cost-Benefit Default Principles, Cass R. Sunstein

Michigan Law Review

Courts should be reluctant to apply the literal terms of a statute to mandate pointless expenditures of effort. . .. Unless Congress has been extraordinarily rigid, there is likely a basis for an implication of de minimis authority to provide exemption when the burdens of regulation yield a gain of trivial or no value. It seems bizarre that a statute intended to improve human health would .. . lock the agency into looking at only one half of a substance's health effects in determining the maximum level for that substance. [I]t is only where there is "clear congressional intent to …

Three Faces Of Private Property, Michael A. Heller

Articles

Private property is a rather elusive concept. Any kid knows what it means for something to be mine or yours, but grownup legal theorists get flustered when they try to pin down the term. Typically they, actually we, turn to a familiar analytic toolkit: including, for example, Blackstone's image of private property as "sole and despotic dominion"; Hardin's metaphor of the "tragedy of the commons"; and, more generally, the division of ownership into a trilogy of private, commons, and state forms. While each analytic tool has a distinguished pedigree and certain present usefulness, each also imposes a cost because it …

Bankruptcy Reorganization: Legal Dynamics Associated With Economic Discontinuity, Young Rock Noh

LLM Theses and Essays

This thesis attempts to discover the factors leading to such failures and to propose a cure. It argues that the basic structure of Chapter 11 of the Code, the debtor in possession structure, is one of the essential factors causing such a high rate of failure. The thesis further asserts that it is possible to reduce the rate of unsuccessful reorganization if the bankruptcy court exercises its power of case management more actively and expeditiously. For example, the court can screen the debtors' filing for relief before the reorganization case proceeds too far. Chapter II of this thesis examines the …

A Presumption Of Innocence, Not Of Even Odds, Richard D. Friedman

Articles

Now I know how the Munchkins felt. Here I have been, toiling in the fields of Evidenceland for some years, laboring along with others to show how use of Bayesian probability theory can assist in the analysis and understanding of evidentiary problems.' In doing so, we have had to wage continuous battle against the Bayesioskeptics-the wicked witches who deny much value, even heuristic value, for probability theory in evidentiary analysis.2 Occasionally, I have longed for law-and-economics scholars to help work this field, which should be fertile ground for them.3 So imagine my delight when the virtual personification of law and …

A New Economic Theory Of Regulation: Rent Extraction Rather Than Rent Creation, Douglas Ginsburg

Michigan Law Review

Once upon a time, people believed that the government regulated various indus tries in "the public interest." The idea was that certain conditions, such as "natural monopoly" or the ability to externalize significant costs, caus ed markets to fail and governments to step in to correct that failure. Econmnic regulation predicated upon market failure can be dated conveniently to the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, in which the Congress established the Inters tate Commerce Commission to regulate railroads in the interests of shippers, principally farmers and small businesses. The legal notion of "affectation with the public interest" dates back much …

The Tentative Case Against Flexibility In Commercial Law, Omri Ben-Shahar

Articles

Well-rooted in modern commercial law is the idea that the law and the obligations that it enforces should reflect the empirical reality of the relationship between the contracting parties. The Uniform Commercial Code ("Code") champions this tradition by viewing the performance practices formed among the parties throughout their interaction as a primary source for interpreting and supplementing their explicit contracts. The generous recognition of waiver and modifications, as well as the binding force the Code accords to course of performance, course of dealings, and customary trade usages, effectively permits unwritten commercial practices to vary and to erode explicit contractual provisions.

Revitalizing Environmental Federalism, Daniel C. Esty

Michigan Law Review

Politicians from Speaker Newt Gingrich to President Bill Clinton, cheered on by academics such as Richard Revesz, are eagerly seeking to return authority over environmental regulation to the states. In the European Union, localist opponents of environmental decisionmaking in Brussels rally under the banner of "subsidiarity." And in debates over international trade liberalization, demands abound for the protection of "national sovereignty" in environmental regulation. All of these efforts presume that a decentralized approach to environmental policy will yield better results than more centralized programs. This presumption is misguided. While the character of some environmental concerns warrants a preference for local …