Law and Economics Commons^™

Constitutional Law - State Control Of Interstate Migration Of Indigents, Edward W. Adams

Michigan Law Review

The interstate migration of persons presents the United States with one of its most acute economic and social problems and carries in its wake a series of significant legal questions. Of paramount importance is the constitutional question whether the migration of indigents is subject to state control. To lend understanding to this problem, attention will be called first to the basic economic and social urges underlying interstate migration and second to the position of the indigent as defined by traditional legal concepts. To complete the discussion, suggestions will be offered for corrective federal legislation.

Douglas On Democracy And Finance -- A Review, Arthur A. Ballantine

Michigan Law Review

A book by a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States would be important under any circumstances. Such a publication is of special significance when its author is the youngest member of the Court, with many years of service ahead, and is endowed with unusual character, ability and earnestness of purpose. In these days of change such a book supplies valuable insight into the mental processes and attitude that will enter deeply into the shaping of our institutions.

The Constitution And A "Planned Economy", Henry Rottschaefer

Michigan Law Review

A little more than a decade has passed since the collapse of the wildest speculative orgy ever indulged in by a nation not markedly given to underestimating its own economic and financial potentialities. It came at a time when the conjuncture of world-wide economic forces combined with almost world-wide unsound practices in the fields of international trade and finance had created an extremely unstable economic situation throughout the world. It would require a degree of optimism as large as that entertained by the speculative community during the "boom period" to believe that the measures and policies adopted and followed during …

Dicey's Law Of The Constitution: A Review, William A. Robson

Michigan Law Review

The first edition of this celebrated work appeared in 1885; and such was its vogue until ten or fifteen years ago that there is scarcely anyone over thirty-five years of age who studied law, politics or constitutional history at a university or professional law school in England and the British Dominions who was not "brought up" on Dicey. "Dicey on the Constitution" was regarded for generations not merely as a perfect, accurate and comprehensive statement of the principles of the British system of government; but also as a reliable explanation of its superior virtues and liberties. The book attained an …

Constitutional Law - Mortgages - Moratoria On The Way Out?, Elbridge D. Phelps

Michigan Law Review

As a general proposition, one might perhaps feel prone to quarrel with the statement that "history repeats itself," but there can be little doubt that it applies full well to legislation aimed at relieving hard-pressed debtors in times of financial crises. From our earliest American history, every economic "winter" has provoked a landslide of pro-debtor legislation. Nor have mortgage debtors been overlooked in this regard. The remedies suggested have been as varied and ingenious as human minds could concoct. A brief review of the past decisions indicates that when they could be said to impair the obligation of contract, such …

The Public Interest Concept In Law And In Economics, Robert W. Harbeson

Michigan Law Review

It is an interesting and perhaps important coincidence that only a year previous to the famous decision in Nebbia v. New York there appeared two volumes which together constitute an equally notable landmark in the development of economic doctrine, Professor Edward Chamberlin's Theory of Monopolistic Competition and Mrs. Joan Robinson's Economics of Imperfect Competition. While there is no evidence that the latter works influenced the outcome of the Nebbia case, the writer is of the opinion that these studies not only afford a rationale of that decision but also make desirable a re-examination of the concept of "businesses affected …

Constitutional Law - Validity Of Mortgage Moratorium Act - Effect Of Lapse Of Time On "Emergency'' Legislation, Ralph Winkler

Michigan Law Review

A mortgage moratorium law was enacted in Nebraska in 1933. It was re-enacted in 1935 and again in 1937. The act recited that an emergency existed and that the law was adopted to provide for this condition. The instant case involved the constitutionality of this law. A majority of the court held that the law violated the due process clause and the contracts clause of the state constitution. While the court admitted that "land values have not been restored to the prices they had attained prior to March 1, 1934," nevertheless, "It appears that there is no crisis now prevailing …

Basic Monetary Conceptions In Law, Arthur Nussbaum

Michigan Law Review

While in various periods of American legal history American courts have been confronted with problems of a monetary character, the importance and multiplicity of these questions have never been more strongly felt than within the last few years, and there is certainly no indication that this situation will change in the near future. The jural difficulties arising from monetary troubles are unusual, not only because of their financial and social implications, but also because of their theoretical intricacies. No wonder, therefore, that arguments advanced by courts in cases of a monetary nature are very often highly unsatisfactory. Again and again, …

The Effect Of Inflation On Private Contracts: United States, 1861-1879, John P. Dawson, Frank E. Cooper

Michigan Law Review

The Northern inflation coincided almost exactly in its early stages with the inflation in the South, and was produced by the same basic factor - a budgetary deficit due to war expenditure. The financial mobilization of the North was handicapped at the outset by a deficit inherited from the previous administration and by an impaired national credit. The prompt response of the Northern banks enabled the Treasury to overcome this initial handicap and to finance the greatly increased expenditure through the early months of the war. How long orthodox methods of borrowing would have sufficed has been ever since a …

Contracting By Reference To Price Indices, John P. Dawson, James Will Coultrap

Michigan Law Review

The commodity price index number has been defined as a "figure which shows the average percentage change in the prices of a number of representative goods from one point of time to another." In the preceding article it has been argued that the use of the index number in private contracts as a method of expressing stable values is not prohibited by the gold-clause resolution of June 5, 1933; that in the decisions of the United States Supreme Court sustaining this legislation there is nothing to indicate that such contracts would run counter to the Government's policies in the control …

The Gold Clause Decisions, John P. Dawson

Michigan Law Review

The gold clause decisions of February 18, 1935, have already taken their place among the great landmarks of American constitutional history. They have given a partial answer to some basic questions of constitutional law. Directly they have disposed of claims amounting to a total of many billions of dollars. But their further implications, both for public and private law, are of even greater magnitude; it may be many years before these wider implications are more fully understood.

The Effect Of Inflation On Private Contracts: United States, 1861-1879, John P. Dawson, Frank E. Cooper

Michigan Law Review

The American Civil War provides ample material for studying the legal consequences of currency depreciation. The sudden demands of war on government budgets made it necessary in both North and South to issue a large volume of paper money, which produced a general rise in prices, a premium on gold, and all the other indices of major monetary inflation. American history had already illustrated the dangers in the use of unstable monetary standards and in too rapid an expansion of the monetary supply. The period of the Civil War is of peculiar interest to lawyers, however, because the record of …

The Economic Aspects Of Inflation, Leonard L. Watkins

Michigan Law Review

In every large industrial country there is a considerable group that urges inflation as a path to national prosperity. They have made least impression on monetary policies in countries that experienced severe inflation during the war and post-war years. But in the United States, where war-time inflation was relatively moderate and where losses in the recent depression have been especially severe, inflationary measures have been adopted and agitation persists for the adoption of still more radical policies.

Effects Of Inflation On Private Contracts: Germany, 1914-1924, John P. Dawson

Michigan Law Review

The German experience with inflation is unique not only in the magnitude of the ultimate disaster but in the wealth and variety of the record which it left behind. From that experience we may still learn much. The problems presented at successive stages of the German inflation differ in degree but not in kind from those which appear in any major shift in the general level of prices. The devices, legal and economic, for restoring an equilibrium thus destroyed must be essentially the same in any great country organized, as Germany was, for specialized, large-scale production. From a study of …

Constitutional Law-Mortgage Foreclosure Moratorium Statutes

Michigan Law Review

The present economic crisis has been productive of much drastic legislation which is directed at the relief of the debtor class. Rather than let the depression run its course, legislative bodies have endeavored to alleviate some of the evils by so-called "emergency'' statutes. A common type of such enactment is that designed to protect mortgagors against foreclosure and sale of their property. Some of these statutes provide that the period of redemption after foreclosure sale shall be extended for a definite period, others that the courts may stay foreclosures, and some provide that there shall be no foreclosure sales unless …

Executive Power In Emergencies, Maurice S. Culp

Michigan Law Review

The events of the last few months indicate that the American chief executive is capable of vigorous action in emergencies. The executive frequently has to use the armed forces of the State or Nation in the performance of his duty to see that the laws are faithfully executed in troubled districts, but it is a new experience to have the governors and the President take emergency measures in combatting a depression. The banking crisis, which first received executive notice in Nevada last November and which attained alarming proportions with Governor Comstock's "bank holiday" in Michigan, culminated in the national holiday …

'Recent Social Trends In The United States" Report Of The President's Research Committee, Robert Cooley Angell

Michigan Law Review

Never before has a particular civilization taken so complete an inventory of its own activities as that presented in the two-volume Report of the President's Research Committee on Social Trends. Its more than 1600 pages are literally crammed with significant data regarding almost every conceivable aspect of American life, data gathered with great care and thoroughness by research men of unquestioned ability and scholarly standing.

Controlling The Production Of Oil, Donald H. Ford

Michigan Law Review

The present pressing need for controlling the production of oil is due to a variety of causes. The principal factors that have contributed to the existing situation to "the flood of oil that takes on the proportions of a national disaster'' are: (1) A rapid improvement in exploratory technique, geological and geophysical, which has resulted in "bringing in" too many new oil fields. (2) Enormous advances in the art of drilling, especially as regards rapidity of drilling and the depths attained. (3) Improved methods of refining which furnish an ever-increasing percentage of gasoline from. the crude. (4) The development of …

State Administrative Supervision Of Municipal Indebtedness, E. Blythe Stason

Michigan Law Review

One of the lessons being drawn from the present economic depression, and especially from the financial straits of municipalities, is the very real need of more adequate restriction upon the power of cities, towns, villages, counties, school districts and other local governments to burden themselves and their taxpayers with excessive public debt.

Legislation - Wisconsin Unemployment Insurance Act

Michigan Law Review

Culminating years of activity in its state legislature, Wisconsin on January twenty-eighth adopted the Groves Bill (Bill No. 8, A) providing for compulsory unemployment insurance, the first legislation of the sort to be enacted in the United States. For a discussion of unemployment insurance measures introduced at the 1931 legislatures see 30 MICH. L. REV. 410 (January, 1932). The compulsory plan is to become operative July 1, 1933, unless Wisconsin employers employing more than 175,000 workers in the state have by that date established approved voluntary insurance systems.

Judicial Attitudes In The Customs-Union Case, Robert Elden Mathews

Michigan Law Review

The World Court decision of last September in the Austro-German Customs case has given rise in many quarters to an attack upon the Court itself.

The criticism has not been based solely upon the eight-to-seven vote of the judges. We have too many one-man majorities in our own judiciary to find much concern there. But the alignment of nationalities from which the two groups of judges come has been the source of the greatest adverse comment. For it so happens that the majority, holding illegal the proposed Customs Union, was composed of judges many of whose nations were opposed to …

Report On The Cost Of Crime, Herbert F, Taggart

Michigan Law Review

The full title of the twelfth report of the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement is "Report on the Cost of Crime and Criminal Justice in the United States." A more descriptive title, suggested by the actual content of the report, would be "The Economic Consequences of Crime." The report constitutes a volume of 657 pages, of which the report proper covers 453 pages, and various appendices make up the balance. For the hasty reader the most essential parts are the first eight pages, constituting the Commission's comments, and the summary and recommendations, of Messrs. Goldthwaite H. Dorr and …

Some Legal Problems Connected With Stock Market Transactions, S. Ashley Guthrie, Henry F. Tenney

Michigan Law Review

If any one were asked what was the most dramatic event of the last year, he probably refer at once to the collapse of the great Bull Market on the New York Stock Exchange. This was not only a dramatic event, but it was literally a tragedy for hundreds of thousands of people. Securities shrank to less than half their former inflated values and hundreds of millions of dollars in cash and paper profits were lost over night, or possibly we should say over two nights, for the crash occurred in two stages, one in October and one in November, …

The Reckoning Of Damages In Fluctuating Exchange, Joseph H. Drake

Michigan Law Review

Not the least serious of the evil effects of the Great War has been the resultant collapse in value of the currencies of foreign countries and the consequent dislocation of exchanges. The case of Sirie v. Godfrey, decided in the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of New York, presents clearly one of the legal problems arising out of this situation. Goods were bought by an American lady in Paris, in 1913 and 1914, at a cost of about 10,000 francs. These goods were delivered in due time but were not paid for. At the time the goods were …

Internationial Aspects Of Prohibition Enforcement

Michigan Law Review

The Eighteenth Amendment to the Federal Constitution prohibits "the manufacture, sale, or transportation oi intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes." 40 Stat. 1050, 1941. In the National Prohibition Cases, 253 U. S. 350, 386, the amendment was said to be operative "throughout the entire territorial limits of the United States." As originally enacted, the National Prohibition Act did not in terms define its territorial field, but a supplemental provision afterwards enacted declares that the act "shall apply not only …

Book Reviews, Edwin W. Patterson, Edson R. Sunderland, C E. Griffin

Michigan Law Review

The title of this brilliant little volume might, more accurately, have been, "The Spirits of the Common Law," for it depicts the common law as the battleground of many conflicting spirits, from which a few relatively permanent ideas and ideals have emerged triumphant. As a whole, the book is a pluralistic-idealistic interpretation of legal history. Idealistic, because Dean Pound finds that the fundamentals of the 'common law have been shaped by ideas and ideals rather than by economic determinism or class struggle; he definitely rejects a purely economic interpretation of legal history, although he demands a sociological one (pp. io-ii). …

Net Income And Judicial Economics, Henry Rottschaefer

Michigan Law Review

A legal system does not function in a vacuum of abstractions. It is part of a general institutional framework of an organized society. Its content is determined by concrete individual and social needs and activities. Hence modern jurisprudence conceives of law as a means for securing interests. The appraisal of its rules and principles requires an evaluation of the significant elements of the situation to which they apply. A narrow, complacent formalism is the penalty of failure in this regard. No one would deny the emphasis modern society places upor its commercial and industrial interests, nor the many points of …