Law and Economics Commons^™

Price Discrimination, Personal Use And Piracy: Copyright Protection Of Digital Works, Michael J. Meurer

Faculty Scholarship

The growth of digital information transmission worries copyright holders who fear the new technology threatens their profits because of greater piracy and widespread sharing of digital works. They have responded with proposals for expanded protection of digital works. Specifically, they seek restrictions on personal use rights regarding digital works provided by the fair use and first sale doctrines. The proposed changes in the allocation of property rights to digital information significantly affect the ability of copyright holders to practice price discrimination. Broader user rights make discrimination more difficult; broader producer rights make discrimination easier. I argue that more price discrimination …

Trends. International Trade And The Subversion Of Justice: Japan, The European Union, And Iraq, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

The author discusses the moral philosophy, the psychology of moral judgment, and treatises on law often suggest that justice subsumes some combination of behavioral and intentional accountability and equity.

Labor And The Supreme Court: Review Of The 1996-1997 Term, Keith N. Hylton

Faculty Scholarship

The U.S. Supreme Court's 1996-1997 Term will surely not be remembered among lawyers for its decisions in the employment area. Most of these decisions involved narrow questions of statutory interpretation, and for the most part the Court has handed down opinions consistent with existing case law. There was not one National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) decision this Term and the two employment discrimination cases involved fairly technical issues of statutory interpretation. The feeling of a quiet year is put across by simply reading the statutes at issue other than Title VII: the Federal Employers' Liability Act (FELA) (one case), the …

Unfunded Mandates And Fiscal Federalism: A Critique, Robert W. Adler

Vanderbilt Law Review

The term "unfunded federal mandates" is used to challenge federal obligations imposed on states and localities without accompanying funding. Unfunded mandates were alluded to by both the majority and dissenting opinions in Printz v. United States, in which provisions of the Brady Handgun Violence Protection Act were invalidated by the U.S. Supreme Court on Tenth Amendment grounds. In this Article, Professor Adler critiques the fiscal, legal, and policy arguments against unfunded federal mandates. This analysis, in turn, raises two broader issues. First, is the concept of unfunded mandates independently useful to the nation's ongoing debate about federal- ism? Second, does …

The Economics Of Auctioning And Related Regulatory Issues: The Economic Viability Of The Auction Provision Of The Bill And Alternatives For Direct-To-Home Licenses, Maria Vagliasindi, Pietro A. Vagliasindi

Cardozo Journal of International and Comparative Law

The article evaluates the use of auctioning as a regulatory tool for awarding licenses in natural monopoly industries, particularly focusing on broadcasting and telecommunications. It examines the economic viability of franchise bidding for Direct-to-Home (DTH) licenses in India and compares it to spectrum auctions in the U.S. The analysis highlights the potential efficiency of auctioning in promoting competition and reducing rents but also identifies significant challenges, including delays, design complexities, and theoretical limitations.

Restating Capitalization Standards And Rules: The Case For "Rough Justice" Regulations (Part Two), John W. Lee, Eldridge Blanton, Veena Luthra, Glenn Walberg, Darryl Whitesell

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Lifestyles Of The Not-So-Rich Or Famous: The Role Of Choice And Sacrifice In Bankruptcy, A. Mechele Dickerson

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Original Constitution And Its Decline: A Public Choice Perspective, John O. Mcginnis

Articles

Public choice offers an analysis of the Constitution that is broadly consonant with an important aspect of the Framers' own approach. The Framers' values were those largely of the Scottish enlightenment: they believed in progress of civilization-the accumulation of wealth and knowledge. In order to create a structure of society that would accomplish these ends, they relied on another Enlightenment axiom, namely that man is an object of natural science. By understanding the predictable manner in which individuals are likely to behave in given situations, the Framers could shape a constitution that would channel their behavior to meet their Enlightenment …

Irrational Expectations, Lynn A. Stout

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Rational expectations models have become a staple of economic theory and the basis for a Nobel Prize. This article argues that rational expectations analysis suffers from potentially fatal flaws that seriously undermine its value in understanding many market phenomena. Using the example of financial markets, the article illustrates how the rational expectations approach has worked to obscure, rather than to illuminate, our understanding of speculation and speculative markets. This misguidance raises problems for law and policy.

Response: Between Economics And Sociology: The New Path Of Deterrence, Dan M. Kahan

Michigan Law Review

The explosive collision of economics and sociology has long illuminated the landscape of deterrence theory. It is a debate as hopeless as it is spectacular. Economics is practical but thin. Starting from the simple premise that individuals rationally maximize their utility, economics generates a robust schedule of prescriptions - from the appropriate size of criminal penalties,1 to the optimal form of criminal punishments, to the most efficient mix of private and public investments in deterrence. Yet it is the very economy of economics that ultimately subverts it: its account of human motivations is too simplistic to be believable, and it …

Deterrence's Difficulty, Neal Kumar Katyal

Michigan Law Review

We all crave simple elegance. Physicists since Einstein have been searching for a grand unified theory that will tie everything together in a simple model. Law professors have their own grand theories - law and economics's Coase Theorem and constitutional law's Originalism immediately spring to mind. Criminal law is no different, for the analogue is our faith in deterrence - the belief that increasing the penalty on an activity will mean that fewer people will perform it. This theory has much to commend it. After all, economists and shoppers have known for ages that a price increase in a good …

Securities Disclosure In A Globalizing Market: Who Should Regulate Whom, Merritt B. Fox

Michigan Law Review

One of the most dramatic examples of increasing interaction across national boundaries in recent years has been the burgeoning volume of transnational transactions in corporate equities. Most developed capitalist countries impose affirmative obligations on issuers of corporate equity to disclose certain information about themselves. While these obligations are imposed on issuers, they are triggered by transactions. The growth in transnational transactions is thus increasingly raising difficult issues concerning the reach of differing national regimes. Given the magnitude of legal resources devoted to compliance with such disclosure regulations, they promise to feature prominently in the larger discussion of the role of …

Law And Economic Development: A New Beginning?, Lan Cao

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Southeastern Water Compact, Panacea Or Pandora's Box? A Law And Economics Analysis Of The Viability Of Interstate Water Compacts, David Copas

William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review

No abstract provided.

The Immovable Object Versus The Irresistable Force: Rethinking The Relationship Between Secured Credit And Bankruptcy Policy, Lawrence Ponoroff, F. Stephen Knippenberg

Michigan Law Review

The last leaf in O. Henry's classic short story was hanging by a delicate thread, but it never fell. It never fell, of course, because it wasn't real; Old Behrman had painted it (and caught pneumonia for his trouble) in order to give Johnsy the will to live. The Supreme Court's decision in Dewsnup v. Timm is also hanging by a thread, following a barrage of scholarly criticism and more than four years of limiting case law and legislative incursions on the case's core conceptual rationale. But the holding in Dewsnup, unlike the last leaf, is very real. It has …

European Community Competition Law, Subsidiarity, And The National Courts, Eric F. Hinton

Brigham Young University Journal of Public Law

No abstract provided.

Realizing The Re-Emergence Of The Chinese Stock Market: Fact Or Fiction?, Ann P. Vandevelde

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

The stock market which currently exists in the People's Republic of China (PRC) is a product of the "open door policy" introduced by Deng Xiaoping in 1978, following the death of Mao Zedong, to promote economic development over class struggle. Following limited experimentation with stock issuance at the local level, the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges opened in 1990 and 1991 respectively. Since its recent inception, China's stock market--which comprises the trading of domestically owned A-Shares and foreign-owned B-Shares--has experienced impressive growth together with periods of volatility as well as lackluster performance. Recent performance of A-Share trading has been strong, …

Globalization In Question: The International Economy And The Possibilities Of Governance, By Paul Hirst And Grahame Thompson, Jeffery A. Hart

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

No abstract provided.

The Comparative And The Critical Perspective In International Agreements, Ángel Oquendo

Faculty Articles and Papers

No abstract provided.

Legal Differences Without Economic Distinctions: Points, Penalties, And The Market For Mortgages, Alan L. Feld

Faculty Scholarship

Economic analysis can serve many functions when applied to the law, most notably prediction (how people' react to laws and lawmaking processes), evaluation (whether these reactions result in social efficiency), and description (which features of laws, and lawmaking are salient). Here we propose to describe. We use economic analysis to show a legal difference without an economic distinction. We demonstrate the economic equivalence of two practices in the mortgage market. Interestingly, widespread bans exist on one of these practices, but no restrictions exist on the other.

Specifically, in this essay we examine the relationship among points, prepayment penalties, and financial …

The World Bank’S Role In Controlling Corruption, Georgetown University Law Center

Philip A. Hart Memorial Lecture

In 1997, Professor of Law and Political Science, Susan Rose-Ackerman of Yale University, delivered the Georgetown Law Center’s seventeenth Annual Philip A. Hart Memorial Lecture: "The World Bank’s Role in Controlling Corruption."

Susan Rose-Ackerman is Henry R. Luce Professor of Law and Political Science, Yale University, and Co-director of the Law School’s Center for Law, Economics, and Public Policy. She holds a Ph.D. in economics from Yale University and has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Fullbright Commission. She was a visiting Research Fellow at the World Bank in 1995-96 where she did research on corruption and economic …

The Idea Of Fairness In The Law Of Enterprise Liability, Gregory C. Keating

Michigan Law Review

The theory and practice of enterprise liability are oddly disjoined. On the one hand, case rhetoric insists that considerations of fairness are among the primary justifications for imposing enterprise liability. On the other hand, normatively inclined and theoretically ambitious scholarship on enterprise liability is overwhelmingly economic in cast. Economically inclined scholars have flocked to the field, while other kinds of tort theorists have shunned it, implicitly or explicitly conceding it to economic analysis. This paper argues that, contrary to this consensus, there is a powerful and important fairness case to be made for enterprise liability. This case fits the rhetoric …

Pleading And Proof: The Economics Of Legal Burdens, Thomas R. Lee

BYU Law Review

Courts have traditionally assigned burdens of pleading and burdens of proof by mechanically applying any of a number of meaningless "tests." Conventional doctrine assigns these burdens to the party to whose case the issue in question is "essential," or to the party who must establish the "affirmative proposition." Neither of these tests provides a coherent methodology for making such allocations. The first is circular-an issue is "essential" by virtue of the fact that the party has been assigned the burden. The latter is unworkable; it depends on accidents of syntax and may be easily manipulated. This Article attempts to fill …

Roundtable Discussion: Visions For The Future, Daniel L. Greenberg (Moderator), Anthony V. Alfieri, Michelle Adams, Edgar S. Cahn, Jennifer Gordon, Luis Garden Acosta, Alan W. Houseman, Errol G. Louis, Esmerelda Simmons, David A. Thomas

Articles

No abstract provided.

Tyrannous Lex, Thomas E. Baker

Faculty Publications

Professor Baker presents a fundamentally unique question. Including all of the legal opinions, statutes and administrative rules, how much law do we have? Is there way to calculate a “Gross Legal Product” for the United States and what effect does this “GLP” have on the U.S. economy? What about all of the secondary legal sources? What do they add, if anything, to our ability to understand all of the law that is constantly being produced? All these and more are the subject of Professor Baker’s article.

Book Review: Has Globalization Gone Too Far? By Dani Rodrik. Washington, D.C, Paul B. Stephan

Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business

To this debate comes Dani Rodrik, an economist on the faculty of Har- vard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. In his brief and intriguing book, Has Globalization Gone Too Far?,2 he seeks to make the race-to-the- bottom story respectable for those who take economics seriously. Rather than preaching radical opposition to globalization, however, he proposes moderate and incremental resistance. He outlines policy responses to what he argues are legitimate concerns about the growth of the world economy, encouraging targeted trade barriers based on a demonstrated national con- sensus about legitimate and illegitimate means of production. I will begin by …

Commodification And Women's Household Labor, Katharine B. Silbaugh

Faculty Scholarship

A woman washes a kitchen floor. She puts the mop away and drives to the comer market. She consults a shopping list, and purchases groceries from it, carefully choosing the least expensive options. A four-year-old child is tugging at her leg while she does this, and she tries to entertain him, talking to him about the mopped floor, the grocery items. When she returns from the store, she prepares lunch from what she has brought home with her. She and the child both eat lunch. After lunch, she and the child collect laundry and she runs a load. She takes …

Creating Competition Policy For Transition Economies: Introduction, Robert H. Lande

All Faculty Scholarship

This is an introduction to a symposium on Creating Competition for Transition Economies. This article provides an overview of the topic, and also briefly introduces the authors of the articles in the symposium; William Kovacic, Eleanor Fox, Spencer Weber Waller, Malcolm Coate, and Armando Rodriguez.

Guidance Rules And Enforcement Rules: A Better View Of The Cathedral, Dale A. Nance

Faculty Publications

Contemporary economic analysis of law is a product of the confluence of standard microeconomics with a legal tradition heavily influenced by American Legal Realism. The effect of this merger has been an analysis of legal institutions from the perspective of the Holmesian "bad man," who sees predicted legal actions as merely various expected material costs or benefits to be taken into account. This might be illuminating for the purposes of an "outsider," such as a sociological behaviorist or perhaps even a legal advisor alerting her "bad man" client to the risks of adverse legal consequences. But it produces bizarre results …

Appendix To Guest Editor's Observations: A Proposal For A Consolidated Theft/Fraud Guideline, Frank O. Bowman Iii

Faculty Publications

Professor Frank Bowman proposed the following consolidated theft/fraud guideline to the U.S. Sentencing Commission in October 1997. The proposal is explained in detail in a forthcoming law review article, Coping With Loss”: A Re-Examination of Federal Economic Crime Sentencing Under the Guidelines, 51 Vanderbilt L. Rev. -- (April 1998).