Law and Economics Commons^™

Legal Services In The Doha Round, Sydney M. Cone Iii.

Articles & Chapters

As a subcategory of professional services and a sub-subcategory of business services, legal services, when supplied transnationally, are the subject of negotiation in the current round of multilateral trade negotiation known as the Doha Round. The negotiations on legal services that take place in the Doha Round have considerable potential for affecting the economics and activities of lawyers and law firms, and for influencing the content of local professional rules governing the practice of law. This article examines that potential.

Of Property And Anti-Property, Abraham Bell, Gideon Parchomovsky

All Faculty Scholarship

Private property is widely perceived as a potent prodevelopment and anticonservationist force. The drive to accumulate wealth through private property rights is thought to encourage environmentally destructive development; legal protection of such property rights is believed to thwart environmentally friendly public measures. Indeed, property rights advocates and environmentalists are generally described as irreconcilable foes. This presumed clash often leads environmentalists to urge public acquisition of private lands. Interestingly, less attention is paid to the possibility that the government may prove no better a conservator than private owners. Government actors often mismanage conservation properties, collaborating with private developers to dispose of …

Toward A Next Generation Regulatory Strategy, Philip J. Weiser

Publications

The FCC is now facing a set of issues that will help shape the future evolution of the Internet and the role of government in its development. In particular, the FCC is in the midst of designing a regulatory regime for broadband platforms. To do so, the FCC must decide both on the appropriate regulatory classification for such platforms and what legal rules (if any) should govern access to such platforms. This Article explains how the FCC, using its "ancillary jurisdiction" authority under Title I of the Communications Act, can develop a reactive regulatory regime that examines allegations of discriminatory …

Regionalism Versus Globalism: A View From The Americas, Carlos Manuel Vázquez

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The well-deserved celebration of UNIDROIT'S first seventy-five years focused on a topic that is of particular interest to the Organization of American States and to the organ of the OAS to which the author belongs, the Inter-American Juridical Committee. The topic of the 75th Anniversary Congress--"Worldwide Harmonization of Private Law and Regional Integration"--implicates one of the several dichotomies with which we in the Inter-American system who work on questions of private international law (and international private law) have been grappling in recent years, the problem of regional versus global approaches to the harmonization of private international law (and international private …

Rights Of Access And The Shape Of The Internet, Michael J. Madison

Articles

This Article reviews recent developments in the law of access to information, that is, cases involving click-through agreements, the doctrine of trespass to chattels, the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and civil claims under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Though the objects of these different doctrines substantially overlap, the different doctrines yield different presumptions regarding the respective rights of information owners and information consumers. The Article reviews those presumptions in light of different metaphorical premises on which courts rely: Internet-as-place, in the trespass, DMCA, and CFAA contexts, and contract-as-assent, in the click-through context. It argues that …

Private Information, Self-Serving Biases, And Optimal Settlement Mechanisms: Theory And Evidence, Seth A. Seabury, Eric L. Talley

Faculty Scholarship

The law and economics literature on suit and settlement has tended to focus on two alternative conceptual models. On the one hand, the "optimism" model of pre-trial negotiation attempts to explain settlement failure as an artifact of unfounded optimism by one or both parties. The idea that bargaining agents can adopt such non-rational biases receives support from experimental evidence. On the other hand, the "private information" model of pre-trial bargaining portrays settlement failures as an artifact of strategic information rent extraction. It finds support in some experimental evidence as well. This paper presents (for the first time) a mechanism-design approach …

The Mechanisms Of Market Efficiency Twenty Years Later: The Hindsight Bias, Ronald J. Gilson, Reinier Kraakman

Faculty Scholarship

Twenty years ago we published a paper, "The Mechanisms of Market Efficiency," that sought to describe the institutional underpinnings of price formation in the securities market. Since that time, financial economics has moved forward on many fronts. The sub-discipline of behavioral finance has struggled to bring yet more descriptive realism to the study of financial markets. Two important questions are (1) how much has this new discipline changed our understanding of the efficiency and nature of the institutional mechanisms that set price in financial markets; and (2) how far does this discipline carry novel implications for the regulation of financial …

Engineering A Venture Capital Market: Lessons From The American Experience, Ronald J. Gilson

Faculty Scholarship

The venture capital market and firms whose creation and early stages were financed by venture capital are among the crown jewels of the American economy. Beyond representing an important engine of macroeconomic growth and job creation, these firms have been a major force in commercializing cutting-edge science, whether through their impact on existing industries as with the radical changes in pharmaceuticals catalyzed by venture-backed firms' commercialization of biotechnology, or by their role in developing entirely new industries as with the emergence of the Internet and World Wide Web. The venture capital market thus provides a unique link between finance and …

Taxing International Portfolio Income, Michael J. Graetz, Itai Grinberg

Faculty Scholarship

Most analyses of the taxation of international income earned by U.S. corporations or individuals have addressed income from direct investments abroad. With the exception of routine bows to the "international tax compromise" and sporadic discussions of the practical difficulties residence countries face in collecting taxes on international portfolio income, the taxation of international portfolio income generally has been ignored in the tax literature.

Analysis and reassessment of U.S. tax policy regarding international portfolio income is long overdue. The amount of international portfolio investment and its role in the world economy has grown exponentially in recent years. In most years since …

The Interplay Between Norms And Enforcement In Tax Compliance, Leandra Lederman

Articles by Maurer Faculty

What will increase individuals' compliance with the federal income tax? There are rich legal, economic, and sociological literatures examining this question. The traditional answer that increased enforcement will increase compliance is supported by both economic modeling and a number of experiments. However, studies show that appeals to normative beliefs about honesty in taxpaying play an important role as well.

A number of scholars have suggested that vigorous enforcement of the tax laws may be counterproductive because it may suggest that noncompliance is the norm. This article argues, in part, that enforcement and a compliance norm are not inconsistent but rather …

The Byrd Amendment Is Wto-Illegal: But We Must Kill The Byrd With The Right Stone, Jagdish N. Bhagwati, Petros C. Mavroidis

Faculty Scholarship

On 16 January 2003, the WTO Appellate Body issued its report on United States – Continued Dumping And Subsidy Offset Act Of 2000 (WTO Doc. WT/DS217 and 234/AB/R). In this report, the Appellate Body condemned the so-called US Byrd Amendment by finding that it was inconsistent with the US obligations under the WTO Agreements on Antidumping (AD) and Subsidies and Countervailing Measures (SCM).

Of Legal Transplants, Legal Irritants, And Economic Development, Katharina Pistor, Daniel Berkowitz

Faculty Scholarship

The collapse of the socialist system has given way to unprecedented economic and legal reforms in the former socialist countries. Over the past decade they have enacted new legislation in all areas of the law, drawing heavily on legal models from developed market economies, including common law and civil law countries. While the transplanted laws now on the books is largely consistent with Western practice, the enforcement of these new laws is often ineffective (Berkowitz, Pistor, and Richard, 2003).

Local Institutions, Foreign Investment And Alternative Strategies Of Development: Some Views From Practice, Tamara Lothian, Katharina Pistor

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay summarizes the major insights gained from a panel discussion with legal practitioners about the relevance of local institutions to foreign direct investors. The Essay offers a critique of policy conclusions drawn from empirical studies that suggest a positive correlation between legal institutions and foreign investment flows. It points out that the data used in these studies are far too general to allow policy conclusions and that neither the data nor the policy conclusions are sufficiently attuned to the challenges or opportunities that foreign direct investment projects face on the ground. According to the results of the panel discussion, …

A Jurisdictional Approach To Collapsing Corporate Distinctions, Peter B. Oh

Articles

This article challenges our persistent path dependence on defunct distinctions between corporations and certain limited unincorporated associations. Recent federal tax regulations have inspired proposals for consolidated treatment of all limited business organizations through uniformly based or universally applicable statutes. I contend these proposals are preoccupied with how hybrid organizations such as the limited liability company and the limited liability partnership amalgamate, and thus implicitly preserve, traditional dichotomies between corporations and partnership categorizations as well as entities and aggregate theories. The continued use of these schemes compromises the legal basis for such proposals.

By critically examining certain jurisdictional principles, this article …

The End Of A Natural Monopoly: Deregulation And Competition In The Electric Power Industry, Daniel Cole, Peter Grossman

Peter Z. Grossman

Note: full-text not available due to publisher restrictions. Link takes you to an external site where you can purchase the book or borrow it from a local library.

A Omc E O Comércio Eletrônico: Temas Para Países Em Desenvolvimento, Ivo T. Gico

Ivo Teixeira Gico Jr.

O objetivo deste texto é trazer algumas das questões mais gerais e predominantente importantes para os países em desenvolvimento que estão surgindo no âmbito da OMC e as possíveis conseqüências para os PEDs, , na esteira do reconhecimento internacional do direito que os povos têm de se desenvolver.

The aim of this paper is to bring some of the most prominent and general questions, which are important for developing countries that are emerging in the WTO and the possible consequences for PEDs, in the wake of the international recognition of the development right of the people.

State Laws And The Independent Judiciary: An Analysis Of The Effects Of The Seventeenth Amendment On The Number Of Supreme Court Cases Holding State Laws Unconstitutional, Donald J. Kochan

Donald J. Kochan

In recent years, the Seventeenth Amendment has been the subject of legal scholarship, congressional hearings and debate, Supreme Court opinions, popular press articles and commentary, state legislative efforts aimed at repeal, and activist repeal movements. To date, the literature on the effects of the Seventeenth Amendment has focused almost exclusively on the effects on the political production of legislation and competition between legislative bodies. Very little attention has been given to the potential adverse effects of the Seventeenth Amendment on the relationship between state legislatures and the federal courts. This Article seeks to fill part of that literature gap, applying …