Law and Economics Commons^™

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 …

The Code For Corporate Citizenship: States Should Amend Statutes Governing Corporations And Enable Corporations To Be Good Citizens, Elisa Scalise

Seattle University Law Review

Corporations are important social actors. They are created by law and create products, services, jobs, and wealth upon which modem societies rely. Investments injected by corporations bring jobs, capital, and technology to communities, thereby raising living standards and creating derivative rights such as education, health and housing, and political freedoms. Modem corporations allow entrepreneurs to raise massive amounts of capital for large projects and research, which results in innovation and a wide range of products and services. However, these same corporations can also cause social harm. They are structured in such a way that it is possible for agents in …

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, …

The Confused U.S. Framework For Foreign-Bank Insolvency: An Open Research Agenda, Steven L. Schwarcz

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Reform Of Imf Conditionality - A Proposal For Self-Imposed Conditionality, Ofer Eldar

Faculty Scholarship

The IMF has faced criticism of its expansive use of conditionality. The paper proposes a new procedure for IMF lending designed to meet these criticisms by arguing for the legalization and formalization of the procedure for IMF lending in the light of legal concepts derived mainly from national administrative laws. The gist of the procedure is that, rather than have the IMF determine loan conditions following informal negotiations with member countries, countries seeking Fund assistance will design the conditions themselves. The IMF will have specified powers under which to review these conditions. Apart from other procedural requirements, conditions will have …

Strike That, Reverse It: County Of Wayne V. Hathcock: Michigan Redefines Implementing Economic Development Through Eminent Domain, Rachel A. Lewis

Villanova Law Review (1956 - )

No abstract provided.

Fitting The Forum To The Fuss With Sticky Defaults: Failure In The Market For Dispute Resolution Services?, Maurits Barendrecht, Berend R. De Vries

Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution

"Fitting the forum to the fuss" - i.e., finding the optimal way to deal with every dispute - is an appealing slogan of proponents of alternative dispute resolution ("ADR"). The phrase also summarizes the contract one would expect rational disputants to make once they are embroiled in a conflict they cannot resolve together. Disputants can "buy" dispute resolution services, such as various forms of court intervention, mediation, or arbitration. Agreeing to a contract to buy such services together with an opponent, however, is likely to be difficult. These difficulties are assessed in this article. The barriers to dispute resolution are …

Envisioning The Modern American Fiscal State: Progressive-Era Economists And The Intellectual Foundations Of The U.S. Income Tax, Ajay K. Mehrotra

Articles by Maurer Faculty

At the turn of the twentieth century, the U.S. system of public finance underwent a dramatic, structural transformation. The late nineteenth-century system of indirect taxes, associated mainly with the tariff, was eclipsed in the early decades of the twentieth century by a progressive income tax. This shift in U.S. tax policy marked the emergence of a new fiscal polity - one that was guided not simply by the functional and structural need for government revenue but by concerns for equity and economic and social justice. This Article explores the paradigm shift in legal and economic theories that undergirded this dramatic …

Time-Inconsistent Management & The Sarbanes-Oxley Act, Manuel A. Utset

Scholarly Publications

No abstract provided.

The Law And Economics Of Development And Environment: An Introduction To The Symposium, Daniel H. Cole

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Misassigning Income: The Supreme Court And Attorneys' Fees, Stephen B. Cohen

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This past term's Supreme Court decision in Commissioner v. Banks and Commissioner v. Banaitis distorts foundational principles, known as assignment of income law, which help identify the person who must report income for federal tax purposes. The Court holds that assignment of income principles require a plaintiff to report as income the portion of a recovery paid to the plaintiffs attorney as a contingent fee. As a result, the plaintiff is taxed at excessively high rates, which may in some cases equal or exceed a confiscatory 100%. Taxing the plaintiff on the attorney-fee portion of a recovery also undermines the …

Beyond Tinkering: Economics After Behavioral Economics, Stephen E. Ellis, Grant M. Hayden

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This paper assesses the current state of law and economics, standard and behavioral, and proposes an additional element to the basic belief-desire apparatus of economic theory in order to create a more unified theory of behavior.

The first part of the paper assesses the current status of standard economic theory. While standard models have had their successes, a large and growing body of empirical evidence reveals that people often fail to live up its rational-actor ideal. In response, economists usually stick with standard consumer theory and attempt to explain the anomalous results by referring to some overlooked input (e.g., some …

An Alternative Paradigm For Valuing Breach Of Registration Rights And Loss Of Liquidity, Royce De R. Barondes

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Competition: The Wrong Goal, Hullihen Williams Moore

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Escaping The Gilded Cage: User Created Content And Building The Metaverse, Cory Ondrejka

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Social Citizen As “Guest Worker”: A Comment On Identities Of Immigrants And The Working Poor, Frank W. Munger

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Cancellation Of Debt And Other Incidental Items Of Income: Puritan Tax Rules In The U.S., Richard C.E. Beck

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Democratizing Capital: The History, Law, And Reform Of The Community Reinvestment Act, Richard D. Marsico

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Does A Computer's Choice Of Where To Reside Implicate The Dormant Commerce Clause?, Robert J. Firestone

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

What Iraq And Argentina Might Learn From Each Other, Anna Gelpern

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Iraq and Argentina each launched a $100 billion debt restructuring last year. The two cases are rarely mentioned together. Most think of Argentina as the quintessential case of financial globalization gone awry - a lapsed market reformer that sank under the weight of (depending on your perspective) misguided liberalization or its own financial chutzpah, and took with it Argentine depositors, Italian retirees, Japanese banks, and offshore investment funds. Iraq's debt has a distinctly preglobalization flavor. Most of its obligations precede the recent wave of financial liberalization. In the words of Iraq's own advisers, its debt restructuring is a quintessential geopolitical …

Economic Rationality Vs. Ethical Reasonableness: The Relevance Of Law And Economics For Legal Ethics, W. Bradley Wendel

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Serial Entrepreneurs And Small Business Bankruptcies, Douglas G. Baird, Edward R. Morrison

Faculty Scholarship

Chapter 11 is thought to preserve the going-concern surplus of a financially distressed business – the extra value that its assets possess in their current configuration. Financial distress leads to conflicts among creditors that can lead to inefficient liquidation of a business with going-concern surplus. Chapter 11 avoids this by providing the business with a way of fashioning a new capital structure. This account of Chapter 11 fails to capture what is happening in the typical case. The typical Chapter 11 debtor is a small corporation whose assets are not specialized and rarely worth enough to pay tax claims. There …

Risk Management In Long-Term Contracts, Victor P. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

Long-term contracts are designed to manage risk. After a brief discussion of why it is unhelpful to invoke risk aversion for analyzing serious commercial transactions between sophisticated entities, this paper focuses on adaptation to changed circumstances. In particular, it considers the options to abandon and the discretion to change quantity. It then analyzes a poorly designed contract between Alcoa and Essex showing how the parties misframed their problem and designed a long-term contract that was doomed to fail.

Reading Wood V. Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon With Help From The Kewpie Dolls, Victor P. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

In Wood v. Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon, Cardozo found consideration in an apparently illusory contract by implying a reasonable effort obligation. Unbeknownst to Cardozo, Wood had agreed to represent Rose O'Neill, the inventory of the kewpie doll in an earlier exclusive contract. Wood sued O'Neill two months prior to entering into the Lucy arrangement. That contract included an explicit best efforts clause. The failure to include such a clause in this contract was, quite likely, deliberate, suggesting that Wood was trying to avoid making a binding commitment to Lucy. The paper examines both the kewpie doll and Lucy contract in some …

The Theory Of Penalties And The Economics Of Criminal Law, Keith N. Hylton

Faculty Scholarship

This paper presents a model of penalties that reconciles the conflicting accounts optimal punishment by Becker, who argued penalties should internalize social costs, and Posner, who suggested penalties should completely deter offenses. The model delivers specific recommendations as to when penalties should be set to internalize social costs and when they should be set to completely deter offensive conduct. I use the model to generate a positive account of the function and scope of criminal law doctrines, such as intent, necessity, and rules governing the distinction between torts and crimes. The model is also consistent with the history of criminal …

Trade As Guarantor Of Peace, Liberty And Security? The Role Of Peace In The Bretton Woods Institutions, Padideh Ala'i

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Shopping For Law In A Coasean Market, G. Marcus Cole

Journal Articles

In the twentieth century, two Nobel-Prize winning economists wrote two seemingly unrelated characterizations of the processes constraining human behavior. One, Ronald Coase, wrote a short article entitled The Nature of the Firm,1 in which he reduced all managerial decision-making to a fundamental choice between making the factors of production, or buying them. This article and the idea of the "make or buy" decision for which it has come to be known, have proven to be among the most seminal in the history of financial economics and organizational behavior.

The second economist, Friedrich Hayek, wrote what he thought to be a …

The Futility Of Appeal: Disciplinary Insights Into The "Affirmance Effect" On The United States Courts Of Appeals, Tracey E. George, Chris Guthrie

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

In contrast to the Supreme Court, which typically reverses the cases it hears, the United States Courts of Appeals almost always affirm the cases that they hear. We set out to explore this affirmance effect on the U.S. Courts of Appeal by using insights drawn from law and economics (i.e., selection theory), political science (i.e., attitudinal theory and new institutionalism), and cognitive psychology (i.e., heuristics and biases, including the status quo and omission biases).

Marine-Salvage Law And Marine-Peril-Related Policy: A Second-Best And Third-Best Economic-Efficiency Analysis Of The Problem, The Law, And The Classic Landes And Posner Study, Richard S. Markovits

Faculty Scholarship

This Article (1) delineates the different kinds of allocative costs that marine-peril contingencies can generate and the different kinds of marine-peril-related decisions that can generate allocative inefficiency (marine-salvage-operation investment decisions; decisions about whether to offer to attempt or to actually attempt marine rescues; decisions about the character of the marine-rescue attempts that are made; decisions by potential rescuees to accept or reject offers of marine-rescue attempts; and decisions by potential rescuees to make or reject various marine-peril-avoidance moves); (2) defines the formal meaning of "the most-allocatively-efficient response a State can make to marine-peril contingencies;" (3) explains why, standing alone, judge-prescribed …

The Political Economy Of International Sales Law, Clayton P. Gillette, Robert E. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods, or CISG, has been adopted by more than 60 countries in an effort to harmonize the law that applies to international sales contracts. In this paper, we argue that the effort to create uniform international sales law (ISL) fails to supply contracting parties with the default terms they prefer, thus violating the normative criterion that justifies the law-making process for commercial actors in the first instance. Our argument rests on three claims. First, we contend that the process by which uniform ISL is drafted will dictate the form …