Law and Economics Commons^™

Dependency By Law: Poverty, Identity, And Welfare Privatization, Frank W. Munger

Articles & Chapters

Privatization of welfare reflects the political pressure to limit public responsibility for protection of social citizenship. Recent welfare reforms incorporate three classic market-like privatization mechanisms--contracting out services forcing allocation of a limited pool of benefits, and deregulation. Deregulation entails strategic diversion and disqualification of large numbers of would-be applicants who are left without alternatives to the labor market. In this article I discuss an empirical study of the effects of deregulation of welfare on the self-perceptions of recipients. Interviews with recipients and with low-wage health care workers, former recipients, show that, criticisms of welfare notwithstanding, they have embraced welfare reforms …

Boilerplate Today: The Rise Of Modularity And The Waning Of Consent, Margaret Jane Radin

Michigan Law Review

Thanks to the vision of Omri Ben-Shahar and the excellence of the scholars contributing to this symposium, students of the law of commercial exchange transactions will now understand how important and interesting, and indeed exciting, boilerplate really is. The various presentations are so rich that my assigned task of commentary cannot approach an adequate summation. Instead of attempting such a task, therefore, I will take up a slightly different one. My commentary will relate some of the ideas presented in the symposium to two themes that I think are significant for the groundwork of contract today: the growing modularity of …

The Law And Sociology Of Boilerplate, Todd D. Rakoff

Michigan Law Review

In my view, the scholarship presented at this symposium demonstrates that, in order to analyze form contracts and boilerplate successfully, one must carry out a set of operations that embodies an approach I will call law and sociology. But I presume I was invited to be a commentator at this conference on boilerplate not because the article I wrote on one branch of the subject awhile back exemplified this methodological approach, but because it took a rather strong substantive position. And so I think I ought first to say a brief word about that. The article in question concerned contracts …

The H’Aint In The (School) House: The Interest Convergence Paradigm In State Legislatures And School Finance Reform, Bryan Adamson

Faculty Articles

The purpose of this essay is to examine recent school funding litigation to illuminate the interest convergence paradigm, using the school finance reform controversy in Ohio as an example. Part I describes how the school finance reform debate is an extension of our nation's desegregation history. Part II looks at the school funding controversy in Ohio, highlighting legislator and citizen attitudes toward school finance litigation and public school funding along racial and geographic lines. Part III identifies six interests which emerge in the school funding dispute, arguing that these interests must be taken into account by legislators in crafting school …

The Entrepreneur And The Theory Of The Modern Corporation, Charles O'Kelley

Faculty Articles

The foremost description of the classic entrepreneur, immediately prior to the Great Depression and now, was presented by Frank Knight in his seminal work, Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit. In this Article, I will explicate Knight's theory of the entrepreneur and show how it relates to both the Berle-Means Paradigm and the nexus-of-contracts theory of the corporation. My effort here is in part intellectual history and in part the tentative beginnings of a new positive account of the corporation. In the latter regard, this Article takes only the first step in what may prove a quite exhaustive effort to re-plow the …

Foreword: Law, Business, And Economic Development - Current Issues And Age-Old Battles, Eric J. Gouvin

Faculty Scholarship

On March 24, 2006, the Western New England College School of Law and School of Business jointly hosted the First Annual Academic Conference sponsored by the Western New England College Law and Business Center for Advancing Entrepreneurship. The Conference capped a year of exciting developments at the Law and Business Center, which is the College's contribution to the entrepreneurship infrastructure in the greater Springfield, Massachusetts area. Economists have understood for some time that small businesses are an important engine of economic development and vitality. Across the United States, 25 million small businesses employ more than half the country's workers, create …

From An Act Of God To The Failure Of Man: Hurricane Katrina And The Economic Recovery Of New Orleans, Wendy B. Scott

Villanova Law Review (1956 - )

No abstract provided.

The Taxation Of Aquaculture In Canada: A Comparison With The Taxation Of Agriculture And Its Policy Implications, Faye Woodman

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

In Canada, at both the federal and the provincial government levels, the tax rules applicable to agricultural producers under the Income Tax Act and other taxing statutes often apply with relatively few modifications to the aquaculture sector. The agriculture rules differ in significant aspects from those applied to other taxpayers. They also tend to be more generous. Thus, the aquaculture sector operates under regimes of taxation in Canada that may be characterized as preferential, but may also have been developed with the needs and circumstances of agriculture, not aquaculture, in mind. This chapter will examine the rationales underlying the various …

The World Bank's Uses Of The "Rule Of Law" Promise In Economic Development, Alvaro Santos

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this chapter, the author seeks to disaggregate the World Bank and provide insight on the impact that particular groups have in dominant development strategies. By analyzing the internal dynamics among groups at the Bank, his aim is to illuminate the rise and fall of ideas about development and their resistance to both empirical evidence and academic critique. These internal dynamics include institutional inertia and constraints, groups’ struggle and competition over resources and prestige, and the relationship between groups at the Bank and the governments of borrowing countries.

The argument presented is that the conceptions of the rule of law …

Boilerplate And Economic Power In Auto Manufacturing Contracts, Omri Ben-Shahar, James J. White

Articles

This Article is structured as follows. Part I compares the terms and conditions in the purchase orders of the Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) and highlights important differences in the substance of these boilerplate provisions. It argues that these differences cannot be easily reconciled with the prediction that sophisticated parties draft the most efficient boilerplate terms. Part II examines how these forms are drafted, how their terms are negotiated, and how the OEMs guard their terms from erosion. It provides some insight on how tailoring occurs and how the internal organization of a party to a deal affects the terms that …

Numerus Clausus: An Economic Perspective, Wei Zhang

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Numerus clausus refers to the principle that both the form and the substance of a property right shall be prescribed by the law, which essentially restricts the freedom to “customize” the legally enforceable property interests.2 It has long been regarded as a basic principle in Civil Law countries, while the recent studies of U.S. scholars suggest that its essence exists in the Anglo-American law as well.

Controlling Shareholders And Corporate Governance: Complicating The Comparative Taxonomy, Ronald J. Gilson

Faculty Scholarship

Corporate governance scholarship has shifted focus in recent years from hostile takeovers, which occur primarily in the widely held shareholder systems of the United States and the United Kingdom, to the comparative merits of the "controlling shareholder" systems that are the norm most everywhere else in the world. In this emerging debate, the simple dichotomy between controlling shareholder systems and widely held shareholder systems that has largely dominated the discourse is too coarse to allow a deeper understanding of the diversity of ownership structures in different national capital markets and their policy implications. In this Article, Professor Ronald Gilson seeks …

"Contracting" For Credit, Ronald J. Mann

Faculty Scholarship

On a recent day, I used my credit cards in connection with a number of minor transactions. I made eight purchases, and I paid two credit card bills. I also discarded (without opening) three solicitations for new cards, balance transfer programs, or other similar offers to extend credit via a credit card. Statistics suggest that I am not atypical. U.S. consumers last year used credit cards in about 100 purchasing transactions per capita, with an average value of about $70. At the end of the year, Americans owed nearly $500 billion dollars, in the range of $1,800 for every man, …

Copyright, Commodification, And Culture: Locating The Public Domain, Julie E. Cohen

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The relationship between increased commodification and the public domain in copyright law is the subject of considerable controversy, both political and theoretical. The paper argues that beliefs about what legal definition the public domain requires depend crucially on implicit preconceptions about what a public domain is. When considered in broader historical context, the term public domain has a specific set of denotative and connotative meanings that constitute the artistic, intellectual, and informational public domain as a geographically separate place, portions of which are presumptively eligible for privatization. This idea meshes well with the current push toward commodification in copyright. The …

Public Law Limitations On Privatization Of Government Functions, Paul R. Verkuil

Articles

The privatization movement is on the verge of succeeding too well. The fact that some of what government does can be done better and cheaper by the private sector has gained such momentum that the public sector is sometimes seen as redundant or irrelevant. But the economist's make-or-buy choice simply fails to capture the full range of responsibilities that government faces in deciding whether to outsource a particular function to private contractors.

This Article illuminates the public dimension of government functions. By exploring the public-private distinction and relating it to constitutional, statutory, and administrative requirements, it structures an argument that …

The Next Epidemic: Bubbles And The Growth And Decay Of Securities Regulation, Erik F. Gerding

Publications

This article explores how speculative bubbles undermine the effectiveness of securities regulations and spawn epidemics of securities fraud. A brief historical survey demonstrates that stock market bubbles almost invariably coincide with epidemics of securities fraud, and provides a compelling argument that the outbreak of fraud in the Enron era did not stem merely from factors unique to the 1990s, but from the dynamics of an asset price bubble as well.

Drawing on perspectives from securities law practice and economic theory, the article argues that bubbles dilute the deterrent effect of antifraud rules and promote deregulation. Both effects alter the calculus …

The Unexpected Value Of Litigation: A Real Options Perspective, Joseph A. Grundfest, Peter H. Huang

Publications

In this Article, we suggest that litigation can be analyzed as though it is a competitive research and development project. Developing this analogy, we present a two-stage real option model of the litigation process that involves sequential information revelation and bargaining over the surplus generated by early settlement. Litigants are risk-neutral and have no private information. The model generates results that, we believe, have analytic and normative significance for the economic analysis of litigation

From an analytic perspective, we demonstrate that negative expected value (NEV) lawsuits are analogous to out of the money call options held by plaintiffs and that …

The Paradox Of Corruption As Antithesis To Economic Development: Does Corruption Undermine Economic Development In Indonesia And China, And Why Are The Experiences Different In Each Country?, Andrew White

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The question of whether corruption is antithetical to economic development has been extensively researched and debated since the 1960s. While nearly all participants in the debate appear to agree that corruption ultimately is antithetical to long-term economic development, the extent to which it positively or negatively affects economic development in the short term depends upon highly contextual factors. In different countries and regions of the world, factors of local culture and history, the nature of the state, the type of corruption and actors involved, and the political responses and motivations to curtail corruption all inform the answer to this question. …