Law and Economics Commons^™

Credit Cards, Consumer Credit, And Bankruptcy, Ronald J. Mann

Faculty Scholarship

This paper analyzes the effects of credit card use on broader economic indicators, specifically consumer credit, and consumer bankruptcy filings. Using aggregate nation-level data from Australia, Canada, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States, I find that credit card spending, lagged by 1-2 years, has a strong positive effect on consumer credit. Finally, I find a strong relation between credit card debt, lagged by 1-2 years, and bankruptcy, and a weaker relation between consumer credit, lagged by 1-2 years, and bankruptcy. The relations are robust across a variety of different lags and models that account for problems of multicollinearity …

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 …

Law, Markets And Democracy: A Role For Law In The Neo-Liberal State, Alfred C. Aman

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Especially after 1980, our belief in and our use of law to solve societal problems seemed to decline precipitously, well beyond the ebb and flow of political trends and tastes. Beginning in earnest in the 1980s, political discourse increasingly treated law and markets primarily in binary terms. You could have one or the other, but not both. More law meant less markets and vice versa. When it came to choosing between law or markets, the tide clearly had shifted. If injustices in the 1970s were greeted with the slogan "there ought to be a law", that approach to solving problems …

Lost In Translation: The Economic Analysis Of Law In The United States And Europe, Kenneth G. Dau-Schmidt, Carmen L. Brun

Articles by Maurer Faculty

In this Essay, we examine the reasons why the economic analysis of law has not flourished in European countries as it has in the United States. In particular, we focus on three European countries-the United Kingdom, Germany, and France. We argue that differences in culture, the legal system, and the academy have led to differing degrees of success of the law and economics movement in each country. We speculate that, although there is currently less interest in the economic analysis of the law in Europe than in the United States, European interest could dramatically increase if scholars adopt more communitarian …

Principles Of Fairness For International Economic Treaties: Constructivism And Contractualism, John Linarelli

Scholarly Works

No legal system deserving of continued support can exist without an adequate theory of justice. A world trade constitution cannot credibly exist without a clear notion of justice upon which to base a consensus. This paper examines two accounts of fairness found in moral philosophy, those of John Rawls and Tim Scanlon. The Rawlsian theory of justice is well-known to legal scholars. Scanlon's contractualist account may be less well-known. The aim of the paper is to start the discussion as to how fairness theories can be used to develop the tools for examining international economic policies and institutions. After elaborating …

The Wto Agreement On Government Procurement And The Uncitral Model Procurement Law: A View From Outside The Region, John Linarelli

Scholarly Works

Two of the most significant efforts to bring municipal procurement institutions up to international standards are the WTO Agreement on Government Procurement (GPA) and the UNCITRAL Model Law on Procurement of Goods, Construction and Services. Though the Model Law has had limited adoptions, it enjoys global influence as a source of norms and practices for good public procurement. The GPA, also reflective of international standards, seems to be on the rise, as more WTO members elect to become GPA contracting parties. This article explores two aspects of these instruments. First, the article explores how the Model Law promotes efficient public …

Richard Posner Meets Reb Chaim Of Brisk: A Comparative Study In The Founding Of Intellectual Legal Movements, Samuel J. Levine

Scholarly Works

Of the various movements that have surfaced in American legal theory in recent decades, law and economics has emerged as perhaps the most influential, leading some to characterize it as the dominant contemporary mode of analysis among American legal scholars. In this essay, Levine considers law and economics in the context of a comparative discussion of another prominent intellectual legal movement, the Brisker method of Talmudic analysis, which originated in Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century and quickly developed into a leading method of theoretical study of Jewish law. The Brisker method takes its name from the city of …

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 …

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 …

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. …

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.

The Third Moment In Law And Development Theory And The Emergence Of A New Critical Practice, David M. Trubek, Alvaro Santos

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The study of the relationship between law and economic development goes back at least to the nineteenth century. It is a question that attracted the attention of classical thinkers like Marx and Weber. And there were some early efforts to craft policy in this area; for example, under the Raj, some English Utilitarians tried to put Jeremy Bentham’s ideas about law and economic progress into practice in India. But it was only after World War II that systematic and organized efforts to reform legal systems became part of the practice of international development agencies.

Initially, development agencies turned to law …

Public Legal Reason, Lawrence B. Solum

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay develops an ideal of public legal reason--a normative theory of legal reasons that is appropriate for a society characterized by religious and moral pluralism. One of the implications of this theory is that normative theorizing about public and private law should eschew reliance on the deep premises of deontology or consequentialism and should instead rely on what the author calls public values--values that can be affirmed without relying on the deep and controversial premises of particular comprehensive moral doctrines.

The ideal of public legal reason is then applied to a particular question--whether welfarism (a particular form of normative …

Does Falling Smoking Lead To Rising Obesity?, Jonathan Gruber, Michael D. Frakes

Faculty Scholarship

The strong negative correlation over time between smoking rates and obesity have led some to suggest that reduced smoking is increasing weight gain in the U.S.. This conclusion is supported by the findings of Chou et al. (2004), who conclude that higher cigarette prices lead to increased body weight. We investigate this issue and find no evidence that reduced smoking leads to weight gain. Using the cigarette tax rather than the cigarette price and controlling for non-linear time effects, we find a negative effect of cigarette taxes on body weight, implying that reduced smoking leads to lower body weights. Yet …

What Do We Owe Each Other In The Global Economic Order?: Constructivist And Contractualist Accounts, John Linarelli

Scholarly Works

No legal system deserving of continued support can exist without an adequate theory of justice. A world trade constitution cannot credibly exist without a clear notion of justice upon which to base a consensus. This paper examines two accounts of fairness found in moral philosophy, those of John Rawls and Tim Scanlon. The Rawlsian theory of justice is well-known to legal scholars. Scanlon's contractualist account may be less well-known. The aim of the paper is to start the discussion as to how fairness theories can be used to develop the tools for examining international economic policies and institutions. After elaborating …

Penalty Defaults In Family Law: The Case Of Child Custody, Margaret F. Brinig

Journal Articles

This paper considers whether an amendment to state divorce laws that strengthens its joint custody preference operates as a traditional default rule, specifying what most divorcing couples would choose or as a penalty default rule the parties will attempt to contract around.

While the Oregon statutes that frame our discussion here, like most state laws, do not state an explicit preference for joint custody, shared custody is certainly encouraged by Section 107.179, which refers cases in which the parties cannot agree on joint custody to mediation and by Section 107.105, which requires the court to consider awarding custody jointly. In …

A Psychology Of Emotional Legal Decision Making: Revulsion And Saving Face In Legal Theory And Practice, Peter H. Huang, Christopher J. Anderson

Publications

Professor Martha C. Nussbaum is an accomplished scholar in an impressive variety of fields. Drawing on her diverse academic backgrounds, Nussbaum has written extensively about emotions and their importance for law from the perspective of her primary specialty, philosophy. Her book Hiding from Humanity criticizes the roles that two particular emotions, disgust and shame, play in the law. Its central thesis is that, as legal actors, we should be wary of disgust and shame because indulging in those emotions allows us to hide from our humanity - both our humanity in the general sense and also those specific features of …

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 …

Helping Those Who Are Helping Us: Sarbanes-Oxley Whistleblower Protection And Its Interplay With Arbitration, Adam Fisher

Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution

The accounting profession took a major blow to its credibility in 2002 when numerous scandals surfaced on the front pages of newspapers seemingly everyday. The most notable stories told of two women who, despite the enormous pressure and harassment they knew they would face, came forward to reveal the ugly truth behind the facades of America's corporate skyscrapers. Cynthia Cooper and Sherron Watkins, employees at WorldCom and Enron respectively, blew the whistle on major accounting frauds at these companies. Their employers' retaliation was harsh and swift, revealing the truth about how todays' corporate juggernauts operate.