Law and Economics Commons^™

The Empagran Exception: Between Illinois Brick And A Hard Place, Victor P. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

Before it was uncovered and prosecuted, the international vitamin cartel, known as "Vitamins, Inc." by its perpetrators, was extraordinarily successful. Estimates of cartel profits run as high as $18 billion (in 2003 dollars). In addition to substantial criminal sanctions, cartel members paid over $2 billion to American plaintiffs. When foreign plaintiffs tried to sue the foreign defendants in American courts, however, they encountered resistance. A trial court read the Foreign Trade Antitrust Improvements Act ("FTAIA") to restrict the reach of the Sherman Act and preclude foreign purchasers from suing the foreign defendants. The D.C. Circuit reversed, holding that the facts …

The Law, Culture, And Economics Of Fashion, C. Scott Hemphill, Jeannie Suk

Center for Contract and Economic Organization

Fashion is one of the world’s most important creative industries. It is the major output of a global business with annual U.S. sales of more than $200 billion — larger than those of books, movies, and music combined. Everyone wears clothing and inevitably participates in fashion to some degree. Fashion is also a subject of periodically rediscovered fascination in virtually all the social sciences and the humanities. It has provided economic thought with a canonical example in theorizing about consumption and conformity. Social thinkers have long treated fashion as a window upon social class and social change. Cultural theorists have …

Domino Effect Of The Current Economic Crisis, Sue K. Varon, Martin S. Varon

Richmond Public Interest Law Review

The deepening recession, increased unemployment, and stalled housing market have negatively impacted the financial situation of most clients of the family lawyer. Many clients' homes are underwater because of declining values. Those divorcing couples fortunate enough to have equity in their most significant marital asset, their home, are unable to sell it. Combined with the plummeting value of retirement accounts, practitioners are looking at marital asset balance sheets that are nothing less than bleak.

Cash Businesses And Tax Evasion, Susan Morse, Stewart Karlinsky, Joseph Bankman

Faculty Publications

This Article attempts to provide a qualitative picture of tax evasion in the small business sector. It provides details from almost 275 field study interviews with cash business owners and with tax preparers and bankers who serve cash business clients. Our research suggests answers to the questions of who evades taxes, what taxes they evade, and why and how they evade taxes. This Article proceeds in three additional parts. Part II summarizes the main threads of relevant social science research on small business tax compliance. Part III describes the methodology and results of this interview study. Part IV concludes.

The Deterrent Effect Of Death Penalty Eligibility: Evidence From The Adoption Of Child Murder Eligibility Factors, Michael D. Frakes, Matthew Harding

Faculty Scholarship

We draw on within-state variations in the reach of capital punishment statutes between 1977 and 2004 to identify the deterrent effects associated with capital eligibility. Focusing on the most prevalent eligibility expansion, we estimate that the adoption of a child murder factor is associated with an approximately 20% reduction in the homicide rate of youth victims. Eligibility expansions may enhance deterrence by (1) paving the way for more executions and (2) providing prosecutors with greater leverage to secure enhanced non-capital sentences. While executions themselves are rare, this latter channel is likely to be triggered fairly regularly, providing a reasonable basis …

The Second Wave Of Comparative Law And Economics?, Ralf Michaels

Faculty Scholarship

Comment on a text by Gillian Hadfield, The Levers of Legal Design: Institutional Determinants of the Quality of Law, 36 Journal of Comparative Economics 43 (2008)

Does Intergenerational Justice Require Rising Standards Of Living?, Lawrence A. Zelenak

Faculty Scholarship

This essay considers whether it would be morally acceptable for a nation to use massive intergenerational borrowing to pursue a no-growth policy, under which the anticipated standard of living of members of future generations would be no higher than the standard of living of members of the present generation. The essay examines whether justification for such a policy can be found in either the political theory of John Rawls or in the application of utilitarian principles to intergenerational ethics. It concludes that under a Rawlsian analysis there is a strong argument that the current generation has no obligation to strive …

Reputation As Property In Virtual Economies, Joseph Blocher

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Letting Good Deeds Go Unpunished: Volunteer Immunity Laws And Tort Deterrence, Jill R. Horwitz, Joseph Mead

Articles

Does tort law deter risky behavior in individuals? We explore this question by examining the relationship between tort immunity and volunteering. During the 1980s and 1990s, nearly every state provided some degree of volunteer immunity. Congress followed with the 1997 Volunteer Protection Act. This article analyzes these acts, identifying three motivations for them: the chilling effects of tort liability, limits on liability insurance, and moral concerns. Using data from the Independent Survey’s Giving and Volunteering surveys, we then identify a large and positive correlation between immunity and volunteering. We next consider the implications of the findings for tort theory and …

Intellectual Liability, Daniel A. Crane

Articles

Intellectual property is increasingly a misnomer since the right to exclude is the defining characteristic of property and incentives to engage in inventive and creative activity are increasingly being granted in the form of liability rights (which allow the holder of the right to collect a royalty from users) rather than property rights (which allow the holder of the right to exclude others from using the invention or creation). Much of this recent reorientation in the direction of liability rules arises from a concern over holdout or monopoly power in intellectual property. The debate over whether liability rules or property …

Interpreting Data: A Reply To Professor Pardo, Robert M. Lawless, Angela K. Littwin, Katherine M. Porter, John A. E. Pottow, Deborah K. Thorne, Elizabeth Warren

Articles

Professor Pardo has published a pointed critique to our Report, raising three major complaints. First, he claims that we make two predicating assumptions in our study that are flawed. Second, he contends that we misunderstand the means test and fail to appreciate with sufficient "nuance" its "operative effect." Third, he maintains that our Report suffers from methodological problems. We can address the two impugned assumptions quickly. The first one - that BAPCPA's means test is the sole causal agent driving 800,000 putative filers from the bankruptcy courts - is not one we make. The second - regarding the income profiles …

The Role Of Nonprofits In Ced, Dana A. Thompson

Book Chapters

Nonprofit institutions play an integral role in community economic development (CED) in the United States. These entities initiate and implement most CED activities, and the CED movement would be significantly weakened without their existence. This chapter briefly explores the historical context of various nonprofit organizations in assisting low- and moderate-income communities across the United States, the ways in which modern-day nonprofit organizations are effecting change in their communities, and the challenges to their effectiveness.

The first section of this chapter discusses community development corporations (CDCs), neighborhood-based organizations that are the primary instruments used to drive and implement revitalization in low- …

Warranties And Disclaimers In The Electronic Age, Robert A. Hillman, Ibrahim Barakat

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

This paper reports on software-licensor express warranty and disclaimer practices on the Internet. Our data show that virtually all of the websites and End User License Agreements (EULAs) we sampled include express warranties on the website and disclaimers of the warranties in the EULAs that may erase all or much of the quality protection. Next, the paper reviews the reasons why consumers generally do not read their e-standard forms despite the prevalence of disclaimers and other adverse terms. We then argue that e-commerce exacerbates the problem of warranties and disclaimers and that lawmakers should address this issue. We contend that …

Human Persons, Human Rights, And The Distributive Structure Of Global Justice, Robert C. Hockett

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

It is common for economically oriented transnational legal theorists to think and communicate mainly in maximizing terms. It is less common for them to notice that each time we speak explicitly of maximizing one thing, we speak implicitly of distributing another thing and equalizing yet another thing. Moreover, we effectively define ourselves and our fellow humans by reference to that which we equalize. For it is in virtue of the latter that our global welfare formulations treat us as "counting" for purposes of globally aggregating and maximizing.

To analyze maximization language on the one hand, and equalization and identification language …

Lessons From The Subprime Debacle: Stress Testing Ceo Autonomy, Steven Ramirez

Faculty Publications & Other Works

No abstract provided.

The Death Of Copyright Protection In Individual Price Valuations, A Flawed Merger Doctrine, And Financial Market Manipulation: New York Mercantile Exchange V. Intercontinentalexchange, Jeremy V. Murray

Buffalo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Overstaying Your Welcome: The Martin Act And Post-Effective-Date Tenants, Kristopher Ferranti

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Domino Effect Of The Current Economic Crisis, Sue K. Varon, Martin S. Varon

Richmond Journal of Law and the Public Interest

The deepening recession, increased unemployment, and stalled housing market have negatively impacted the financial situation of most clients of the family lawyer. Many clients' homes are underwater because of declining values. Those divorcing couples fortunate enough to have equity in their most significant marital asset, their home, are unable to sell it. Combined with the plummeting value of retirement accounts, practitioners are looking at marital asset balance sheets that are nothing less than bleak.

The Intellectual Foundations Of The Modern American Fiscal State, Ajay K. Mehrotra

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Belief In A Just World, Blaming The Victim, And Hate Crime Statutes, Dhammika Dharmapala, Nuno Garoupa, Richard H. Mcadams

Faculty Scholarship

The earliest economic theory of discrimination proposed the subsequently neglected idea of a "vicious circle" of discrimination (Myrdal,1944). We draw on psychological evidence (that people derive utility from believing that the world is just) to propose a behavioral economic model in which the vicious circle envisaged by Myrdal can arise. We demonstrate the power of this approach through an application to the issue of whether and how to justify penalty enhancements for hate crimes against members of disfavored groups. The crucial assumption is that individuals engage in biased inference in order to preserve their Belief in a Just World, thus …

Human Dignity And American Employment Law, David C. Yamada

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.