Law and Economics Commons^™

Marital Contracting In A Post-Windsor World, Martha M. Ertman

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Investments To Make Threats Credible, Rent-Seeking, And Duress, Mark Seidenfeld, Murat C. Mungan

Scholarly Publications

Existing literature on the contract law doctrine of duress identifies a number of tests to determine conditions under which a contract can be voided. No article provides a specific and formal economic analysis on the link between rent-seeking and the conditions under which allowing a defense of duress is wealth enhancing. This article shows that commitments made as a result of ex ante investments by threatening parties made solely for the purpose of transferring, rather than creating wealth, ought to be voidable. We discuss cases in which a test based on rent-seeking enhances efficiency where previously proposed tests do not.

Law And Economic Exploitation In An Anti-Classification Age, Hila Keren

Florida State University Law Review

Does our legal system permit the economic exploitation of extreme vulnerability? Focusing on predatory housing loans—a thriving business at the dawn of the twenty-first century—this Article argues that the answer in most cases is yes. Under an individualistic neoliberal paradigm, borrowers are held liable for their contracts, even if they were targeted with predatory practices. Further, borrowers’ attempts to resort to antidiscrimination law, and frame their exploitation as “reverse redlining,” have offered no real answer. An important yet undertheorized explanation for this problem is the impact of the Supreme Court’s anti-classification jurisprudence on lower courts. In an anti-classification age, even …

Private Ordering Under Threat Of Regulation, Jake Linford

Scholarly Publications

No abstract provided.

Adjudicating Corporate Auctions, Jay B. Kesten

Scholarly Publications

In light of recent developments in auction theory, this Article re-examines Delaware corporate law governing directors' actions when structuring the sale of a corporation. A foundational doctrine of Delaware law is that when the board of directors resolves to sell a corporation, it must obtain the highest price reasonably available. Auction theory posits that, in certain circumstances germane to corporate takeovers, revenues can be maximized through the use of ex ante precommitments to the rules of the auction. Delaware law, however, does not fully endorse directors' ability to make such precommitments, primarily out of the concern that the board will …

Political Uncertainty And The Market For Ipos, Jay B. Kesten, Murat C. Mungan

Scholarly Publications

No abstract provided.

Childcare Market Failure, Meredith J. Harbach

Law Faculty Publications

In the UnitedStates,family law norms and childcare policy have long reflected the view that childcare is a private,family matter.Butchildcare hascrossedtheprivate-publicdivide.In the absence of parents at home providing care, a substantial childcare market has emerged. And that market is failing. Our law, policy, and legal scholarship have yet to recognize and account for this new reality. This Article confronts the problem on its own terms, using economic analysis to diagnose our childcarecrisis as a marketfailure,and makes the casefor more active and explicit government intervention in the childcare market. Economic theory not only helps us understand why the market is failing, but …

Human Equity? Regulating The New Income Share Agreements, Shu-Yi Oei, Diane Ring

Faculty Scholarship

A controversial new financing phenomenon has recently emerged. New "income share agreements" (''ISAs'') enable an individual to raise funds by pledging a percentage of her future earnings to investors for a certain number of years. These contracts, which have been offered by entities such as Fantex, Upstart, Pave, and Lumni, raise important questions for the legal system: Are they a form of modern-day indentured servitude or an innovative breakthrough in human financing? How should they be treated under the law?

This Article comprehensively addresses the public policy and legal issues raised by ISAs and articulates an analytical approach to evaluating …

Markets, Morals, And Limits In The Exchange Of Human Eggs, Kimberly D. Krawiec

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Surprising Relevance Of Medical Malpractice Law, Michael D. Frakes

Faculty Scholarship

The academic community has largely reached a consensus that medical malpractice reform is unlikely to be a meaningful source of health-care cost containment. This Article suggests that it would be premature to conclude based on the evidence underlying this academic sentiment that physicians are universally insensitive to the parameters of medical malpractice law and that liability reform has no role to play in the health-care-costs debate. On the contrary, this Article demonstrates that the medical-liability system, under particular structures and conditions, may indeed have a meaningful connection to health-care spending patterns.

The shortcoming of the existing empirical literature that has …

Do Physicians Respond To Liability Standards?, Michael D. Frakes, Matthew Frank, Seth Seabury

Faculty Scholarship

In this paper, we explore the sensitivity in the clinical decisions of physicians to the standards of care expected of them under the law, drawing on the abandonment by states over time of rules holding physicians to standards determined by local customs and the contemporaneous adoption of national-standard rules. Using data on broad rates of surgical interventions at the county-by-year level from the Area Resource File, we find that local surgery rates converge towards national surgery rates upon the adoption of national-standard rules. Moreover, we find that these effects are more pronounced among rural counties.

The Effect Of Statutory Rape Laws On Teen Birth Rates, Michael D. Frakes, Matthew C. Harding

Faculty Scholarship

Policymakers have often been explicit in expanding statutory rape laws to reduce teenage pregnancies and live births by teenage mothers, often with the goal of reducing associated welfare outlays. In this paper, we explore whether expansions in such laws are indeed associated with reductions in teen birth rates. In order to codify statutory-rape-law expansions, we use a national micro-level sample of sexual encounters to simulate the degree to which such encounters generally implicate the relevant laws. By codifying statutory-rape laws in terms of their potential reach into sexual encounters, as opposed to using crude binary treatment variables, this simulation approach …

Quitting In Protest: A Theory Of Presidential Policy Making And Agency Response, Charles M. Cameron, John M. De Figueiredo, David E. Lewis

Faculty Scholarship

This paper examines the effects of centralized presidential policy-making, implemented through unilateral executive action, on the willingness of bureaucrats to exert effort and stay in the government. Extending models in organizational economics, we show that policy initiative by the president is a substitute for initiative by civil servants. Yet, total effort is enhanced when both work. Presidential centralization of policy often impels policy-oriented bureaucrats ("zealots") to quit rather than implement presidential policies they dislike. Those most likely to quit are a range of moderate bureaucrats. More extreme bureaucrats may be willing to wait out an opposition president in the hope …

Occupy Copyright: A Law & Economic Analysis Of U.S. Author Termination Rights, Kate Darling

Buffalo Law Review

No abstract provided.

International Trade's Zero-Sum Game: How Zeroing In Accordance With The Tariff Act Of 1930 Harms The American Economy And Why It Must Go, Courtney Cox

Loyola Consumer Law Review

No abstract provided.

Revisited 2015: Protection Of U.S. Trade Secret Assets: Critical Amendments To The Economic Espionage Act Of 1996, 14 J. Marshall Rev. Intell. Prop. L. 476 (2015), R. Mark Halligan

UIC Review of Intellectual Property Law

In order to protect the national and economic interests of the United States, the Economic Espionage Act was enacted in 1996. Although intended to prevent and deter trade secret theft, the EEA is limited to criminal prosecutions. Critical amendments to the EEA are required to create a civil cause of action in the new information-based economy and the international marketplace. In 2008, the author recommended two critical amendments to the Economic Espionage Act that have been vetted and have been the subject of legislative proposals for the past 7 years. The author now revisits developments since 2008 and underscores the …

Information & Equilibrium In Insurance Markets With Big Data, Peter Siegelman

Faculty Articles and Papers

Asymmetric information makes the behavior of insurance markets very difficult to predict. But this Article argues that the increasing use of Big Data by insurers will not result in forecasts of loss that are so accurate that they eliminate uncertainty, and with it, the possibility of insurance. Big Data techniques might lead to a 'flip" in informational asymmetry, resulting in a situation in which insurers know more about their customers than the latter know about themselves. But the effects of such a development could actually be benign. Finally, the Article considers the potential for Big (or at least, More) Data …

Concept And Contract In The Future Of International Law, John Linarelli

Scholarly Works

This is an article written for a symposium on Joel Trachtman’s book, The Future of International Law. I first deal with the contractarian features of Trachtman’s approach to understanding international law. Using the tools of new institutional economics and constitutional economics, Trachtman seeks to describe the features of an international legal system. This is positive political theory or at least relates substantially to the methods of positive political theory. I explore a different approach, one connecting to normative political theory. In its ambitious sense, my approach would see international law as a form of moral argument, but in its modest …

A Conceptual Framework For The Regulation Of Cryptocurrencies, Omri Y. Marian

UF Law Faculty Publications

This Essay proposes a conceptual framework for the regulation of transactions involving cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrencies offer tremendous opportunities for innovation and development but are also uniquely suited to facilitate illicit behavior. The regulatory framework suggested herein is intended to support (or at least not impair) cryptocurrencies’ innovative potential. At the same time, it aims to disrupt cryptocurrencies’ criminal utility. To achieve these purposes, this Essay proposes a regulatory framework that imposes costs on the characteristics of cryptocurrencies that make them especially useful for criminal behavior (in particular, anonymity) but does not impose costs on characteristics that are at the core of …

In The Name Of The Child: Race, Gender, And Economics In Adoptive Couple V. Baby Girl, Bethany Berger

Faculty Articles and Papers

On June 25, 2013, the Supreme Court decided Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl, holding that the Indian Child Welfare Act did not permit the Cherokee father in that case to object to termination of his parental rights. The case is ostensibly about a dispute between prospective adoptive parents and a biological father. This Article demonstrates that it is about a lot more than that. It is a microcosm of anxieties about Indianness, race, and the changing nature of parenthood. While made in the name of the child, moreover, the decision supports practices and policies that do not forward and may …

Lift Not The Painted Veil! To Whom Are Directors’ Duties Really Owed?, Martin Gelter, Geneviève Helleringer

Faculty Scholarship

In this article, we identify a fundamental contradiction in the law of fiduciary duty of corporate directors across jurisdictions, namely the tension between the uniformity of directors’ duties and the heterogeneity of directors themselves. American scholars tend to think of the board as a group of individuals elected by shareholders, even though it is widely acknowledged (and criticized) that the board is often a largely self-perpetuating body whose inside members dominate the selection of their future colleagues and eventual successors. However, this characterization is far from universally true internationally, and it tends to be increasingly less true even in the …

The Responsible Investor’S Guide To Climate Change, Jeffrey D. Sachs, Lisa E. Sachs

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

Around the world, institutional investors – including pension funds, insurance companies, philanthropic endowments, and universities – are grappling with the question of whether to divest from oil, gas, and coal companies. The reason, of course, is climate change: unless fossil-fuel consumption is cut sharply – and phased out entirely by around 2070, in favor of zero-carbon energy such as solar power – the world will suffer unacceptable risks from human-induced global warming. How should responsible investors behave in the face of these unprecedented risks?

Economic Conundrums In Search Of A Solution: The Functions Of Third-Party Litigation Finance, Joanna M. Shepherd, Judd E. Stone Ii

Faculty Articles

Despite a rapid increase in economic significance and substantial increase in international use, third-party litigation financing remains poorly understood. No academic consensus takes account of the multiple economic conundrums that third-party litigation financing arises to solve, nor do legal scholars adequately consider obvious public and private substitutes for litigation financing that society rightfully recognizes as innocuous or outright beneficial. In this Article, we explore the economic challenges driving both business plaintiffs and sophisticated law firms to seek external litigation financing. We examine closely the key elements of the litigation financing arrangement itself, focusing on eligible cases and clients, devices financiers …

Death Penalty Drugs And The International Moral Marketplace, James Gibson, Corinna Barrett Lain

Law Faculty Publications

Across the country, executions have become increasingly problematic as states have found it more and more difficult to procure the drugs they need for lethal injection.At first blush, the drug shortage appears to be the result of pharmaceutical industry norms; companies that make drugs for healing (mostly in Europe) have refused to be merchants of death. But closer inspection reveals that European governments are the true change agents here. For decades, those governments have tried-and failed-to promote abolition of the death penalty through traditional instruments of international law. Turns out that the best way to export their abolitionist norms was …

"Economic Property Rights" As "Nonsense Upon Stilts": A Comment On Hodgson, Daniel H. Cole

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Hodgson's (2015) critique of extra-legal 'property rights' - in this case, so-called 'economic property rights' - is right on target. This Comment contributes two further points to his critique. First, the notion of 'economic property rights' is based on what Gilbert Ryle (1949) referred to as a 'category mistake', conflating physical possession, which is a brute fact about the world, with the right or entitlement to possession, which is a social or institutional fact that cannot exist in the absence of some social contract, convention, covenant, or agreement. The very notion of a non-institutional 'right' is oxymoronic. Second, the fact …

Toward A Critical Corporate Law Pedagogy And Scholarship, Steven A. Ramirez, Cheryl L. Wade, Andre Douglas Pond Cummings

Faculty Publications & Other Works

No abstract provided.

How Federal Tax Expenditures That Support Housing Contribute To Economic Inequality, Henry Rose

Faculty Publications & Other Works

No abstract provided.

Innovation Worth Sharing: Seeking Balance Between Innovation Policy And National Security, Alexandra H. Katich

Cardozo Journal of International and Comparative Law

The note examines the tension between promoting innovation and safeguarding national security, focusing on the Invention Secrecy Act of 1951. It argues that while the Act is designed to protect sensitive inventions, extending its secrecy powers to economically significant patents would be counterproductive, unconstitutional, and harmful to U.S. competitiveness. The analysis highlights the challenges of balancing economic security, intellectual property rights, and the constitutional mandate to promote scientific progress.

Economic Theory, Divided Infringement And Enforcing Interactive Patents, W. Keith Robinson

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

High tech companies – especially in the emerging areas of the Internet of Things, wearable devices, and personalized medicine – have found it difficult to enforce their patents on interactive technologies. This is especially true when multiple parties combine to perform all of the steps of a claimed method. This problem is referred to as joint or divided infringement, and some commentators advocate that “interactive” patents susceptible to divided infringement should not be enforced.

In contrast, this article argues that economic theory supports the enforcement of interactive patents. Previous papers have analyzed divided infringement problems from a doctrinal and policy …

The Once And Future Irrelevancy Of Section 12(G), Usha Rodrigues

Scholarly Works

Among more fundamental reforms, the JOBS ACt of 2012 amended Section 12(g) of the Securities Exchange Act and sought to increase the number of shareholders (from 500 to 2000) that a firm must have before it must make public disclosures. Argument on the floor of Congress focused on the undue burden the provision placed on companies. This Article examines data that invalidates those anecdotal concerns.

Indeed, the data reveal important insights: First, my hand-collected dataset shows that, contrary to public concerns about Section 12(g)'s onerous burdens, it only affects a few firms - (less than three percent of those going …