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Articles 1 - 30 of 70
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
3d Printing And Healthcare: Will Laws, Lawyers, And Companies Stand In The Way Of Patient Care?, Evan R. Youngstrom
3d Printing And Healthcare: Will Laws, Lawyers, And Companies Stand In The Way Of Patient Care?, Evan R. Youngstrom
Evan R. Youngstrom
Today, our society is on a precipice of significant advancement in healthcare because 3D printing will usher in the next generation of medicine. The next generation will be driven by customization, which will allow doctors to replace limbs and individualize drugs. However, the next generation will be without large pharmaceutical companies and their justifications for strong intellectual property rights. However, the current patent system (which is underpinned by a social tradeoff made from property incentives) is not flexible enough to cope with 3D printing’s rapid development. Very soon, the social tradeoff will no longer benefit society, so it must be …
Gandhi’S Prophecy: Corporate Violence And A Mindful Law For Bhopal, Nehal A. Patel
Gandhi’S Prophecy: Corporate Violence And A Mindful Law For Bhopal, Nehal A. Patel
Nehal A. Patel
AbstractOver thirty years have passed since the Bhopal chemical disaster began,and in that time scholars of corporate social responsibility (CSR) havediscussed and debated several frameworks for improving corporate responseto social and environmental problems. However, CSR discourse rarelydelves into the fundamental architecture of legal thought that oftenbuttresses corporate dominance in the global economy. Moreover, CSRdiscourse does little to challenge the ontological and epistemologicalassumptions that form the foundation for modern economics and the role ofcorporations in the world.I explore methods of transforming CSR by employing the thought ofMohandas Gandhi. I pay particular attention to Gandhi’s critique ofindustrialization and principle of swadeshi (self-sufficiency) …
“To Promote The General Welfare” Addressing Political Corruption In America, Bruce M. Owen
“To Promote The General Welfare” Addressing Political Corruption In America, Bruce M. Owen
Bruce Owen
Systemic (but lawful) political corruption reduces well-being and equity in America. Madisonian democracy is no longer capable of containing such corruption. Proposals currently on the table to stem corruption are unlikely to be effective and tend to undermine basic rights. This essay describes a new approach—regulating the output of corrupted legislative and administrative processes, rather than the inputs. Providing for substantive ex post review of direct and delegated legislation would be far more protective of the “general welfare” of the People than other reforms, while no more or less difficult to implement. Supporting an umpire proposal may be a dominant …
Public Actors In Private Markets: Toward A Developmental Finance State, Robert Hockett, Saule Omarova
Public Actors In Private Markets: Toward A Developmental Finance State, Robert Hockett, Saule Omarova
Saule T. Omarova
The recent financial crisis brought into sharp relief fundamental questions about the social function and purpose of the financial system, including its relation to the “real” economy. This Article argues that, to answer these questions, we must recapture a distinctively American view of the proper relations among state, financial market, and development. This programmatic vision – captured in what we call a “developmental finance state” – is based on three key propositions: (1) that economic and social development is not an “end-state” but a continuing national policy priority; (2) that the modalities of finance are the most potent means of …
Hospital Chargemaster Insanity: Heeling The Healers, George A. Nation Iii
Hospital Chargemaster Insanity: Heeling The Healers, George A. Nation Iii
George A Nation III
Hospital list prices, contained in something called a chargemaster are insanely high, often running 10 times the amount that hospitals routinely accept as full payment from insurers. Moreover, the relative level of a particular hospital’s chargemaster prices bears no relationship to either the quality of the services the hospital provides or, to the cost of the services provided. The purpose of these fictitious list prices is to serve as a starting point or anchoring point, for negotiations with third-party payers regarding the amount that they will actually pay the hospital for it’s goods and services.
Ironically, there is widespread agreement, …
Law In Regression? Impacts Of Quantitative Research On Law And Regulation, David C. Donald
Law In Regression? Impacts Of Quantitative Research On Law And Regulation, David C. Donald
David C. Donald
Quantitative research (QR) has undeniably improved the quality of law- and rulemaking, but it can also present risks for these activities. On the one hand, replacing anecdotal assertions regarding behavior or the effects of rules in an area to be regulated with objective, statistical evidence has advanced the quality of regulatory discourse. On the other hand, because the construction of such evidence often depends on bringing the complex realities of both human behavior and rules designed to govern it into simple, quantified variables, QR findings can at times camouflage complexity, masking real problems. Deceptively objective findings can in this way …
Taking Distribution Seriously, Robert C. Hockett
Taking Distribution Seriously, Robert C. Hockett
Robert C. Hockett
It is common for legal theorists and policy analysts to think and communicate mainly in maximizing terms. What is less common is for them to notice that each time we speak explicitly of socially maximizing one thing, we speak implicitly of distributing another thing and equalizing yet another thing. We also, moreover, effectively define ourselves and our fellow citizens by reference to that which we equalize; for it is in virtue of the latter that our social welfare formulations treat us as “counting” for purposes of socially aggregating and maximizing. To attend systematically to the inter-translatability of maximization language on …
Minding The Gaps: Fairness, Welfare, And The Constitutive Structure Of Distributive Assessment, Robert C. Hockett
Minding The Gaps: Fairness, Welfare, And The Constitutive Structure Of Distributive Assessment, Robert C. Hockett
Robert C. Hockett
Despite over a century’s disputation and attendant opportunity for clarification, the field of inquiry now loosely labeled “welfare economics” (WE) remains surprisingly prone to foundational confusions. The same holds of work done by many practitioners of WE’s influential offshoot, normative “law and economics” (LE). A conspicuous contemporary case of confusion turns up in recent discussion concerning “fairness versus welfare.” The very naming of this putative dispute signals a crude category error. “Welfare” denotes a proposed object of distribution. “Fairness” describes and appropriate pattern of distribution. Welfare itself is distributed fairly or unfairly. “Fairness versus welfare” is analytically on all fours …
Nuclear Chain Reaction: Why Economic Sanctions Are Not Worth The Public Costs, Nicholas C.W. Wolfe
Nuclear Chain Reaction: Why Economic Sanctions Are Not Worth The Public Costs, Nicholas C.W. Wolfe
Nicholas A Wolfe
International economic sanctions frequently violate human rights in targeted states and rarely achieve their objectives. However, many hail economic sanctions as an important nonviolent tool for coercing and persuading change. In November 2013, the Islamic Republic of Iran negotiated a temporary agreement with major world powers regarding Iran’s nuclear program. The United States’ media and politicians have repeatedly and incorrectly attributed Iran’s willingness to negotiate to the effectiveness of economic sanctions.
Politicians primarily focus on immediate domestic effects and enact sanctions without a thorough understanding of the long-term effects on the United States economy and the public within a targeted …
The Ciudades Modelo Project: Testing The Legality Of Paul Romer’S Charter Cities Concept By Analyzing The Constitutionality Of The Honduran Zones For Employment And Economic Development, Michael R. Miller
Michael R Miller
Over the last several years, the Honduran government has been aggressively advancing a "model cities" project that it argues will provide options for its citizens to escape the extreme violence in their country without migrating to the U.S. The model cities, which are formally called "Zones for Employment and Economic Development" ("ZEDEs"), are purported to be autonomously governed areas that will attract foreign investment and compete for residents by establishing safer communities and better managed institutions governed by the rule of law.
The ZEDEs trace their origin to a concept formulated by development economist Paul Romer, who proposed the idea …
The Smokable Goods Tax: Crafting A Constitutional Marijuana Tax, Nima H. Mohebbi, Samuel T. Greenberg
The Smokable Goods Tax: Crafting A Constitutional Marijuana Tax, Nima H. Mohebbi, Samuel T. Greenberg
Nima H. Mohebbi
Marijuana legalization and decriminalization has become a hot policy issue. Roughly twenty U.S. states have partially legalized marijuana (generally for medicinal purposes) and two states – Colorado and Washington – have legalized it for general adult recreational use. Given the likely hyper-growth of the cannabis market in view of the possible wide-scale legalization of marijuana, states might enjoy a potential budgetary windfalls from marijuana excise taxes. Marijuana, however, remains a federally controlled substance, the sale or use of which is subject to substantial penalties. For the states, this presents a potential problem in collecting excise taxes on marijuana – namely, …
Behavioral International Law, Tomer Broude
Behavioral International Law, Tomer Broude
Tomer Broude
Economic analysis and rational choice have in the last decade made significant inroads into the study of international law and institutions, relying upon standard assumptions of perfect rationality of states and decision-makers. This approach is inadequate, both empirically and in its tendency towards outdated formulations of political theory. This article presents an alternative behavioral approach that provides new hypotheses addressing problems in international law while introducing empirically grounded concepts of real, observed rationality. First, I address methodological objections to behavioral analysis of international law: the focus of behavioral research on the individual; the empirical foundations of behavioral economics; and behavioral …
Corporate Social Responsibility In A Remedy-Seeking Society: A Public Choice Perspective, Donald J. Kochan
Corporate Social Responsibility In A Remedy-Seeking Society: A Public Choice Perspective, Donald J. Kochan
Donald J. Kochan
Written for the Chapman Law Review Symposium on “What Can Law & Economics Teach Us About the Corporate Social Responsibility Debate?,” this Article applies the lessons of public choice theory to examine corporate social responsibility. The Article adopts a broad definition of corporate social responsibility activism to include both (1) those efforts that seek to convince corporations to voluntarily take into account corporate social responsibility in their own decision-making, and (2) the efforts to alter the legal landscape and expand legal obligations of corporations beyond traditional notions of harm and duty so as to force corporations to invest in interests …
What Do We Worry About When We Worry About Price Discrimination? The Law And Ethics Of Using Personal Information For Pricing, Akiva A. Miller
What Do We Worry About When We Worry About Price Discrimination? The Law And Ethics Of Using Personal Information For Pricing, Akiva A. Miller
Akiva A Miller
New information technologies have dramatically increased sellers’ ability to engage in retail price discrimination. Debates over using personal information for price discrimination frequently treat it as a single problem, and are not sufficiently sensitive to the variety of price discrimination practices, the different kinds of information they require in order to succeed, and the different ethical concerns they raise. This paper explores the ethical and legal debate over regulating price discrimination facilitated by consumers’ personal information. Various kinds of “privacy remedies”—self-regulation, technological fixes, state regulation, and legislating private causes of legal action—each have their place. By drawing distinctions between various …
The Commons, Capitalism, And The Constitution, George Skouras
The Commons, Capitalism, And The Constitution, George Skouras
George Skouras
Thesis Summary: the erosion of the Commons in the United States has contributed to the deterioration of community and uprooting of people in order to meet the dynamic demands of capitalism. This article suggests countervailing measures to help remedy the situation.
A Market For Tax Compliance, Walter E. Afield Iii
A Market For Tax Compliance, Walter E. Afield Iii
Walter E Afield III
It is becoming increasingly clear that, due to political realities and budgetary constraints, the IRS is going to have to attempt to enforce the tax laws by doing more with less. Current enforcement efforts have yielded a tax gap (i.e., the difference between the amount of taxes that should be paid and the amount that are collected) of roughly $450 billion annually. Faced with this task, one of the steps that the IRS has recently taken is to try to improve the quality in services performed by paid tax preparers, a group that historically has been subject to little IRS …
Licensure Of Health Care Professionals: The Consumer's Case For Abolition, Charles H. Baron
Licensure Of Health Care Professionals: The Consumer's Case For Abolition, Charles H. Baron
Charles H. Baron
While state medical licensure laws ostensibly are intended to promote worthwhile goals, such as the maintenance of high standards in health care delivery, this Article argues that these laws in practice are detrimental to consumers. The Article takes the position that licensure contributes to high medical care costs and stifles competition, innovation and consumer autonomy. It concludes that delicensure would expand the range of health services available to consumers and reduce patient dependency, and that these developments would tend to make medical practice more satisfying to consumers and providers of health care services.
How To Create American Manufacturing Jobs, John D. Gleissner Esquire
How To Create American Manufacturing Jobs, John D. Gleissner Esquire
John D Gleissner Esquire
No abstract provided.
Snopa And The Ppa: Do You Know What It Means For You? If Snopa (Social Networking Online Protection Act) Or Ppa (Password Protection Act) Do Not Pass, The Snooping Could Cause You Trouble, Angela Goodrum
Angela Goodrum
No abstract provided.
Costs Of Codification, Dru Stevenson
Costs Of Codification, Dru Stevenson
Dru Stevenson
Between the Civil War and World War II, every state and the federal government shifted toward codified versions of their statutes. Academia has so far ignored the systemic effects of this dramatic change. For example, the consensus view in the academic literature about rules and standards has been that precise rules present higher enactment costs for legislatures than would general standards, while vague standards present higher information costs for courts and citizens than do rules. Systematic codification – featuring hierarchical format and numbering, topical arrangement, and cross-references – inverts this relationship, lowering transaction costs for legislatures and increasing information costs …
Neoliberalism And The Law: How Historical Materialism Can Illuminate Recent Governmental And Judicial Decision Making, Justin Schwartz
Neoliberalism And The Law: How Historical Materialism Can Illuminate Recent Governmental And Judicial Decision Making, Justin Schwartz
Justin Schwartz
Neoliberalism can be understood as the deregulation of the economy from political control by deliberate action or inaction of the state. As such it is both constituted by the law and deeply affects it. I show how the methods of historical materialism can illuminate this phenomenon in all three branches of the the U.S. government. Considering the example the global financial crisis of 2007-08 that began with the housing bubble developing from trade in unregulated and overvalued mortgage backed securities, I show how the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which established a firewall between commercial and investment banking, allowed this …
The Rise Of Planning In Industrial America, 1865-1914
The Rise Of Planning In Industrial America, 1865-1914
Richard Adelstein
How American firms grew very large after the Civil War, and how Americans responded to them.
Firms As Social Actors, Richard Adelstein
Firms As Social Actors, Richard Adelstein
Richard Adelstein
A close look at what firms are and how they act.
Organizations And Economics, Richard Adelstein
Organizations And Economics, Richard Adelstein
Richard Adelstein
A contribution to a symposium on a paper by Richard Posner.
Behavioral Public Finance, Edward J. Mccaffery
Behavioral Public Finance, Edward J. Mccaffery
Edward J McCaffery
These are slides from a presentation to the Gruter Institute for Law and Behavioral Research, Squaw Valley Conference, May, 2008 (at which event Michael Jensen got me to agree to post these slides as a pdf on SSRN . . . ). The task is to give an overview of what I hope to be an emerging field of behavioral public finance. Behavioral finance, as per Barberis and Thaler 2003 (and others), consists of two parts: (1) individual level heuristics and biases, which can lead to sub-optimal (inconsistent) judgment and decision-making, and (2) institutional arbitrage mechanisms. In private finance and …
Comments On Liebman And Zeckhauser, Simple Humans, Complex Insurance, Subtle Subsidies, Edward J. Mccaffery
Comments On Liebman And Zeckhauser, Simple Humans, Complex Insurance, Subtle Subsidies, Edward J. Mccaffery
Edward J McCaffery
These are brief comments on an excellent paper by Jeffrey Liebman and Richard Zeckhauser, prepared for a conference sponsored by the Urban Institute and Brookings on tax and health care policy. Liebman and Zeckhauser summarize the complexities involved in making optimal health insurance decisions, and offer generally cautionary notes about conflating these with tax law (a theme of the conference). Most importantly, Liebman and Zeckhauser suggest a positive role for employers in health care and insurance decisions, as better setters or framers of choice sets—witness 401(k) plans. In this Commentary, I applaud Leibman and Zeckhauser’s general work and particular observation, …
Taking Distribution Seriously, Robert C. Hockett
Taking Distribution Seriously, Robert C. Hockett
Cornell Law Faculty Working Papers
It is common for legal theorists and policy analysts to think and communicate mainly in maximizing terms. What is less common is for them to notice that each time we speak explicitly of socially maximizing one thing, we speak implicitly of distributing another thing and equalizing yet another thing. We also, moreover, effectively define ourselves and our fellow citizens by reference to that which we equalize; for it is in virtue of the latter that our social welfare formulations treat us as “counting” for purposes of socially aggregating and maximizing.
To attend systematically to the inter-translatability of maximization language on …
Much Ado About Pluralities: Pride And Precedent Amidst The Cacophy Of Concurrences, And Re-Percolation After Rapanos, Donald J. Kochan, Melissa M. Berry, Matthew J. Parlow
Much Ado About Pluralities: Pride And Precedent Amidst The Cacophy Of Concurrences, And Re-Percolation After Rapanos, Donald J. Kochan, Melissa M. Berry, Matthew J. Parlow
Donald J. Kochan
Conflicts created by concurrences and pluralities in court decisions create confusion in law and lower court interpretation. Rule of law values require that individuals be able to identify controlling legal principles. That task is complicated when pluralities and concurrences contribute to the vagueness or uncertainty that leaves us wondering what the controlling rule is or attempting to predict what it will evolve to become. The rule of law is at least handicapped when continuity or confidence or confusion infuse our understanding of the applicable rules. This Article uses the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision in Rapanos v. United States to …
Paying To Save: Tax Withholding And Asset Allocation Among Low- And Moderate-Income Taxpayers, Michael S. Barr, Jane Dokko
Paying To Save: Tax Withholding And Asset Allocation Among Low- And Moderate-Income Taxpayers, Michael S. Barr, Jane Dokko
Law & Economics Working Papers Archive: 2003-2009
We analyze the phenomenon that low- and moderate-income (LMI) tax filers exhibit a “preference for over-withholding” their taxes, a measure we derive from a unique set of questions administered in a dataset of 1,003 households, which we collected through the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan. We argue that the relationship between their withholding preference and portfolio allocation across liquid and illiquid assets is consistent with models with present-biased preferences, and that individuals exhibit self-control problems when making their consumption and saving decisions. Our results support a model in which individuals use commitment devices to constrain their consumption. …
The Hidden Harm Of Law And Economics, Daniel I A Cohen
The Hidden Harm Of Law And Economics, Daniel I A Cohen
ExpressO
The paper deals with the adverse psychodynamic consequences to an individual and to society, immediately and in the long run, of dissolving individual responsibility for fault as in the doctrine of Law and economics.