Law and Economics Commons^™

A Strategic Approach To “E”Sg Reporting, Taylor Nchako

Lewis & Clark Law Review

Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) factors have emerged as an important investment tool for the financial sector to address climate change. While the federal government has abandoned ESG disclosure, U.S. firms still face reporting obligations domestically and abroad. States across the country have proposed or passed two types of disclosure laws: greenhouse gas emissions disclosure and climate risk disclosure. These state-level efforts mirror actions in the European Union, Canada, and other jurisdictions in which U.S. firms operate.

As ESG disclosure standards are adopted in jurisdictions around the world, these standards are undergoing various advancements, reductions, and contestations. These shifts in …

1981, Carliss N. Chatman

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

42 U.S.C. § 1981 should have solved a pervasive problem in American capitalism—when white economic interests do not converge with the contract rights of Black people, they are excluded from the market in a way that causes systemic harm. This Article proposes that the failure to enforce 1981 in the past may render it more harmful than beneficial in the present climate of retrenchment. The realities of racism combine with the lack of economic interest convergence to make combatting contract inequality on a contract-by-contract basis legally precarious, nearly impossible to properly evaluate, and difficult to economically incentivize. This is in …

Values Primacy & Total Governance Through Activism, Carliss N. Chatman, Sergio Alberto Gramitto Ricci

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, public companies swift-ly pledged sweeping equity commitments—only to abandon them under political and market pressure. These reversals were not aberrations. They were opportunistic, performative, and reactionary marketing responses. They expose a governance regime in which stakeholder interests are structurally reversible because they remain doctrinally optional, lacking the institutional interlock needed to create binding accountability across stakeholder roles.

This Article explores how stakeholder power is already embedded in corporate governance through interlocking initiatives grounded in shared values. Stakeholder activism—boycotts, proxy votes, viral campaigns—is not merely expressive; it is an overlooked form of governance. Drawing …

A New View Of Taxation, Christopher H. Hanna

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Tax scholars have made a number of breakthrough discoveries in tax law going back to at least Thomas Hobbes and his observations on a consumption tax almost 400 years ago. In more recent times, in the 1970 and 1980s, a number of tax law scholars made very important contributions in understanding the similarities and differences between an income tax, a consumption tax and a wage tax, as well as developing a greater understanding in a related area—the time value of money. It seems, however, that in the last 30 years or so, the only breakthrough or significant discovery in tax …

The Future Of Monetary Federalism: Rethinking Supremacy In The Stablecoin Era, Richard H. Fair

American University Business Law Review

[INTRODUCTION] In the summer of 2023, the State of Wyoming enacted a law authorizing its state treasurer to issue a blockchain-based, state-backed digital stablecoin known as the Wyoming Stable Token (“WYST”). Two years later, Congress passed the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act (GENIUS Act, GENIUS, or the Act), moving to establish a comprehensive federal regulatory regime for stablecoins. These dueling initiatives have sparked more than regulatory confusion; they have set the stage for a structural clash between state financial innovation and federal monetary supremacy. At the heart of this confrontation lies a question that the Constitution …

Romanist-Bourgeois Property And The Development Of The Modern Capitalist World System, Anna Di Robilant

Faculty Scholarship

This article examines the role of Romanist-bourgeois property law in the development of the modern capitalist world system, focusing on how nineteenth-century jurists deliberately crafted and adapted Roman law-based property doctrines to address the evolving social relations of production in both Europe and its peripheries. Rather than viewing legal concepts as merely reflective of broader economic transformations, the author highlights the active role played by a professional class of jurists in shaping property law to legitimize and structure emergent capitalist class dynamics. The article critically engages with competing scholarly perspectives that either privilege market expansion or downplay class relations, arguing …

Universities, Capital, And Democratic Vulnerability, Steven Dean, Dana Brakman Reiser

Faculty Scholarship

For many, the university serves as a crucial guardian of democracy. Still, the capitulation of leading American private universities to authoritarian pressure from the Trump Administration should not be terribly surprising. This Essay offers one reason why. It does so by focusing on the law governing private nonprofit universities. It examines both the origins and the impact of a fundamental tension between their charitable missions and their need for capital. It shows how the legal framework designed to protect these nonprofit universities from market pressures can actually intensify their vulnerability.

The so-called “nondistribution constraint” stands at the core of U.S. …

Ticking Toward Reform: Rethinking The Material Difference Exception In The Luxury Watch Resale Market And Beyond, Mallory K. Hogan

American University Law Review

The rapid growth of the luxury resale market has heightened tension between trademark holders and secondary-market sellers. Courts are increasingly left to apply the material difference exception to first sale doctrine defenses, to find trademark infringement when resold goods differ from the original product, even in de minimis ways. Originally designed to protect consumers from confusion where post-sale modifications affected product quality or safety, the exception has evolved into a broad enforcement tool that luxury brands leverage to challenge resellers over minor or cosmetic alterations. In the luxury watch and accessories markets in particular, courts have deemed even minimal differences …

Antidiscrimination Law Against Labor, Jordan Laris Cohen

American University Law Review

In recent years, employer compliance with antidiscrimination law has emerged as a major justification for limiting the rights of employees to organize and engage in collective action in the workplace. In IBM Corp., a Republican majority of the National Labor Relations Board cited “laws addressing workplace discrimination and sexual harassment” as a primary reason to deny nonunionized employees the right to a coworker representative during investigatory interviews. In General Motors, a Republican Board majority invoked antidiscrimination law in upending four decades of precedent regarding employer discipline of employees engaged in “opprobrious conduct” in the course of protected organizing …

Lawbreaking As A Method Of Competition, Sandeep Vaheesan

American University Law Review

Business competition is not a free-for-all in which firms can compete and triumph by hook or crook. Instead, market rivalry is a process structured by laws of general application and sector-specific rules. Certain competitive strategies and tactics are proscribed by statutes, regulations, and common law. Firms may not compete by bombing their rivals’ facilities, bribing the employees of wholesale customers, or making false claims about their own goods.

In a range of industries, however, firms choose to compete by violating laws protecting consumers, workers, businesses, and the public and obtaining an unfair cost or other advantage over their rivals. Examples …

The Law And Ai As An “Apex Collaborator”: Legal Frameworks For Optimized Cooperation, David S. Filippi, Bill Tomlinson, Andrew W. Torrance

FIU Law Review

Law fundamentally exists to enable human cooperation, providing frameworks for everything from basic contracts to complex international agreements. As artificial intelligence systems grow more sophisticated, they may enable new ways that collaborative activity can occur. We posit the possibility of a new kind of AI entity: the “Apex Collaborator,” a computational system with capabilities for cooperation and partnership that are superior, in at least some ways, to those of humans. Just as apex predators shape the ecosystems in which they live through predation, Apex Collaborators would shape human-AI networks through their ability to enhance peaceful coexistence, collective problem-solving, and shared …

Constructive Taxation: How Filing Requirements Turn Tax Benefits Into De Facto Taxes, Orli Oren-Kolbinger

FIU Law Review

Constructive taxation reveals a mismatch between the redistributive objectives Congress claims to pursue and how tax administration is carried out. Procedural barriers allocate benefits through bureaucratic processes rather than on the basis of need or eligibility, reflecting implicit judgments about who deserves them. Low-income households must still file, even when the government already has the necessary information to determine eligibility. Examining this through Congress’s taxing and spending powers, the Article shows that refundable credits function as tax expenditures, using the tax code to deliver benefits while creating administrative burdens that resemble economic penalties. When procedural barriers prevent eligible taxpayers from …

Owning Trading Opportunities, Kevin Douglas

FIU Law Review

Owning Trading Opportunities identifies the doctrines and policy rationales used to protect property rights in corporate opportunities. It then explores adopting these doctrines and rationales to reform the notions of "fairness," "public interest," "investor protection," "market confidence," and "economic efficiency" driving the regulation of insider trading.

This approach yields several benefits. First, it shows that a policy commitment to equal trading opportunities for all investors is the functional equivalent of a commitment to fostering equal access to information for all investors. The U.S. Supreme Court attempted to reject the latter but failed by embracing the former.

Second, corporate opportunity cases …

The American Dream And The Politics Of Promise: Presidential Rhetoric Against Reality On Inequality, Education, And Assistance Since 2000, Abigail Demonte

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Rethinking Legal Models For Aligning U.S.-African Trade And The Afcfta, Katrin Kuhlmann

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The U.S.-African trade relationship has become increasingly volatile and conditional, with significant implications for supply chains, trade corridors, and regional and global markets. This relationship has historically been based on a unilateral, preferential legal approach through a trade preference programme – the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) – under which individual countries petition for eligibility to receive duty-free treatment. AGOA expired in September 2025 in the midst of U.S. tariffs, but in early 2026 the programme was retroactively reauthorised through December 2026, with further application subject to “modernisation” and alignment with the “America First” policy. While many see reauthorisation …

Distillation Laundering: Regulatory Arbitrage And A Potential Beijing Effect In Ai, Laura Edelson, Filippo Lancieri

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay introduces distillation laundering, a new form of regulatory arbitrage. Distillation, a technique for training large language models based on the outputs of other models instead of from scratch, is generally prohibited by the terms of service of closed-weight frontier models. However, it is economically efficient and has been key to the success of the cheap, distilled (largely Chinese) open-weight models, which have reshaped the global political economy of AI regulation. US companies have now begun to re-import the effects of distillation through various means—a process we call distillation laundering. We also discuss how attempts to lobby these models …

Symmetry, Presumptions, And The Judges Design, Murat C. Mungan

Faculty Scholarship

An instrumental variables approach called ‘the judges design’ used frequently in social sciences relies on an assumption called ‘average monotonicity’. This assumption pertains to how different judges’ (or other classifiers’) decision making processes relate to each other. Violations of it are hard to detect, which raises the importance of it being supported by a plausible theory. Decisions of judges who solve Bayesian decision problems violate average monotonicity as long as the signals they process are symmetric and they do not possess strong presumptions. This result is extended to cases where judge presumptions are symmetrically distributed and may include strong presumptions. …

2025-2026 Annual Report, Heyman Center On Corporate Governance

Heyman Center Annual Reports

The 2025–2026 Annual Report of the Samuel & Ronnie Heyman Center on Corporate Governance at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law highlights the Center's academic programs, events, and initiatives throughout the academic year. The report documents discussions and programming addressing antitrust enforcement, corporate governance, bankruptcy and restructuring, cryptocurrency regulation, and emerging legal issues. It also provides an overview of the Heyman Business Law Colloquium, business law curriculum, clinical programs, and experiential learning opportunities. Additionally, the report highlights the Heyman Scholars Program, which welcomed 55 participating students, and profiles the Center's leadership and affiliated faculty.

Insider Trading & Unconstitutionally Compelled Speech, Steven J. Cleveland

Villanova Law Review (1956 - )

No abstract provided.

The Equity Dead Zones: Legal Intersectionality Failure Points In Chapter 13 Bankruptcy, Tearria N. Simmons

The Guardianship Journal

Legal intersectionality failure points describe the systemic fractures that occur where overlapping legal, social, and economic inequalities converge, potentially producing compounded barriers to relief. Each failure point marks a site of marginalization. In what ways do individuals already recognized as vulnerable in Chapter 13 bankruptcy face a heightened risk when multiple forms of disadvantage intersect? When these intersections combine in mutually reinforcing ways—racial, economic, and relational disparities colliding with structural deficiencies in family, property, and bankruptcy law—does it result in pronounced negative outcomes, and, if so, what are those outcomes? Within this convergence, could there be a space where compounded …