This Essay is part of Bulletin’s symposium on special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs). Please click here for an introduction by Professor John Morley putting the 2020 SPAC boom and the regulatory reform agenda into context. Introduction The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has recently proposed regulations that would address a wide range of issues governing special purpose acquisition […]

When the SPAC boom began in the summer of 2020, a common way to explain the phenomenon was to say that SPACs were something new. SPACs raised $83 billion in 2020—nearly double the total raised in the previous ten years—and another $97 billion in just the first three months of 2021. They spread so rapidly […]

Introduction In October 2021, Senator Elizabeth Warren and several cosponsors introduced a revised version of the Stop Wall Street Looting Act. First introduced in 2019, the proposed legislation targets a range of perceived abuses by private equity firms ranging from the carried interest tax “loophole” to the lack of risk-retention requirements for securitized debt. Among […]

Workers in the United States depend on their employers for a host of benefits beyond wages and salary. From retirement benefits to health insurance, from student loan repayment to dependent-care spending plans, from disability benefits to family and medical leave, U.S. employers play a uniquely central role in the financial lives of their employees. Yet […]

When purchasing infrastructure, goods or services, the U.S. government has “to promote economy, efficiency and effectiveness.” Executive Order No. 13,673, issued by President Obama, expanded the requirement to encompass social sustainability: to promote economy and efficiency in procurement, the government was required to “contract with responsible sources who comply with labor laws.” The Fair Pay […]

Rules are rules and orders are orders, and never the twain shall meet. Generations of scholars and practitioners were taught back in law school that the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) divides the universe of agency action into two exclusive and exhaustive categories: “rulemaking,” which is used for promulgating “rules,” and “adjudication,” which is used for […]

Introduction Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) has brought job opportunities and a brighter future to somewhere around 700,000 undocumented immigrant youth. Yet some contend that the employment authorization conferred upon DACA recipients renders the program illegal, because it converts it from a mere program of prosecutorial discretion into an ultra vires benefit. This essay […]

Abstract: Legal scholars worry that existing laws cannot adequately regulate large private companies (“unicorns”). At the same time, unicorns seem to be a key part of flourishing markets. Are unicorns a problem that requires solving or a sign that entrepreneurial finance is working? This essay addresses that question by tracking outcomes for the 32 startups […]

Abstract: This Essay argues that Facebook’s Oversight Board—an independent “Supreme Court” for Facebook, tasked with reviewing the platform’s content-moderation decisions—has the additional power to review Facebook’s algorithms. While much of the literature on the Board assumes that it does not have this power, the text and structure of the Board’s Charter clearly provide for oversight […]

Introduction Dagan and Kreitner have offered a rich and elegantly written discussion of the normative uses of economic analysis of law. For Dagan and Kreitner, a scholar uses economic analysis normatively either when she evaluates a legal rule or institution or when she makes policy recommendations. These two normative uses of economic analysis are closely […]

Tamar Kricheli Katz† Jennifer Arlen’s The Essential Role of Empirical Analysis in Developing Law and Economics Theory explores the relationship between law-and-economics theory and empirical analysis. The paper provides a rich discussion of empirical-analysis examples to inform normative theoretical understandings.  The paper focuses on empirical investigation of decision making, documenting the instances and conditions in […]

In July 2020, the European Commission published the “Study on directors’ duties and sustainable corporate governance” by Ernst & Young (EY). The Report purports to find evidence of debilitating short-termism in EU corporate governance and recommends many changes to support sustainable corporate governance. In this paper, we point out deep flaws in the Report’s evidence […]

Introduction The Department of Labor (“DOL”), through its administration of ERISA, has a critical role to play in the regulation of private “employee pension benefit plans.”. Most importantly, the DOL is tasked with enforcing the fiduciary duties of ERISA plan managers (trustees who retain investment and voting authority or “investment managers” who receive such authority […]

Killer instinct is a key business asset. Firms live and die by their strategic choices, and the desire to outcompete rivals colors most business decisions. While many firms strive to win market share on their merits, economists have recently identified an anti-competitive practice—killer acquisition—that enables incumbents to maintain market share by burying, rather than beating, […]

Private social media companies regulate much more speech than any government does, and their platforms are being used to bring about serious harm. Yet companies govern largely on their own, and in secret.  To correct this, advocates have proposed that companies follow international human-rights law.  That law–by far the world’s best-known rules for governing speech–could improve […]