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 […]
Lewis A. Kornhauser† 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 […]
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 […]
Mark Roe, Holger Spamann, Jesse Fried & Charles Wang† 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, […]
Bernard S. Sharfman† 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 […]
Amy C. Madl† 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, […]
Susan Benesch† 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 […]
Michael Lwin† In recent years, social media platforms have been beset with hate speech, misinformation, disinformation, incitement of violence, and other content that cause real-world harm. Social media companies, focusing solely on profit-maximization and user-engagement, have been largely asleep at the wheel during outbreaks of violence in countries such as Myanmar, Sri Lanka, New Zealand, […]
Yafit Lev-Aretz† & Katherine J. Strandburg†† Regulation is often claimed to be the enemy of socially desirable innovation because of factors including innovation’s unpredictability and reulation’s compliance costs. In this essay, we bring two intellectual property scholars’ perspectives to bear on the question of regulation’s impact on innovation. We offer a novel, yet intuitive, analytical framework […]
In Trump v. Pennsylvania, the Supreme Court faces the question whether the Administrative Procedure Act’s provision governing scope of judicial review instructs courts to give universal injunctions – injunctions telling the government not to apply a challenged agency action to anyone, not just the plaintiff. That provision, section 706 of title 5 of the United States […]
Tyler J. Smith† Privacy law is an extremely complex and complicated problem. And, unfortunately, the United States remains one of the only Western countries without comprehensive consumer data protection laws. Until the federal government decides to address the ubiquitous collection and use of data by corporations with omnibus legislation similar to the EU’s GDPR—or until […]
William S. Laufer† & Matthew Caulfield†† On the margins of the partisan political divide is a groundswell of anti-corporate rhetoric conjuring images of an unbridled, unregulated, and uncontrollable corporate America. This Essay considers a casualty of this progressive imagery: serious legislative and regulatory reforms to ensure corporate accountability. Demonizing all corporations does little to promote […]
In regulated industries, including telecommunications, electric power, and natural gas, there has been a dramatic substitution of price cap regulation (PCR) for rate-of-return regulation (RRR). Despite this sea change in regulatory regimes, the Hope Standard, which protects the regulated firm from confiscatory rates so that it remains a financially viable enterprise, continues to serve as […]
Regulators have long been aware that differential access to information can undermine the efficiency and fairness of financial markets. In an effort to place investors on equal footing, the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2000 created Regulation Fair Disclosure (Reg FD), which prohibits public firms from disclosing material information to certain parties but not others. […]