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Volume 31 • Issue 1

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Repayment Frequency in the Law of Microfinance

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Recent debates over microfinance regulatory frameworks have misunderstood an important instrument: repayment frequency. Despite recent laws mandating lower microfinance repayment frequency under the banner of consumer protection, this Comment argues that repayment frequency is unable to protect borrowers beyond what substantive anti-coercion rights and procedural law can, and have begun to, accomplish. Moreover, repayment frequency, […]

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Retroactivity Analysis After Brand X

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Under Brand X, federal courts must reverse their own prior precedent in deference to an intervening agency decision if that agency decision is based on a reasonable interpretation of the statute. Thus, if the first-in-time court sets the law at A, and if a second-in-time agency later finds that B is a superior interpretation of […]

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Injunctions in Sovereign Debt Litigation

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Injunctions against foreign sovereigns have come under criticism on comity and enforcement grounds. This Feature argues that these objections are overstated. Comity considerations are important but not dispositive. Enforcement objections assign too much significance to the court’s inability to impose meaningful contempt sanctions, overlooking the fact that, when a foreign sovereign is involved, both money […]

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Shotguns and Deadlocks

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This Article studies business deadlocks and their resolution. We advance a proposal to reform the way that courts resolve business deadlocks and value business assets. Specifically, we argue that Shotgun mechanisms, where the court mandates one owner to name a single buy-sell price and compels the other owner to either buy or sell shares at […]

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Three Proposals for Regulating the Distribution of Home Equity

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The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s recently-released “qualified mortgage” rules effectively discourage predatory lending but miss an equally important source of systemic risk: low-equity clustering. Specific “volatility-inducing” mortgage terms, when present in a substantial cluster of mortgage contracts, exacerbate macroeconomic risk by increasing the chance that the housing and lending markets will have to absorb a […]

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For Diversity in the International Regulation of Financial Institutions: Critiquing and Recalibrating the Basel Architecture

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This Article challenges the prevailing view of the efficacy of harmonized international financial regulation and provides a mechanism for facilitating regulatory diversity and experimentation within the existing global regulatory framework, the Basel Accords. Recent experience suggests that regulatory harmonization can increase, rather than decrease, systemic risk, an effect that is the precise opposite of the […]