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Volume 36 • Issue 1

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Exemption Federalism: Regulatory Carve-Outs and the Protection of Local Farms

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When national regulatory programs exempt small-scale operators or producers from certain requirements, the result looks surprisingly like federalism. That is, many local (or intrastate) operators end up subject only to state or local regulations; most national (or interstate) operators end up subject to federal regulation. While small-scale businesses may rely on these exemptions in practice, […]

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The Faulty Foundation of the Draft Restatement of Consumer Contracts

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Professor Gregory Klass’s replication study of the Draft Restatement of the Law of Consumer Contract’s empirical analysis of privacy policies found troubling and pervasive problems with the Reporters’ coding of cases. We extended Professor Klass’s study with a replication of the coding of the two largest datasets supporting the Draft Restatement, those on the enforceability […]

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The FSOC’s Designation Program as a Case Study of the New Administrative Law of Financial Supervision

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When legal scholars specializing in financial regulation have examined the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), their lens has usually focused on matters outside of the core public law expertise they are best positioned to contribute. This curious state of affairs is the consequence of the historical mutual disinterest between administrative law scholars and financial regulatory […]

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Does Agency Structure Affect Agency Decisionmaking? Implications of the CFPB’s Design for Administrative Governance

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An extensive literature has analyzed the accountability of administrative agencies, and in particular, their relationship to Congress. A well-established strand in the literature emphasizes that Congress retains control over agencies by their design, with a focus on the structure and process by which agency decisionmaking is undertaken. This Article examines the relationship between agency structure […]

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Federal Agency Guidance and the Power to Bind: An Empirical Study of Agencies and Industries

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The typical federal agency issues a vast amount of guidance, advising the public on how it plans to exercise discretion and interpret law. Under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), the agency must follow onerous procedures to issue full-blown regulations (including notice and comment) but can issue guidance far more easily. What justifies this difference, in […]

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Global Antitakeover Devices

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This Article explores a “hidden” mechanism that insulates management from hostile takeovers and activist intervention: the global antitakeover device (“GAD”). A GAD is based on the ability of public firms to “mix and match” between different forms of regulation by cross-listing on multiple stock exchanges or incorporating in foreign jurisdictions. This action subjects any hostile […]

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Empiricism and Privacy Policies in the Restatement of Consumer Contract Law

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The Draft Restatement of the Law of Consumer Contracts includes a quantitative study of judicial decisions concerning businesses’ online privacy policies, which it cites in support of a claim that most courts treat privacy policies as contract terms. This Article reports an attempt to reproduce that study’s results. Using the Reporters’ data, this study was […]

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Successor Identity

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The law of successor criminal liability is simple—corporate successors are liable for the crimes of their predecessors. Always. Any corporation that results from any merger, consolidation, spin-off, etc., is on the hook for all the crimes of all the corporations that went into the process. Such a coarse-grained, one track approach fails to recognize that […]