This Essay considers the role of bankruptcy law in the legal ecosystem that regulates banks and other financial intermediaries. It uses the recent spate of bank and crypto intermediary failures to consider the role of bankruptcy courts (and other resolution institutions) in protecting both customers, and the stability of the financial system when the instability […]

The Federal Home Loan Bank system is a $1.3 trillion government-sponsored enterprise that operates primarily for the benefit of member financial institutions. Federal Home Loan Bank members enjoy generous dividends and ready access to fresh liquidity. The biggest beneficiaries are the biggest users of the system, including the largest banks and insurance companies in the […]

The source-of-strength doctrine is a long-standing pillar of bank regulation. It holds that a bank holding company (BHC) is to serve as “a source of financial and managerial strength” for its bank subsidiaries. The doctrine, however, has always been more aspirational than actual. The doctrine has never clearly imposed any liability on BHCs. Thus, it […]

This Article offers a conceptual framework for analyzing public banking as an institutional form of finance. It examines the key elements of design of a public bank as a financial institution―its core functions, sources of funding, asset structure, and governance framework―and highlights the opportunities and challenges presented by various choices along these dimensions. By isolating […]

Administrative agencies bear principal responsibility for keeping the federal government’s promises by giving effect in the real world to the laws Congress enacts. If administrative law’s goal was to help agencies fulfill this responsibility, its lodestar would be a thick concept of administration. But as a field, administrative law today neglects administration, focusing instead on […]

What determines the effectiveness of corporate compliance programs, and who is accountable when they fail? Scholars and policymakers tend to answer these questions by focusing on internal compliance actors: directors, CEOs, general counsels, chief financial officers, and chief compliance officers. Yet in reality, all these corporate insiders rarely perform compliance tasks on their own. They […]

Even before the pandemic, the 90,000 local governments in the United States faced grim fiscal positions. During the pandemic, revenues cratered, costs increased, and many local governments teetered on the brink. Yet few of them considered filing for bankruptcy, though Chapter 9 of the Bankruptcy Code is designed for local governments. The choice to eschew […]

Under the New Deal framework for money and payments—which had its roots in the National Bank Act of 1864—banks in the United States were governed in many respects as public utilities. Charters were available only where they were consistent with public convenience and need, the usual standard for utilities. Banks enjoyed an exclusive privilege to […]

What determines the effectiveness of corporate boards? Corporate legal scholars usually approach this question by focusing on directors’ incentives, such as counting how many directors are independent or whether the roles of the CEO and Chair are separated. Yet on the ground, the focus has been shifting to directors’ skill sets and experience. Investors, regulators, […]

“Limited liability” is the rule that shareholders are not liable for the debts of the corporations they own. Critics of limited liability argue that it encourages corporations to ignore the harms they cause and cuts off recovery for deserving plaintiffs. Defenders of limited liability reply that it helps the economy by reassuring investors that they […]

In times of crisis such as the 2008 financial crisis and the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic central banks throughout the world engage in interventions with lasting effects on financial markets and the macroeconomy, for better and worse. The negative political consequences of these interventions—fears of politicizing central banking and inflationary concerns about dramatic interventions among them—can dampen […]

In a series of recent opinions, the Supreme Court has threatened to transform the nondelegation doctrine into a device for imposing sweeping limits on congressional authority to empower the regulatory state. But, as a matter of history and logic, the nondelegation doctrine has a quite different purpose. This Article argues that the nondelegation doctrine plays […]

The challenge of financial inclusion is among the most intractable policy problems in banking. Despite living in the world’s wealthiest economy, many Americans are shut out of the financial system. Five percent of American households lack a bank account, and an additional thirteen percent rely on expensive and sometimes predatory fringe financial services, such as check cashers […]

The United States has delegated the responsibility of keeping the lights on to a self-regulatory organization called the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC). Although NERC is a crucial example of industry-led governance—and regulates in an area that is central to our economy and basic human survival—this unusual institution has received scant attention from policymakers and scholars. Such attention […]

So-called passive index funds—investment funds that are designed to track a pre-specified underlying index—have become a dominant force in the investing landscape, collectively controlling over $12 trillion in assets. It is widely assumed that these funds are obligated to follow their underlying index, and that fund managers cannot, or do not, select portfolios that deviate […]