Sentence diagramming—a method of showing the relationship between different parts of a sentence—has long been used by judges to interpret legal texts. This Comment documents how judges employ sentence diagrams in constitutional, statutory, and contract cases. It finds that diagramming plays an important role in constitutional and statutory cases, complementing traditional canons of legal interpretation, […]
The municipal bond market has traditionally been viewed as a relatively safe market, where credit risk wasn’t a primary concern. The spate of fiscal crises that state and local governments have experienced in recent years, however, has changed this narrative. With credit risk increasingly on the forefront of investors and bond issuers’ minds, credit default […]
Much of the scholarly literature lauds cooperative federalism, in which states regulate to achieve federal standards, as an innovative federal-state partnership. But delegation of authority also has grave dangers caused by principal-agent problems, among others. The largely toothless nondelegation doctrine captures these challenges, but the bidirectional difficulties of principals adequately monitoring agencies, and vice versa, […]
At the root of recurring bank crises are deeply-implanted incentives for banks and their executives to take systemically excessive risk. Since the 2008- 2009 financial crisis, regulators have sought to strengthen the financial system by requiring more capital (which can absorb losses from risk-taking) and less risk-taking, principally via command-and-control rules. Yet bankers’ baseline incentives […]
Regulation by litigation has driven U.S. merger regulation to crisis. The reliance on private lawsuits to police disclosures and potential conflicts of interest in mergers, takeovers, and other control transactions has resulted in the filing of claims after every major transaction. However, it has failed to achieve meaningful benefits for shareholders and has instead deprived […]
More than eighty years after federal law first addressed stock market manipulation, federal courts remain fractured by disagreement and confusion about manipulation law’s most foundational questions. Only last year, plaintiffs petitioned the Supreme Court to resolve a sharp split among the federal circuits concerning manipulation law’s central question: whether trading activity alone can ever be […]
Agency regulations are full of examples. Regulated parties and their advisors parse the examples to develop an understanding of the applicable law and to determine how to conduct their affairs. However, the theoretical literature contains no study of regulatory examples or of how they might be interpreted. Courts differ about whether examples serve as an […]