The Trump administration wreaked havoc on U.S. climate policy by withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, undoing climate regulations, and undermining the foundation of future regulatory efforts. The Biden administration has begun to reverse the Trump administration’s climate rollbacks, but Democrats have struggled to enact legislation that would directly limit carbon emissions. Because federal climate policy […]
In the wake of the Reagan deregulation, America experienced twenty-eight years of regulatory progression, with precious little retrogression. That trend came to a crashing halt during the four years of Donald Trump’s presidency. As a candidate, Trump campaigned on a series of pledges to reverse and undo as much of the work done by Barack […]
The science is clear: the United States and the world must take dramatic action to address climate change or face irreversible, catastrophic planetary harm. Within the U.S.—the world’s largest historic emitter of greenhouse gas emissions—this will require passing new legislation or turning to existing statutes and authorities to address the climate crisis. Doing so implicates […]
In 2016, we co-authored a symposium article, The Grass is Not Always Greener: Congressional Dysfunction, Executive Action, and Climate Change in Comparative Perspective, 91 Chi.-Kent L. Rev. 139 (2016), that compared the impact of polarization on the process of creating climate change law and policy in the United States and Australia. We found that while […]
The social cost of greenhouse gases provides the best available method to quantify and monetize the climate damages attributable to the emission of an incremental unit of heat-trapping pollution. Accordingly, the metric can be highly useful for crafting policies that will reduce the nation’s greenhouse gas footprint, with potential usages including weighing the impacts of […]
As the Biden Administration works on updating the social cost of carbon (SCC), some economists are urging a different approach, known as the “Marginal Abatement Cost” (MAC) method or the “target-consistent” approach. Rather than attempting to calculate all the damage caused worldwide by each ton of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere, the MAC approach […]
The Supreme Court’s ongoing efforts to narrow the contours of administrative agencies’ policymaking discretion comes at a particularly inopportune time. The nation faces a set of increasingly complex and pressing national problems, including climate change, that require the simultaneous application of careful deliberation and expertise, something Congress is ill-suited to do in the best of […]
Do foreign lives matter? When? How much? If one nation damages another, what are its obligations, as a matter of law and policy? These questions can be approached and understood in diverse ways, but they are concretized in debates over the “social cost of carbon,” which is sometimes described as the linchpin of national climate […]
Climate change poses an enormous risk to plant and animal species across the planet. Mean global temperatures have already increased by approximately 1ºC, causing environmental changes that affect species abundance, distribution, behavior, physiology, genetics, and survival prospects. These changes, combined with other human stressors, have already resulted in the extinction of some species and imperiled […]
This Essay is part of Bulletin’s symposium on special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs). Please click here for an introduction by Professor John Morley putting the 2020 SPAC boom and the regulatory reform agenda into context. Introduction This Essay lays out an economic substance approach to regulating special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) as sales of stock for cash. The […]
This Essay is part of Bulletin’s symposium on special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs). Please click here for an introduction by Professor John Morley putting the 2020 SPAC boom and the regulatory reform agenda into context. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Committee’s (SEC) proposed reforms of how it regulates special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) lean heavily on the most […]
This Essay is part of Bulletin’s symposium on special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs). Please click here for an introduction by Professor John Morley putting the 2020 SPAC boom and the regulatory reform agenda into context. Introduction The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has recently proposed regulations that would address a wide range of issues governing special purpose acquisition […]
When the SPAC boom began in the summer of 2020, a common way to explain the phenomenon was to say that SPACs were something new. SPACs raised $83 billion in 2020—nearly double the total raised in the previous ten years—and another $97 billion in just the first three months of 2021. They spread so rapidly […]
Introduction In October 2021, Senator Elizabeth Warren and several cosponsors introduced a revised version of the Stop Wall Street Looting Act. First introduced in 2019, the proposed legislation targets a range of perceived abuses by private equity firms ranging from the carried interest tax “loophole” to the lack of risk-retention requirements for securitized debt. Among […]
The lenders that fund Chapter 11 reorganizations exert significant influence over the bankruptcy process through the contract associated with the debtor-in-possession (DIP) loan. In this Article, we study a large sample of DIP loan contracts and document a trend: over the past three decades, DIP lenders have steadily increased their contractual control of Chapter 11. […]