The law-and-economics movement has transformed the analysis of private law in the United States and, increasingly, around the world. As the field developed from 1970 to the early 2000s, scholars have developed countless insights about the operation and effects of law and legal institutions. Throughout this period, the discipline of law-and-economics has benefited from a […]
A world in turmoil caused by Covid-19 has revealed again what has long been true: the Federal Reserve is arguably the most powerful administrative agency in government, but neither administrative-law scholars nor the Fed itself treat it that way. In this Article, we present the first effort to map the contours of what administrative law […]
*This is the fifth post in a symposium on Morgan Ricks, Ganesh Sitaraman, Shelley Welton, and Lev Menand’s “Networks, Platforms, and Utilities: Law and Policy.” For other posts in the series, click here. The new casebook by Morgan Ricks, Ganesh Sitaraman, Shelley Welton and Lev Menand on the law and policy of networks, platforms, and utilities […]
This Article examines the departmental structure of the executive branch, which facilitates, channels, and delimits the exercise of executive power. This structure is grounded in the text of the Constitution, which refers to “Department[s]” in the Necessary and Proper Clause, Appointments Clause, and Opinion Clause. The concept of the department also played a key role […]
The expression “personnel is policy” has become a truism in Washington. Yet our understanding of how the political branches use appointments to project influence into the administrative state is incomplete. This Article leverages data on almost one-thousand commissioners serving on eleven major independent regulatory commissions to chart, for the first time, Congress’s growing practice of […]
A recent rise in the volume of corporate share repurchases has prompted calls for changes to the rules governing stock buybacks. These calls for reform are animated by concerns that buybacks enrich corporate executives at the expense of productive investment. This emerging antibuyback movement includes prominent politicians as well as academics and Republicans as well […]
*This is the fourth post in a symposium on Morgan Ricks, Ganesh Sitaraman, Shelley Welton, and Lev Menand’s “Networks, Platforms, and Utilities: Law and Policy.” For other posts in the series, click here. “We encourage you to think of it as offering something like a liberal arts education in the structural foundations of American capitalism.” (p. […]
Acute agency costs exist in unions as they do in other complex organizations. Specifically, union officials are imperfect representatives of the rank-and-file workers they ostensibly represent. Yet far less attention has been paid to addressing agency costs in the context of unions than in the context of public corporations, where the separation of share ownership […]
This paper uses network theory to argue that the consequences of horizontal ownership by large investment institutions are more complicated than, and sometimes the complete opposite of, what conventional economic theory predicts. Horizontal ownership occurs when a large investment institution, such as Vanguard or BlackRock, simultaneously holds large stakes in many different companies in the […]
*This is the third post in a symposium on Morgan Ricks, Ganesh Sitaraman, Shelley Welton, and Lev Menand’s “Networks, Platforms, and Utilities: Law and Policy.” For other posts in the series, click here. In the preface to the 1994 edition of Economic Regulation: Cases and Materials (a precursor to Networks, Platforms, and Utilities (NPU) Law & […]
We live in a republic of statutes, yet understanding those statutes has become so cognitively difficult that judges cannot properly interpret them, citizens cannot properly understand them, and legislatures cannot properly write them. This Note presents a new tool for reducing the cognitive difficulty of understanding and applying statutes: statutory diagrams. The Note presents the […]
*This is the second post in a symposium on Morgan Ricks, Ganesh Sitaraman, Shelley Welton, and Lev Menand’s “Networks, Platforms, and Utilities: Law and Policy.” For other posts in the series, click here. Networks, Platforms, and Utilities is the casebook I wish I’d written. It’s also the casebook I wish I’d had available for the past […]
Pharmaceutical companies claim that high prices for drugs are needed to offset the costs and risks associated with research and development. In most instances, though, the initial (basic) research that leads to new discoveries is conducted at public institutions and paid for with public funds. Drugmakers tend to take over the process of bringing new […]
*This is the first post in a symposium on Morgan Ricks, Ganesh Sitaraman, Shelley Welton, and Lev Menand’s “Networks, Platforms, and Utilities: Law and Policy.” For other posts in the series, click here. One of my prized possessions is an unsolicited letter I received after publishing my very first academic article in August 1993. The article, […]
As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to embed itself in our daily lives, many focus on the threats it poses to privacy, security, due process, and democracy itself. But beyond these legitimate concerns, AI promises to optimize activities, increase efficiency, and enhance the accuracy and efficacy of the many aspects of society relying on predictions and […]