This Article examines presidential direction of administrative action in the Obama and early Trump Administrations against the backdrop of ongoing debates concerning: (i) the desirability of and appropriate techniques for presidential control of administration and (ii) the relevance of separated powers when American government is under unified political control. To give this analysis a concrete […]

A lengthy tug of war between the Supreme Court and the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals may have ended with Impression Products v. Lexmark. The Supreme Court held that the sale of a patented thing exhausts the patentee seller’s rights to enforce restrictions on that thing through patent infringement suits. Further, the parties cannot bargain around […]

Contested director elections are a central feature of the corporate landscape and underlie shareholder activism. Rules governing proxy voting by shareholders prevent shareholders from “mixing and matching” among nominees from the two sides of contests. This Article’s analysis shows that these proxy voting rules can lead to distorted proxy contest outcomes: different directors being elected […]

It has long been said that market forces alone will result in a problematic under-sharing of information by public companies. Since the 1930s, the main regulatory response to this market failure has come in the form of the massive mandatory-disclosure regime that sits at the foundation of modern securities law. But thisregime—especially when viewed along […]

Public policy has been focused on controlling the conflicts of interests in banks for the last eighty-five years with limited success. Banks have a unique place in the economy as intermediaries between investors and companies, allowing them to obtain significant private, proprietary information. Public policy is focused on trying to ensure that banks do not […]

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 […]

Politicians and commentators have from time to time proposed that regulations be suspended or delayed during recessions because of their adverse impact on employment. We evaluate this argument from within a macroeconomic framework. When the business cycle is taken into account, it is possible that regulations should be weakened during downturns and strengthened during upturns, […]

In this Article, I offer a macroeconomic perspective on law that reshapes the microeconomic perspective that currently dominates law and economics. I argue that, first, the economy works one way in ordinary economic conditions, in which supply capacity determines output, and a different way when interest rates are zero. At the “zero lower bound” on […]

The debate among legal scholars about individuals’ failure to save enough for retirement adopts a “micro” perspective. It focuses on the causes and consequences of undersaving from the perspective of individuals and analyzes how legal interventions, such as tax subsidies and nudges, can best address individual saving mistakes. This debate depends on certain assumptions about […]

Macroeconomics has changed in light of both developments in the world and its internal intellectual evolution. This article explores ways in which legal scholarship can help inform macroeconomic research and macroeconomic policymaking in light of three important developments: (i) limitations on conventional monetary policy in a world with lower equilibrium interest rates; (ii) labor markets […]

Data brokers have begun to sell consumer information to individual buyers looking to track the activities of romantic interests, professional contacts, and other people of interest. The types of data available for consumer purchase seem likely to expand over the next few years. This trend invites the emergence of a new type of privacy harm, […]