Category Archives: Jotwell
Dec 12, 2011 Caroline BradleyCorporate LawJotwell
Much recent scholarship on financial regulatory reform since the global financial crisis critiques the substance of new standards and rules. For this paper (the draft is dated September 2011) Kimberly Krawiec chose to examine the process which produces rules of financial regulation (this is the sausage-making of the paper’s title). The current administration, like governments of other countries, has emphasized the importance of transparency and open government and of opening up decision-making to citizen participation, so an academic study like this paper, which examines citizen participation in rule-making, is timely and important.
The paper’s case study is of the Volcker rule, which restricts proprietary trading and ownership interests in hedge funds and private equity funds by banking entities. Professor Krawiec chose to focus on the Volcker rule because it “had the potential to illuminate questions of whose voice gets heard on a major issue of financial reform as the sausage is really getting made”. The Dodd-Frank Act left significant discretion to regulators with respect to the details of this rule (and others): key terms and the contours of the exceptions to the bans are not clearly defined. Professor Krawiec explains that the exceptions were a necessary component of a compromise between those who thought that Dodd-Frank should do more to rein in large financial institutions and those who were sympathetic to complaints from financial institutions. She also points out that much of the trading the Volcker rule explicitly permits shares objective characteristics with proprietary trading, such that the motive for the trading is the distinguishing characteristic. Continue reading "Open Government and the Implementation of the Dodd-Frank Act"
Dec 5, 2011 Adrian VermeuleConstitutional LawJotwell
In the large and ever-growing category of articles I wish I’d written, the latest entry is Rick Pildes’s withering critique of a standard line about the Supreme Court. The standard line holds – roughly speaking, and its imprecision is one of the article’s main points – that the Court “cannot and does not stray too far from ‘majoritarian views’ …. If the Court does, larger political forces bring the Court back into line; the Justices, knowing this, do not wander far.” (p. 105). In the context of the Court’s recent Citizens United decision, Pildes exposes the ambiguity and fragility of this view.
Pildes traces the thesis of a majoritarian Court back as far as a book by Dean Alfange in 1937, although the same claims were clearly articulated by James Bryce in his neglected classic The American Commonwealth, first published in 1889. Whatever its origins, the thesis is usually associated with Robert Dahl’s classic 1957 article, which Pildes contrasts with the nearly contemporaneous identification of the “countermajoritarian difficulty” in Alexander Bickel’s 1962 book on the Court. Pildes argues that later commentators have taken the Dahl article and run too far with it, overreacting against a romanticized image of the Court as heroic guarantor of minority and individual rights. Thus Pildes offers a partial rehabilitation of Bickel as against, not Dahl himself, but rather Dahl’s successors. Continue reading "The Short-Run Inelasticity of Constitutional Law"
Dec 2, 2011 Carole SilverJotwellLegal Profession
Two years ago I had an opportunity to attend the “Future(s) of Professional Services Programme” organized by Harvard Law School and Oxford Said Business School. It was a terrific conference in many respects, not least for its interdisciplinarity, bringing together scholars from business and law whose work focused on professional service firms. As a lawyer studying law firms in the context of globalization, the insight of the business scholars was enlightening: by placing law firms in the larger context of professional service firms and by bringing the framework of management and strategy to bear on the study of law firms, legal scholars gain a new perspective from seeing the same picture from a different vantage point.
In truth, conversations with law firm leaders and others that have informed my own work on globalization and the legal profession indicate that decisions about law firm globalization and strategy are neither so clean nor logical as some of the management and strategy school research suggests. Rather, law firms’ activities with regard to globalization often are as much reactive and opportunistic as strategic. Nonetheless, the analysis of the business school scholars reflects the reality of regulation outside of the US, in that regulators involved in international as well as foreign regulation of their domestic legal profession increasingly are not trained as lawyers and have little incentive to treat lawyers particularly differently than other professional service providers (see, for example, Laurel Terry, The Future Regulation of the Legal Profession: The Impact of Treating the Legal Profession as “Service Providers”). Continue reading "The Benefit of an Exterior View: Looking at Lawyers from an Outsider’s Perspective"
Nov 16, 2011 James GrimmelmannJotwellTechnology Law
Felix T. Wu,
Collateral Censorship and the Limits of Intermediary Immunity,
87 Notre Dame L. Rev. 101 (2011), available at
SSRN.
“Section 230” contains the single most important provision in all of Internet law:
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
Felix Wu’s Collateral Censorship and the Limits of Intermediary Immunity — his first article as a law professor — offers a perceptive new interpretation of this enigmatic sentence. It has always been clear that Section 230 protects intermediaries — the Googles, Facebooks, Comcasts, and bloggers of the world — from being held liable for user-generated content. But consensus in the core gives way to controversy in the penumbra: just how far does or should the immunity reach? Continue reading "Undiplomatic Immunity"
Nov 14, 2011 Michael CarrollIntellectual Property LawJotwell
Media Piracy in Emerging Economies (Joseph Karaganis, ed., 2011).
For those of us who study intellectual property law or the relationship between law and the Internet, these are interesting times. So interesting, in fact, that it is difficult to keep up and to have a real sense for how the activities regulated by intellectual property law are evolving around the world. Now, thanks to Joseph Karaganis and the team of researchers whose efforts he has coordinated to produce Media Piracy in Emerging Economies (“MPEE”), we have a much clearer picture about how interesting, and puzzling, the times in which we live really are.
A little background. It is no secret that economic globalization and developments in digital technologies are interrelated but independent forces shaping the character and quality of human life around the globe. These forces have pulled the industries in the United States, Europe and Japan that produce capital-intensive film, music, software, video games and related media in different directions. Globalization has led to increased market access for media goods produced by these industries, but the growth of digital networks and related technologies have undermined these industries’ traditional production and distribution practices. To manage these divergent forces, media industry executives have invested heavily in influencing intellectual property law and policy. Continue reading "Access to Global Media in Middle and Low Income Countries: A Responsible Study"
Nov 7, 2011 Paul HorwitzConstitutional LawJotwell
Ashutosh Avinash Bhagwat,
Details: Specific Facts and the First Amendment (2011), available at
SSRN.
Imagine two speech scenarios. In the first, a noted scientist publishes a paper offering specific, detailed, and accurate empirical evidence concerning the genetic structure of a rare and fatal disease. Few people suffer from the disease, and even fewer will understand the paper, but it represents a great leap forward in understanding the underlying nature of the disease. The paper does, however, include patient information that is supposed to be confidential under federal privacy laws. In the second, a newspaper published a letter to the editor by a local crank charging that the climate change movement is a worldwide conspiracy in which scientists are deliberately lying to the public. The letter is a poorly supported rant. Which speech deserves greater protection under the First Amendment?
Although he would offer some protection to both, Ashutosh Bhagwat argues, in a new working paper, Details: Specific Facts and the First Amendment, that the second speech—the false, unhelpful work of what Holmes would have called a “poor and puny anonymity”—deserves more protection than the paper that may revolutionize understanding and treatment of a variety of genetically based disorders, a Nobel Prize in waiting. His answer is not outrageous, and some may find it unsurprising. But even recognizing that the question exists is important. Continue reading "“Living Turned Inside Out”: True Facts and the First Amendment"
Nov 2, 2011 Adam RosenzweigJotwellTax Law
David Hasen,
Tax Neutrality and Tax Amenities, __
Fla. Tax Rev. __ (forthcoming 2011), available at
SSRN.
As with many areas of law, a canon of sorts has grown up around the field of international taxation. Pursuant to this canon, income disappearing “through the cracks” of the international taxing regime, and the resulting loss of tax revenue, has been singled out as one of the single largest problem plaguing the international fiscal order. This has led to concerted efforts to recapture this disappearing tax base through multiple types of enforcement or punishment, most famously through a blacklist campaign led by the OECD against so-called uncooperative tax havens.
What may surprise some, however, is that this canon appears to rest primarily on a single, somewhat dated, premise arising from the public finance literature: that of tax “neutrality” – or the idea that the tax law should not change where and how capital invests around the world as compared to what would occur absent taxes. Neutrality, it was argued, was the sine qua non of the international tax regime in that it would prevent “distortions” to international capital flows, thus maximizing worldwide efficiency; increased worldwide efficiency would mean increased worldwide growth, making all countries better off – the supposed common goal of all. Given that neutrality would benefit the entire worldwide tax regime, the argument went, it was appropriate or even necessary to punish countries which did not adopt “neutral” policies in their tax laws as well. Even critics of this approach seemed to base their analysis in neutrality terms, effectively ceding the battleground before a shot was fired. Continue reading "Taking Sovereignty Seriously"
Oct 21, 2011 Bill BrattonCorporate LawJotwell
The GW Center for Law, Economics & Finance, under the leadership of the redoubtable Lisa Fairfax, last spring held its first Junior Faculty Business and Financial Law Workshop. I was one of the old fogies called in to do commentary. It was a successful event. The papers were strong and I was glad of the opportunity to acquaint myself with their authors.
One of the papers has loomed particularly large in the memory—From Graham-Leach-Bliley to Dodd-Frank: The Unfulfilled Promise of Section 23A of the Federal Reserve Act, by Professor Saule T. Omarova of North Carolina Law. Continue reading "Into the Heart of Darkness"
Sep 15, 2011 George MundstockJotwellTax Law
The recent shuttering of Borders reminded us all of the huge competitive advantages that online merchants enjoy over brick-and-mortar retailers. Foremost among these advantages is the ability to exploit Quill Corporation v. North Dakota, 504 U.S. 298 (1992), and avoid collecting use tax on sales so as to achieve a practical 5 to 10% price advantage. Quill held that a state could require use tax collection only from a seller with a “physical presence” in the state. Michael Mazerov’s Amazon’s Arguments Against Collecting Sales Tax Do Not Withstand Scrutiny (2010) presents a complete analysis of the issues here. (An earlier version was published at 54 State Tax Notes 728 (2009).)
Mr. Mazerov carefully dissects all of the arguments against taxation using Amazon as a case study. He starts by looking at the argument that multistate tax collection would unduly burden interstate sellers. He points out that Amazon already collects tax in every state of the union but one for customers like Target. Amazon even collects value added taxes on foreign sales. Supporting U.S. states presumably would require only “the flip of a (software) switch.” Continue reading "Online Retailers’ Tax-Free Lunches"
Aug 25, 2011 JotwellJotwell
Jotwell is taking a short summer break.
Posting will resume on Tuesday, September 6, 2011.
See you then.
