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<title>George Mason University School of Law Working Papers Series</title>
<copyright>Copyright (c) 2013 George Mason University School of Law All rights reserved.</copyright>
<link>http://law.bepress.com/gmulwps</link>
<description>Recent documents in George Mason University School of Law Working Papers Series</description>
<language>en-us</language>
<lastBuildDate>Wed, 30 Jan 2013 12:28:52 PST</lastBuildDate>
<ttl>3600</ttl>








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<title>A Law and Economics Perspective on Terrorism</title>
<link>http://law.bepress.com/gmulwps/art42</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://law.bepress.com/gmulwps/art42</guid>
<pubDate>Wed, 07 Sep 2005 18:20:08 PDT</pubDate>
<description>
	<![CDATA[
	<p>This paper reviews the existing law and economics literature on crime, noting where various models might apply to the terror context. Specifically, it focuses on two strands of the literature, deterrence and incapacitation. Challenging the conventional application of the basic rational agent model of crime in the context of terrorism, it considers anti-terror measures enacted by different countries, highlighting how the details of the laws correspond to the insights from economic models of crime. In conclusion, the paper proposes an efficient sorting mechanism in which individuals will be provided with adequate incentives to reveal their type to law enforcement authorities.</p>

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</description>

<author>Nuno  M. Garoupa  et al.</author>


<category>Comparative and Foreign Law</category>

<category>Criminal Law and Procedure</category>

<category>Law and Economics</category>

<category>Torts</category>

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<title>Two Tales of Bundling</title>
<link>http://law.bepress.com/gmulwps/art41</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://law.bepress.com/gmulwps/art41</guid>
<pubDate>Thu, 01 Sep 2005 16:47:09 PDT</pubDate>
<description>
	<![CDATA[
	<p>The economic literature on bundling has made many theoretical advances.  However, several omissions reveal themselves.  The advances have largely been on the theoretical side.  These models contain restrictive assumptions regarding the existence of monopoly in some markets, and the nature of rivalry in others.  The models generally ignore obvious and ubiquitous reasons firms may use bundled discounts.  These models have not been subject to robustness checks, nor have their assumptions been tested empirically.  As a result, the literature that shows the possibility of anticompetitive harm does not provide a reliable way to gauge whether the potential for harm would outweigh any demonstrable benefits from the practice.</p>
<p>As a result of the underdeveloped nature of the literature, simple rules that result in extreme tradeoffs between type I and type II errors may dominate more complex tests that attempt to differentiate procompetitive from anticompetitive behavior.  Such complex tests may work well within the confines of a theoretical model, but not when applied to firms in actual antitrust cases.  Improving the reliability of more complex tests for anticompetitive behavior will require economists to expand their understanding of both the anticompetitive and procompetitive reasons firms engage in bundling.  This will entail studying the reasons bundling is adopted by firms without market power, relaxing the assumption of monopoly in theoretical models, and generating testable hypothesis and the data to test them.</p>

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</description>

<author>Bruce H. Kobayashi</author>


<category>Law and Economics</category>

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<title>The Economics of Loyalty Discounts and Antitrust Law in the United States</title>
<link>http://law.bepress.com/gmulwps/art40</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://law.bepress.com/gmulwps/art40</guid>
<pubDate>Tue, 30 Aug 2005 17:04:18 PDT</pubDate>
<description>
	<![CDATA[
	<p>This paper examines the law and economics of loyalty discounts.  While there have been recent advances in the economic analysis of loyalty discounts, this literature is still relatively recent and sparse.  Though some of these papers provide tests that would serve to identify either deviations from short run profit maximization or, in the case of bundled discounts, a reduction in consumer welfare or the exclusion of a hypothetically equally efficient competitor, these tests have several shortcomings. As a result, the economic literature currently does not provide a reliable way to gauge whether the potential harm from the use of loyalty discounts would outweigh any demonstrable benefits from their use.</p>
<p>A review of the major cases involving loyalty and other volume discounts suggests the following general observations.  In the single product case, courts have consistently applied the “not easy to establish” two part test for predatory pricing set out by the Supreme Court in its Brooke Group decision.  As a result, the courts have generally ruled that above-cost volume discounts, including those that use market share discounts and near exclusive thresholds, are lawful and do not violate the antitrust laws.  In cases involving multimarket or bundled rebates, however, courts have not generally followed the Brooke Group Court’s presumption that above cost bundled discounts are presumptively legal.  However, they have generally followed the Brooke Group Court’s focus on the actual facts or realities of the marketplace rather than on hypotheticals.  Thus, while the lower courts have considered the theories and tests contained in the recent theoretical literature on loyalty discounts, they have generally refused to find liability absent sufficient proof that the conditions required by these tests apply, and that the underlying tests reflect market realities.   This approach is consistent with the federal courts’ generally cautious approach to expanding Section 2 liability, and the recognition of the underdeveloped and untested state of the academic literature.</p>
<p>Moreover, there are significant flaws in the two cases where courts have found use of bundled loyalty rebates to be unlawful.  In SmithKline, the court did focus on data and concluded that an equally efficient competitor would have been excluded by the bundled discounts evaluated in the case.  However, economic theory suggests that the court may have used a flawed standard, and should have instead focused on the fact that changes to the bundled rebate programs served to increase rather than decrease prices.  And the court’s decision in LePage’s not only suggested use of the same flawed standard, it found liability without requiring sufficient proof that the standard even applied to the facts of the case.</p>

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</description>

<author>Bruce H. Kobayashi</author>


<category>Law and Economics</category>

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<title>Calling a Truce in the Culture Wars: From Enron to the CIA</title>
<link>http://law.bepress.com/gmulwps/art39</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://law.bepress.com/gmulwps/art39</guid>
<pubDate>Thu, 25 Aug 2005 11:24:51 PDT</pubDate>
<description>
	<![CDATA[
	<p>This Article compares and evaluates recent Congressional efforts to improve institutional “cultures” in the private and public sectors.  The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 was designed to upgrade corporate culture by patching up the “walls” that separate corporate management from boards of directors, accountants, lawyers, and financial analysts.  The Intelligence Reform Act of 2005 took a different tack, hammering away at walls that supposedly segmented the intelligence community.  The logic was that the market failed because people did not observe sufficient formalities in their dealings with one another, while the intelligence community failed precisely because people kept their distance from one another and declined to share information.  The way to improve their respective cultures, Congress determined, was to build up walls in the one case and to tear them down in the other.  This Article expresses some skepticism, however, about these solutions.  Building walls in the private sector increases transaction costs, which may outweigh any benefits in detecting fraud.  With respect to the intelligence community, compartmentalization of information diminishes risks associated with double agents; redundancy of tasks may provide a safety margin; and segmentation of government agencies may guard against civil liberties violations as well as provide additional spurs to action.  Furthermore, thriving firms in the private sector forge successful, though likely idiosyncratic, cultures designed to exploit business opportunities.  Because the market is largely self-correcting, regulatory efforts to dictate a particular reorganization or cultural shift are probably unnecessary and possibly harmful.  By contrast, the CIA, FBI, NSA, and all other government agencies operate without fear of bankruptcy, which is to say in the absence of penalties for deficient cultures (or rewards for successful ones).  Nonetheless, efforts to re-structure government bureaucracies, nominally to re-make their cultures, should be regarded with caution.  First, such efforts will almost inevitably be undertaken by political actors, whose motivations are at a minimum suspect.  Second, even assuming the best of intentions and the utmost of human wisdom, central planners cannot forecast the untold costs and benefits to a major governmental reorganization.  The Intelligence Reform Act’s overhaul of the intelligence community will have certain and substantial costs in the short-term, and very uncertain, if any, benefits in the long term.</p>

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</description>

<author>Craig S. Lerner</author>


<category>Criminal Law and Procedure</category>

<category>Law Enforcement and Corrections</category>

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<title>Life v. Death: Or Why the Death Penalty Should Marginally Deter</title>
<link>http://law.bepress.com/gmulwps/art38</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://law.bepress.com/gmulwps/art38</guid>
<pubDate>Wed, 24 Aug 2005 11:20:00 PDT</pubDate>
<description>
	<![CDATA[
	<p>Econometric measures of the effect of capital punishment have increasingly provided evidence that it deters homicides. However, most researchers on both sides of the death penalty debate continue to rely on rather simple assumptions about criminal behavior. I attempt to provide a more nuanced and predictive rational choice model of the incentives and disincentives to kill, with the aim of assessing to what extent the statistical findings of deterrence are in line with theoretical expectations.  In particular, I examine whether it is plausible to suppose there is a marginal increase in deterrence created by increasing the penalty from life imprisonment without parole to capital punishment.  The marginal deterrence effect is shown to be a direct negative function of prison conditions as they are anticipated by the potential offender – the more tolerable someone perceives imprisonment to be, the less deterrent effect prison will have, and the greater the amount of marginal deterrence the threat of capital punishment will add. I then examine the empirical basis for believing there to be a subset of killers who are relatively unafraid of the prison environment, and who therefore may be deterred effectively only by the death penalty.  Criminals, empirically, appear to fear a capital sentence, and are willing to sacrifice important procedural rights during plea bargaining to avoid this risk. This has the additional effect of increasing the mean expected term of years attached to a murder conviction, and may generate a secondary deterrent effect of capital punishment. At least for some offenders, the death penalty should induce greater caution in their use of lethal violence, and the deterrent effect seen statistically is possibly derived from the change in the behavior of these individuals. This identification of a particular group on whom the death penalty has the greatest marginal effect naturally suggests reforms in sentencing (and plea bargaining) which focus expensive capital prosecutions on those most resistant to alternative criminal sanctions.</p>

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</description>

<author>Charles N. W.  Keckler</author>


<category>Criminal Law and Procedure</category>

<category>Law and Economics</category>

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<title>Crops, Guns &amp; Commerce: A Game Theoretical Critique of Gonzales v. Raich</title>
<link>http://law.bepress.com/gmulwps/art37</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://law.bepress.com/gmulwps/art37</guid>
<pubDate>Sun, 21 Aug 2005 16:30:18 PDT</pubDate>
<description>
	<![CDATA[
	<p>In Gonzales v. Raich, the Supreme Court sustained an application of the Controlled Substances Act (“CSA”), banning all private use of marijuana, as applied to two women who had cultivated or otherwise acquired marijuana for the treatment of severe pain pursuant to the California Compassionate Use Act. Writing for the majority, Justice Stevens placed Raich at the intersection of two landmark Commerce Clause precedents: Wickard v. Filburn, the notorious 1942 decision, which upheld a penalty under the Agriculture Adjustment Act of 1938 applied to a local farmer who violated his wheat quota but who had used the modest excess portion entirely on his own farm, and Lopez v. United States,  the controversial 1995 decision, which stuck down the Gun-Free School Zones Act and for the first time in over sixty years imposed limits on the scope of Congress’s Commerce Clause power based upon the underlying subject matter of the regulated activity.</p>
<p>Writing for the Lopez majority, Chief Justice Rehnquist had claimed not to disturb the expansive post-New Deal Commerce Clause precedents, but rather to fit all of the cases neatly into three circumscribed categories: the use of channels of interstate commerce; instrumentalities or persons or things traveling in interstate commerce; and economic activities that have a substantial effect on interstate commerce. Significantly, the Lopez Court redefined the third and most important category from its original formulation set out in Wickard. While Wickard had allowed Congressional regulation of local activity, “whatever its nature . . . if it exerts a substantial economic effect on interstate commerce,” Rehnquist instead used “economic” to qualify the activity itself.</p>
<p>Following the revised Lopez formulation, the Raich Court inquired whether cultivating, acquiring, and using medical marijuana qualified as a regulable economic activity. Relying upon a dictionary for the proposition that economics refers to “the production, distribution, and consumption of commodities,” Stevens determined that just as the Wickard Court had sustained Congress’s regulation of wheat production, so too, the Raich Court was compelled to sustain Congress’s prohibition of marijuana acquisition, production, and use even if for medical purposes and on the advice of a physician as permitted under state law.</p>
<p>This Article traces the Lopez Court’s doctrinal modification, explores its implications, and offers an alternative economic analysis that considers the need for a central coordinating authority to effectuate the Congressional policy enacted pursuant to the Commerce Clause. The analysis reveals the shortcomings of Justice Stevens’s analysis in employing a dictionary definition of economics and of focusing strictly on the nature of the underlying activity to equate Wickard and Raich. Using an analysis that draws instead upon the prisoners’ dilemma and the multiple Nash equilibrium bargaining game, this Article demonstrates that the Court could have reconciled the expansive post-New Deal Commerce Clause cases with the more recent efforts, embodied in Lopez and in Morrison v. United States, to impose meaningful substantive restraints on the scope of Congress’s Commerce Clause powers. And it could have done so while applying Lopez to invalidate the CSA as applied to Respondents’ activities.</p>
<p>Most notably, the analysis reveals that Wickard does not represent an extreme example of Congressional Commerce Clause powers. Instead, Wickard relies upon the need for a central authority to curb national wheat outputs as a means of controlling price, and the need for a meaningful signal concerning the level at which the governmentally imposed quota regime will be enforced to avoid the consequence of cheating in undermining the overall pricing scheme. Neither of these concerns, nor any of the other identified concerns that justify the broad post-New Deal exercise of Congressional Commerce Clause powers, properly bear on the facts of Raich.</p>

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</description>

<author>Maxwell L. Stearns</author>


<category>Constitutional Law</category>

<category>Jurisprudence</category>

<category>Law and Economics</category>

<category>Public Law and Legal Theory</category>

</item>






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<title>Reasonable Suspicion and Mere Hunches</title>
<link>http://law.bepress.com/gmulwps/art36</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://law.bepress.com/gmulwps/art36</guid>
<pubDate>Sun, 21 Aug 2005 16:18:45 PDT</pubDate>
<description>
	<![CDATA[
	<p>In Terry v. Ohio, Earl Warren held that police officers could temporarily detain a suspect, provided that they could articulate the “reasonable inferences” for their suspicion, and not merely allude to a “hunch.”  Since Terry, the American legal system has discounted the “mere” hunches of police officers, requiring them to articulate “specific” and “objective” observations of fact to support their decision to conduct a stop and frisk.  The officer’s intuitions, gut feelings and sixth sense about a situation are all disallowed.</p>
<p>This dichotomy between facts and intuitions is built on sand.  Emotions and intuitions can be reasonable, and reasons are often predicated on emotions.  Even as courts have, over the past two generations, grown more dismissive of hunches, there has been a counter-revolution in the cognitive sciences.  Emotions and intuitions are not obstacles to reason, but indispensable heuristic devices that allow people to process diffuse, complex information about their environment and make sense of the world.  If the legal rules governing police conduct are premised on a mistaken assumption about human cognition, can one craft a doctrine of policing that credits the wisdom of hunches?  Can the legal system defer to police officers’ intuitions without undermining protections against law enforcement overreaching?</p>
<p>This article argues that, to some extent, judicial skepticism about police hunches can and should be abandoned.  As a practical matter, the current legal regime substitutes palliative euphemisms for useful controls on police discretion.  When an energetic police officer has a hunch that something is wrong and action is imperative, the officer will simply act.  Months will pass before a suppression hearing, and by then it will be a simple matter to reverse-engineer the objective “reasons” for the stop — e.g., “I saw a bulge.” The legal system in practice simply rewards those officers who are able and willing to spin their behavior in a way that satisfies judges, while it penalizes those officers who are less verbally facile or who are transparent about their motivations.  It would be preferable if politically accountable authorities joined the courts in monitoring police practices. The focus should be less on what police say after the fact and more on what they do — that is, how successful police officers are in catching criminals and how respectful they are of all citizens.</p>

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</description>

<author>Craig S. Lerner</author>


<category>Criminal Law and Procedure</category>

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<title>Private Property, Development and Freedom</title>
<link>http://law.bepress.com/gmulwps/art35</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://law.bepress.com/gmulwps/art35</guid>
<pubDate>Sun, 21 Aug 2005 16:07:21 PDT</pubDate>
<description>
	<![CDATA[
	<p>The author asserts that adherence to the rule of law, including property law, is a necessary condition to economic development and human freedom. United States governmental agencies and private institutes have attempted to convey this message to Russia, other states of the former Soviet Union, and former Soviet satellite states, with some success. Finally, and unfortunately, the United States has veered away from the very adherence to the rule of law respecting property which it espouses abroad.</p>

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</description>

<author>Steven J. Eagle</author>


<category>Constitutional Law</category>

<category>International Law</category>

<category>Land Use Planning</category>

<category>Property-Personal and Real</category>

<category>Public Law and Legal Theory</category>

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<title>The Reasonableness of Probable Cause</title>
<link>http://law.bepress.com/gmulwps/art34</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://law.bepress.com/gmulwps/art34</guid>
<pubDate>Tue, 16 Aug 2005 08:54:30 PDT</pubDate>
<description>
	<![CDATA[
	<p>Probable cause is generally cast in judicial opinions and the scholarly literature as a fixed probability of criminal activity.  In the weeks before the September 11 attacks, FBI headquarters, applying such an unbending standard, rejected a warrant application to search Zacarias Moussaoui’s laptop computer.  This article, which begins with an analysis of the Moussaoui episode, argues that the probable cause standard should be calibrated to the gravity of the investigated offense and the intrusiveness of a proposed search.  Tracing the evolution of probable cause from the common law through its American development, the article argues that the Supreme Court’s current insistence on a “single standard” lacks historical support.  Probable cause should be recast within a reasonableness framework, embracing the common sense view that not all searches equally trench on privacy concerns and not all crimes equally threaten the social order.</p>

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</description>

<author>Craig S. Lerner</author>


<category>Constitutional Law</category>

<category>Criminal Law and Procedure</category>

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<title>Expressive Association after Dale</title>
<link>http://law.bepress.com/gmulwps/art33</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://law.bepress.com/gmulwps/art33</guid>
<pubDate>Fri, 12 Aug 2005 10:06:36 PDT</pubDate>
<description>
	<![CDATA[
	<p>The right to join with other people to promote a particular outlook, known as the right of expressive association, is a necessary adjunct to the right of freedom of speech, which is protected by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. In Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, the United States Supreme Court found that the Boy Scouts of America had a First Amendment expressive association right to exclude a homosexual adult volunteer. Dale is likely to prove to be one of the most important First Amendment cases of recent years, because the Court enforced a broad right of expressive association against the competing claims of an antidiscrimination law.</p>
<p>The right to expressive association had languished in obscurity for more than two decades after the Supreme Court articulated it in the late 1950s and early 1960s in the course of protecting civil rights activists from racist Southern governments. Controversy over constitutional protection of expressive association arose in the 1980s, when private associations claimed that it protected their right to discriminate when necessary to pursue the associations' goals. The Supreme Court seemed aghast that the expressive association right was being used as a tool of those who would seek to use its protection of their associative status in order to discriminate. In a series of opinions in the mid to late 1980s, the Court both narrowly defined the circumstances in which expressive association rights are impinged, and suggested that antidiscrimination laws are always "compelling government interests" sufficient to override these rights. The right of expressive association had been significantly weakened.</p>
<p>Dale, however, dramatically revived the right of expressive association. The Court found that the Boy Scouts had an expressive association right to exclude gay scoutmasters even though the Scouts' anti-homosexual activity policy was neither well-publicized nor especially central to its mission. Moreover, the Court rejected New Jersey's claim that the law was justified by the state's compelling interest in eradicating discrimination against homosexuals.</p>
<p>The essay examines the right of expressive association and the consequences of its reinvigoration by the Supreme Court in Dale. Part I recounts the ups and downs of the right from its inception in civil rights cases, to its low ebb in the 1980s, to its reinvigoration in Dale. Part II discusses some of the scholarly commentary on Dale and concludes that the right to expressive association after Dale will continue to be a broad one, with some limitations. Part III discusses some of the post-Dale decisions that support the interpretation of Dale as expounding a broad-based expressive association right fully applicable to a variety of situations. Finally, Part IV looks at some of the untapped potential uses of the right. In particular, Dale will often shield religious associations from intrusive antidiscrimination laws.</p>

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</description>

<author>David E. Bernstein</author>


<category>Constitutional Law</category>

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<title>Is Forum-Shopping Corrupting America&apos;s Bankruptcy Courts? Review of Lynn M. LoPucki, &quot;Courting Failure: How Competition for big Cases is Corrupting the Bankruptcy Courts&quot;</title>
<link>http://law.bepress.com/gmulwps/art32</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://law.bepress.com/gmulwps/art32</guid>
<pubDate>Wed, 10 Aug 2005 12:05:27 PDT</pubDate>
<description>
	<![CDATA[
	<p>In his new book, Courting Failure: How Competition for Big Cases is Corrupting the Bankruptcy Courts, Professor Lynn LoPucki’s book argues that that current bankruptcy venue rules have spawned an improper “competition for big cases” that has “corrupted” America’s bankruptcy courts.  LoPucki argues that this competition has harmed the bankruptcy system and the economy, transferring wealth from creditors and employees to incumbent management and bankruptcy professionals.  He also argues that the competition that has corrupted the American bankruptcy system is being replicated internationally, resulting in a similar competition and similar harm on the global stage.</p>
<p>This essay reviews LoPucki’s book and its central theoretical and empirical arguments.  LoPucki offers powerful empirical evidence that something is amiss with much of current American bankruptcy practice.  This essay will try to flesh out in more detail the model and theoretical foundations that implicit underlie LoPucki’s indictment of bankruptcy forum-shopping (and other forms of forum-shopping as well).  Empirical evidence standing alone is insufficient to draw conclusions about whether forum-shopping is in general good or bad without a clearly-stated hypothesis to test.  Instead, it is necessary to also have a theoretical model sufficient to generate testable hypotheses as a predicate both for determining whether forum-shopping is good or bad on net, as well as the likely effects of reform proposals.  Although LoPucki identifies several problem areas in the current Chapter 11 reorganization process, it is not as clear that all of these problems can be clearly attributed to runaway forum-shopping.  Instead, they may simply be good-faith errors or mistakes, for which continued competition may be beneficial, in that the competition may actually expedite the process of self-correction.</p>
<p>This review essay develops a model of the institutions and incentives governing the forum-shopping competition described by LoPucki in an effort to determine whether the empirical observations proffered by LoPucki can be best explained as the outcome of improper forum-shopping competition.  The essay then closes with an analysis of provisions of the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005, noting that many of the provisions in the legislation offer substantive responses to many of the problems identified by LoPucki.</p>

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</description>

<author>Todd J. Zywicki</author>


<category>Bankruptcy Law</category>

<category>Commercial Law</category>

<category>Contracts</category>

<category>Corporations</category>

<category>Law and Economics</category>

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<item>
<title>Learning the Wrong Lessons from &quot;An American Tragedy&quot;: A Critique of the Berger-Twerski Informed Choice Proposal</title>
<link>http://law.bepress.com/gmulwps/art31</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://law.bepress.com/gmulwps/art31</guid>
<pubDate>Tue, 02 Aug 2005 12:36:52 PDT</pubDate>
<description>
	<![CDATA[
	<p>This paper is a critique of Margaret Berger and Aaron Twerski, “Uncertainty and Informed Choice: Unmasking Daubert”, forthcoming the Michigan Law Review. Berger and Twerski propose that courts recognize a cause of action that would allow plaintiffs who claim injury from pharmaceutical products, but who do not have sufficient evidence to prove causation, to recover damages for deprivation of informed choice. Berger and Twerski claim inspiration from the litigation over allegations that the morning sickness drug Bendectin caused birth defects.   Considering the criteria Berger and Twerski suggest for their proposed cause of action in the context of Bendectin, it appears that a pharmaceutical manufacturer could be held liable for failure to provide informed choice: (a) even when there was never any sound scientific evidence suggesting that the product caused the harm at issue, and there was an unbroken consensus among leading experts in the field that the product did not cause such harm; (b) when the product prevented serious harm to a significant number of patients, and prevented substantial discomfort to a much greater number, even when there were no available alternative products; (c) when a plaintiff claims that she would not have taken the product had she been informed of an incredibly remote and completely unproven risk; and (d) when the defendant is unable to prove "a negative" - that the product in question definitely did not cause the claimed injury.   No rational legal system would allow such a tort.  Putting the Bendectin example aside, the informed choice proposal has the following additional weaknesses: (1) it invites reliance on unreliable "junk science" testimony;  (2) it ignores the fact that juries are not competent to resolve subtle risk assessment issues;  (3) it reflects an unwarranted belief in the ability of juries to both follow limiting instructions and ignore their emotions; (4) it ignores the problems inherent to multiple trials---even if defendants were to win most "informed choice" cases, safe products could still be driven off the market by a minority of contrary verdicts; (5) it ignores the inevitable costs to medical innovation as pharmaceutical companies scale back on researching product categories that would be particularly prone to litigation;  (6) to preempt litigation, pharmaceutical companies would "overwarn," rendering more significant warnings less useful; and (7) FDA labeling requirements would arguably preempt the proposed cause of action.</p>

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</description>

<author>David E. Bernstein</author>


<category>Evidence</category>

<category>Food and Drug Law</category>

<category>Health Law and Policy</category>

<category>Insurance Law</category>

<category>Products Liability</category>

<category>Torts</category>

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<title>Bolling, Equal Protection, Due Process, and Lochnerphobia</title>
<link>http://law.bepress.com/gmulwps/art30</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://law.bepress.com/gmulwps/art30</guid>
<pubDate>Thu, 14 Jul 2005 11:57:10 PDT</pubDate>
<description>
	<![CDATA[
	<p>In Brown v. Board of Education, the United States Supreme Court invalidated state and local school segregation laws as a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. That same day, in Bolling v. Sharpe, the Court held unconstitutional de jure segregation in Washington, D.C.'s public schools under the Fifth Amendment's Due Process Clause. Fifty years after it was decided, Bolling remains one of the Warren Court's most controversial decisions.</p>
<p>The controversy reflects the widespread belief that the outcome in Bolling reflected the Justices' political preferences and was not a sound interpretation of the Due Process Clause. The Bolling Court stands accused of "inventing" the idea that due process includes a guarantee of equal protection equivalent to that of the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause.</p>
<p>A careful analysis of Bolling v. Sharpe, however, reveals some surprises. First, the almost universal portrayal of Bolling as an opinion relying on an "equal protection component" of the Fifth Amendment's Due Process Clause is incorrect.  In fact, Bolling was a substantive due process opinion with roots in Lochner era cases such as Buchanan v. Warley, Meyer v. Nebraska, and Pierce v. Society of Sisters.  The Court, however, chose to rely explicitly only on Buchanan because the other cases were too closely associated with Lochner.</p>
<p>Another surprise is that the proposition that Bolling has come to stand for, that the Fifth Amendment prohibits discrimination by the Federal Government, was not simply "made up" by the Supreme Court, but has a basis in longstanding precedent.</p>
<p>Finally, Bolling is an important example of the distorting effect of Lochnerphobia on Supreme Court jurisprudence. Bolling would have been a much stronger opinion had it been willing to explicitly rely on Lochner era precedents such as Meyer, and to employ a more explicitly Lochnerian view of the Due Process Clause.</p>

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</description>

<author>David E. Bernstein</author>


<category>Civil Rights and Discrimination</category>

<category>Constitutional Law</category>

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<title>Neuronomics and Rationality</title>
<link>http://law.bepress.com/gmulwps/art29</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://law.bepress.com/gmulwps/art29</guid>
<pubDate>Wed, 22 Jun 2005 11:25:30 PDT</pubDate>
<description>
	<![CDATA[
	<p>The assumption of rationality is both one of the most important and most controversial assumptions of modern economics. This article discusses what current experimental economic as well as neuroscience research tells us about the relationship between rationality and the mechanisms of human decision-making. The article explores the meaning of rationality, with a discussion of the distinction between traditional constructivist rationality and more ecological concepts of rationality. The article argues that ecological notions of rationality more accurately describe both human neural mechanisms as well as a wider variety of human behavior than do constructivist notions of rationality.</p>

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</description>

<author>Terrence Chorvat et al.</author>


<category>Law and Economics</category>

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<title>The Comparative Law and Economics of Pure Economic Loss</title>
<link>http://law.bepress.com/gmulwps/art28</link>
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<pubDate>Mon, 20 Jun 2005 17:36:50 PDT</pubDate>
<description>
	<![CDATA[
	<p>Law and economics shows that a key factor in determining the optimal economic loss rule is found in the relationship between pure economic loss and social loss. Economic loss should be compensable in torts only to the extent that it corresponds to a socially relevant loss. In this paper we undertake a comparative evaluation of the economic loss rule to verify whether modern legal systems, although not formally adopting the economic criterion, define the exclusionary rule in light of efficiency considerations. The comparative analysis reveals that the substantive applications of the economic loss rule in European jurisdictions are consistent with the predicates of economic analysis.</p>

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</description>

<author>Francesco Parisi et al.</author>


<category>Comparative and Foreign Law</category>

<category>Contracts</category>

<category>Law and Economics</category>

<category>Torts</category>

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<item>
<title>Worthless Patents</title>
<link>http://law.bepress.com/gmulwps/art27</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://law.bepress.com/gmulwps/art27</guid>
<pubDate>Thu, 28 Apr 2005 16:40:25 PDT</pubDate>
<description>
	<![CDATA[
	<p>This article presents the first empirical analysis of patent value by examining renewal rate data for nearly 100,000 patents. Finding that 53.7% of all patentees allow their patents to expire for failure to pay maintenance fees confirm common perceptions of patent issuance being a poor measure of innovation value. Even more interesting is the finding that patents which expire for failure to pay maintenance fees share some common identifiable characteristics. In particular, we found that renewed patents had more claims, cited more prior art, received more citations, had more related applications, had more inventors, and spent longer in prosecution. We also found that renewal rates varied both by assignee (individual versus corporation) and (foreign versus domestic) and by technology. By providing a means of systematically identifying worthless patents and their ex ante characteristics, this article complements the author's earlier work on identifying valuable patents by comparing litigated and issued patents. Renewal rate data, however, seems a better predictor of value than litigation data as renewal rate data captures the many ways a patent may be of private value to its owner such as revenue generation via licensing or litigation, defensively, or for signaling purposes. Hence, rather than analyzing a subset of really valuable patents (those that are litigated) which may or may not be representative of all valuable patents, analysis of renewal rate data captures the population of valuable patents.</p>

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</description>

<author>Kimberly A. Moore</author>


<category>Intellectual Property Law</category>

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<item>
<title>An Economic Analysis of the Private and Social Costs of the Provision of Cybersecurity and other Public Security Goods</title>
<link>http://law.bepress.com/gmulwps/art26</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://law.bepress.com/gmulwps/art26</guid>
<pubDate>Thu, 21 Apr 2005 13:34:32 PDT</pubDate>
<description>
	<![CDATA[
	<p>This paper examines the incentives of private actors to invest in cybersecurity. Prior analyses have examined investments in security goods, such as locks or safes that have the characteristics of private goods.  The analysis in this paper extends this analysis to examine expenditures on security goods, such as information, that have the characteristics of public goods.  In contrast to the private goods case, where individual uncoordinated security expenditures can lead to an overproduction of security, the public goods case can result in the underproduction of security expenditures, and incentives to free ride.  Thus, the formation of collective organizations may be necessary to facilitate the production of public security goods, and the protection of information produced by the collective organization should be a central feature of such organizations.</p>

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</description>

<author>Bruce H. Kobayashi</author>


<category>Criminal Law and Procedure</category>

<category>Intellectual Property Law</category>

<category>Law and Economics</category>

</item>






<item>
<title>Fig Leaf Federalism and Tenth Amendment Exceptionalism</title>
<link>http://law.bepress.com/gmulwps/art25</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://law.bepress.com/gmulwps/art25</guid>
<pubDate>Wed, 06 Apr 2005 14:42:51 PDT</pubDate>
<description>
	<![CDATA[
	<p>The Supreme Court’s jurisprudence of federalism is at best undergoing an unfinished transformation, and is at worst just troubled and unsatisfying. In a little-noticed dissent in Tennessee v. Lane, Justice Scalia proposed an approach that could be generalized well beyond the specific position that he took in that case. Thus generalized, this approach may be understood as an elaboration of a proposal made by Justice O’Connor in her dissenting opinion twenty years ago in Garcia v. San Antonio Metro. Transit Auth. If adopted by the Court, this synthesis of the O’Connor and Scalia suggestions could work a real transformation in its federalism jurisprudence, and without some of the potentially radical side-effects that have thus far made the Court timorous and inconsistent. This very short paper explains how the synthesis would work, and why the Court should adopt it.</p>

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</description>

<author>Nelson Lund</author>


<category>Constitutional Law</category>

</item>






<item>
<title>Modernization of European Antitrust Enforcement: The Economics of Regulatory Competition</title>
<link>http://law.bepress.com/gmulwps/art24</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://law.bepress.com/gmulwps/art24</guid>
<pubDate>Tue, 05 Apr 2005 17:08:42 PDT</pubDate>
<description>
	<![CDATA[
	<p>In this article we analyze the expected effects of regulatory overlap in European competition law resulting from Regulation 1/2003. Drawing upon recently developed economic theories of regulatory competition, our model foresees a number of qualitative adjustments resulting from this reform. On one hand, the direct applicability of the exemption provision should increase the overall amount of exemptions. On the other hand, a decentralized system permits private litigants' forum shopping, and parallel enforcement by multiple national competition authorities will drive up the number of infringement findings. Although the precise direction of substantive competition law is unclear, the overall effect is higher levels of regulatory activity. This entails not only greater administrative costs but also suggests increased transaction costs for doing business in the post-Regulation 1/2003 European Union.</p>

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</description>

<author>Ben Depoorter et al.</author>


<category>Comparative and Foreign Law</category>

<category>International Law</category>

<category>Law and Economics</category>

</item>






<item>
<title>The FTC and State Action: Evolving Views on the Proper Role of Government</title>
<link>http://law.bepress.com/gmulwps/art23</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://law.bepress.com/gmulwps/art23</guid>
<pubDate>Wed, 30 Mar 2005 14:09:20 PST</pubDate>
<description>
	<![CDATA[
	<p>The state action doctrine was born in an era of exceptional confidence in government, with governmental entities widely regarded as unbiased and conscientious defenders of the public interest.  Over time, however, more cautious and skeptical theories of government began to gain sway.  In particular, the school of thought known as “public choice” – which holds that governmental entities, like private firms, will act in their economic self-interest – began to influence both legal theory and competition policy.  Indeed, a close examination of recent state action case law suggests that public choice thinking has driven a slow, but consistent, evolution of the doctrine toward less deference to state regulators and more careful assessment of the actual incentives that drive their decision-making.</p>
<p>This evolution in thinking, however, has not been accompanied by the development of a systematic, analytical framework to guide the application of the state action doctrine in particular cases.  Developing such a framework should therefore remain a top priority of leading antitrust policymakers, including those at the Federal Trade Commission.</p>

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</description>

<author>John T. Delacourt et al.</author>


<category>Law and Economics</category>

<category>Legislation</category>

<category>Trade Regulation</category>

</item>





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