Black Metropolis Research Consortium
University of Chicago Law School: Chicago UnboundNot a member yet
22435 research outputs found
Sort by
Bringing Dead Capital to Life: Property Rights Security in China
No full textChina’s 2007 Property Law provides a rare large-scale quasi experiment to examine the impact of restoring property rights protections for privately owned assets. We test hypotheses about property rights insecurity using novel firm-level administrative data that cover the universe of Chinese firms from 1998 to 2012. We find evidence confirming the counterfactual to de Soto’s “dead” capital, wherein the law increased new privately owned firms and enabled more firms to survive the early years and produce more; the converse to be true for state-owned enterprises, which indicates the law’s role—indeed, intent—to reallocate; and evidence of capital reallocation in the birth of more productive firms, specifically firms that became exporters
Deciphering the Traditional Property Interests Test for Property-Based Mail and Wire Fraud
Full text linkThe mail and wire fraud statutes are the “first line of defense” against fraudulent activities. Adaptable and broadly written, they are go-to tools in the white- collar prosecutor’s arsenal. But this flexibility has also raised concern about their expansive and indeterminate scope—leading the Supreme Court to eliminate certain honest-services theories of fraud and limit property-based theories of fraud to the protection of “traditional property interests.”
Unfortunately, the vagueness of the traditional property interests test has resulted in a confusing morass of inconsistent judgments. With limited guidance from the Supreme Court on how to conduct such an inquiry, lower courts have struggled to consistently determine whether alleged property interests are covered by these statutes. This has led to overturned convictions in high-profile mail and wire fraud cases ranging from the Varsity Blues college admission scandal to the Buffalo Billion bid-rigging scheme.
This Comment aims to aid courts conducting the traditional property interest analysis by synthesizing the Supreme Court’s property-based case law and proposing a hallmarks-of-property test. By providing structure to the currently amorphous analysis, the hallmarks-of-property test should minimize lingering constitutional vagueness concerns and provide increased deterrence to the would-be fraudsters across the United States
Coase\u27s Second Problem
No full textChicago’s most famous idea is the Coase Theorem. It is well known that the usual implication depends on low transaction costs. But there is a second problem. What if there is a collective action problem in the way? For example, when should you let someone cut in front of you in a long line? In this CBI, Professor Levmore will introduce all this and along the way connect Coase to climate change
How Did Corporations Get Stuck in Politics and Can They Escape?
Full text linkCorporations have always been involved in politics, but today is different. They are taking public positions, either directly or indirectly, on contested political and social issues unrelated to their businesses. In contrast to the conventional wisdom, we argue that this practice, which we term “corporate political posturing,” is problematic. First, it is of dubious value to the corporation and its stakeholders. Corporate political posturing often backfires, it does so unpredictably and potentially catastrophically, and it is particularly susceptible to agency costs. Second, it is harmful to society. The fundamental problem is that corporations are institutionally ill-equipped to take center stage in policy debates. They are inherently self-interested economic actors with goals that often conflict with those of society. This manifests in statements that tend to polarize rather than enlighten and actions that undermine the positions that they back publicly.
We surmise that corporations themselves are ambivalent about taking policy positions but are caught in a feedback loop in which customers, employees, and investors demand political involvement. Corporations thus engage in response to competitive pressure, which normalizes the conduct and leads to escalating expectations for further engagement. We see several ways to break this cycle. One possibility, which we consider and reject, is to subject political posturing to distinctive governance rules. A second option is voluntary disarmament. Borrowing from the Business Roundtable Statement on Corporate Purpose, we suggest that corporations could voluntarily and publicly commit to refrain from political posturing. A third option is for corporations to provide greater transparency, either voluntarily or in response to regulatory requirements. If corporations disclosed the extent to which their actions were consistent with their public positions, we predict that fewer corporations would engage in posturing and those that do would back their statements with conduct that matches
Law School Announcements 2024-2025
Full text linkOfficers and Faculty The Law School - History Programs of Instruction Curriculum Student Activities and Organizations Funds and Endowmentshttps://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/lawschoolannouncements/1138/thumbnail.jp
Lost Time: Paying for Delays Associated with Labor Strikes and Traffic Jams (chapter in a coming book: Research Handbook on Law and Time)
Full text linkWaiting is often costly. In many settings, one party delays to impose costs on another. In other settings, delay yields a small gain while imposing significant costs on others who cannot easily bargain. Where the parties can bargain, at least one expects the other to relent and to bring about a settlement that is mutually beneficial. Inasmuch as time offers the opportunity to gather information, compare alternatives, and reach yet better bargains, law does not and should not simply discourage all delays. On the other hand, it is often the case that when parties delay before reaching a bargain, they not only suffer costs, but they also impose costs on third parties who had little opportunity to shorten the delay. It is these costs that are examined in this Chapter, along with an idea for lowering these third-party costs. When this can be done, the costs of delay to the bargaining parties are also likely to be decreased. They might be happy to have a legal rule that appears to tax them but that often encourages quicker agreement and lower delay costs
Uncovering the Role of Hubs: A Network Science Perspective on Platform Competition
Full text linkThis paper offers a novel legal framework to evaluate competition among digital platforms. Drawing on network science, it debunks two prominent approaches in antitrust law, that network effects either lead to a winner-takes-all situation or, conversely, that they safeguard against platform market power abuses. It coins the term “hub-plucking” to highlight a critical dynamic of platform competition that has surprisingly gone unnoticed: the competition between platforms over highly connected “hubs”. Hub-plucking enables rivaling platforms, including new entrants, to instantly acquire market share by seizing hubs. Since many platforms of interest exhibit hubs, hub-plucking is applicable to a multitude of industries and is thus crucial for competitive analysis. The paper demonstrates the viability of hub-plucking as a major restraint on platform market power. It analyzes the relative advantages of fledgling platforms over dominant ones in acquiring hubs, and provides empirical examples of industries where hub-plucking was successfully implemented to dethrone platform incumbents. Serving as a proof-of-concept for showcasing network science’s enormous potential for advancing antitrust law, the paper last entertains two proposals for expanding antitrust’s arsenal of potential interventions in the platform context
Protecting Children\u27s Access to a Sound Basic Education in the Age of Political Polarization, A Comment on Goodwin Liu and Kristine Bowman\u27s Essays on Children\u27s Education in the Restatement
Full text linkJustice Goodwin Liu and Professor Kristine Bowman have taken two very different approaches in their essays commenting on the Restatement’s1 coverage of the law governing children’s education. In Some Thoughts on a Developmental Approach to a Sound Basic Education,2 Justice Liu focuses near exclusively on the Restatement’s articulation of the core educational standard, the “sound basic education,” and presses for an expanded application of that standard to children from birth through young adulthood.3 In The New Parents’ Rights Movement, Education, and Equality,4 Bowman addresses the entire structure of the educational provisions of the Restatement, which straddle Part 1, “Children in Families,”5 and Part 2, “Children in Schools,”6 and warns us of the fragility of the balance between these two sources of educational control in our legal system. Attending these differences in focus are important differences in tone: Justice Liu is optimistically ambitious, calling for developments in the law that extend beyond what can currently be restated. Professor Bowman is pessimistic, predicting that the recent “parents’ rights movement”7 threatens the stability of the restated law, to the detriment of children’s and society’s well-being. At the same time, the two pieces share important common ground. Most significantly, they share a concern about the growing polarization in our society and a belief that our system of education must play a central role in resisting this trend.
In this Essay, I will first briefly set out the Restatement’s approach to education, which spans several chapters in two parts of the Restatement. Next, I will consider Professor Bowman’s essay addressing the threats she identifies and the role the Restatement can play in resisting those threats. I will then consider Justice Liu’s more optimistic anticipation of future developments in the law and the role the Restatement could play in fostering those developments. I will conclude by suggesting that avoiding Professor Bowman’s threats and achieving Justice Liu’s aspirations will largely depend on the democratic process, a process not governed by the Restatement, but perhaps subject to the influence of some of the legal principles it highlights
Comment on Part 4 Essays: Goodwin and Dailey and Rosenbury
Full text linkProfessors Michelle Goodwin and Anne Dailey and President Laura Rosenbury have written two compelling essays on Part 4 of the Restatement of Children and the Law,1 dealing with Children in Society. Goodwin’s essay, She’s So Exceptional: Rape and Incest Exceptions Post-Dobbs,2 focuses on § 19.02 of the Restatement, dealing with the right of minors to reproductive health treatments. This Section was approved by the American Law Institute before the Supreme Court decided Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization,3 overturning Roe v. Wade.4 In her essay, Goodwin explores the harms that will follow if minors’ right of access to abortion, contraception, treatment for sexually transmitted infections and other care is cut off.5 Dailey and Rosenbury engage with §§ 18.10 and 18.11, dealing with minors’ right of free expression in their essay, Beyond Home and School.6 Building on arguments against strong parental authority they have developed in earlier work, they challenge the Restatement’s position recognizing parents’ authority to limit their children’s access to speech, focusing particularly on social media.7
This Comment begins by briefly describing Part 4 of the Re- statement, which includes diverse regulation dealing with the law’s direct relationship with children, not mediated (primarily) through the institutions most relevant to children’s experience—the family, the public school, and the justice system. It hen reviews the two essays on Part 4, turning first to Goodwin’s essay and then to Dailey and Rosenbury’s essay. Finally, I suggest that the two essays, while they address very different legal issues, are in conversation with one another. Goodwin’s essay is a cautionary tale on the risk of giving the state (and particularly the political branches) greater authority to decide what is harmful to children, as Dailey and Rosenbury’s proposal would seem to do