Black Metropolis Research Consortium
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Comparative Effects of Recreational and Medical Marijuana Laws on Drug Use among Adults and Adolescents
No full textThirty-four states have medical marijuana laws, and 10 states have recreational marijuana laws. Little research compares how these two types of laws affect drug consumption in the general population or in particular age groups. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, we find that recreational laws increase past-year marijuana use by 25 percent among adults and by 10 percent among adolescents. In contrast, medical laws increase adult use by only 5 percent and have a negligible effect on adolescent use. We also find that recreational marijuana dispensaries are an important driver of the increase in marijuana use for adults 26 and older. Our results suggest that medical laws succeed in mitigating recreational (nonmedical) use, that recreational laws produce large increases in marijuana use in the general population, and that underage marijuana use may be an important problem with existing implementations of recreational marijuana laws
Is Banning Corporate Contributions Enough? The Dynamics of Incomplete Campaign Finance Reform
No full textThis paper studies whether banning corporate contributions suffices to curb firms’ efforts to influence politics. We examine Brazil’s 2015 campaign finance reform, which banned companies from making political contributions but did not ban political contributions made by individuals. Following the reform, overall contributions decreased significantly. However, this does not mean that influence in politics disappeared. Firms with high prereform contributions responded by increasing individual donations at both the intensive and extensive margins. More critically, individual contributions became more valuable after the reform: postban individual contributions to winning candidates increased firms’ valuation substantially, thereby replicating what only corporate donations achieved preban and partially offsetting the reform’s intent. Despite this, the reform reduced total contributions, increased shareholder protection by reducing excessive contributions, and leveled political participation among firms. Moreover, the reform increased market valuations for contributing firms. Overall, incomplete campaign finance reform does deliver notable successes but has critical loopholes.
All contributions by corporations … for any political purpose should be forbidden by law; directors should not be permitted to use stockholders’ money for such purposes; and, moreover, a prohibition of this kind would be … an effective method of stopping the evils aimed at in corrupt practices acts. (Theodore Roosevelt, President’s Annual Message, 1905, 40 Cong. Rec. 96 [1906])A ban on direct corporate contributions leaves individual members of corporations free to make their own contributions, and deprives the public of little or no material information. (Federal Election Commission v. Beaumont, 539 U.S. 146, 161 [2003]
Searching for Justice for Australia’s Stolen Generations
Get PDFUntil the early 1970s, Australian federal and state government agencies forcibly removed tens of thousands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families and placed them up for adoption or in group homes and church missions. These children are known as the “Stolen Generations.” Domestic remedies have proven insufficient in securing justice for the Stolen Generations and international adjudication may be a viable alternative. This Comment examines whether Australia may be haled before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for violations of the Genocide Convention for its Stolen Generations policies. Australia’s policies likely constituted a violation of Article II(e) of the Genocide Convention, which prohibits the forcible transfer of children from one group to another with the intent of destroying the original group. The ICJ would likely have jurisdiction to hear this claim but would likely rule against the claimant were the Court to apply its reasoning from prior genocide cases. This is because the ICJ’s genocide jurisprudence is fundamentally flawed. By setting an unreasonably high bar for proving and inferring genocidal intent in state responsibility claims, the Court has essentially foreclosed Article II(e) claims from adjudication, in contravention of the Convention’s object and purpose. This Comment argues that a claim brought on behalf of the Stolen Generations at the ICJ could correct the Court’s jurisprudential errors in its application of the Genocide Convention and enable the Stolen Generations to achieve justice
Property Rights to Land and Agricultural Organization: An Argentina–United States Comparison
No full textThe contributions of Harold Demsetz offer key insights on how property rights and transaction costs shape economic organization. These guide our comparison of agricultural organization in the early 20th century in two comparable regions, the Argentine Pampas and the US Midwest. In the United States, land was distributed in small parcels and actively traded. In the Pampas, land was distributed in large plots, and trade was limited because land was a social and political asset, as well as a commercial one. We analyze why the absence of trade led to persistently larger farms, specialization in ranching, and peculiar tenancy contracts in Argentina relative to the United States. Our empirical analysis, based on county-level data for both regions, shows that geoclimatic factors cannot explain the observed differences in agricultural organization. We discuss implications for long-term economic development in Argentina
The Tragedy of “The Tragedy of the Commons”: Hardin versus the Property Rights Theorists
No full textGarrett Hardin’s article “The Tragedy of the Commons” is widely influential but fundamentally incorrect. Hardin characterizes the commons problem as arising from the exercise of free will in a world with limited carrying capacity. Hardin’s solutions to this problem emphasize coercive policies, including traditional command-and-control environmental and natural resource regulations. In contrast, the property rights literature that preceded Hardin shows that the commons problem arises from nonexclusive-use rights. Nonexclusivity is part of a broader class of restrictions on private ownership, any of which fosters dissipative rent seeking. The property rights literature focuses on value creation rather than just the physical exhaustion of the commonly owned resource. It is therefore more general and highlights solutions that are less coercive and dissipative than the more widely known views espoused by Hardin
Civil Procedure as the Regulation of Externalities: Toward a New Theory of Civil Litigation
Get PDFCivil procedure serves a multitude of goals, from regulating the cost of fact gathering to dictating the rules of advocacy in court to promoting public participation in trials. To what extent can procedural design serve them all, or must rules sacrifice some interests to serve others? In this Article, we are the first to introduce a theory of procedural design that answers this question. We build upon the fundamental insight that the goals of civil procedure, as varied as they are, all occupy a common conceptual space—each addresses an externality, positive or negative, that litigation creates. This insight allows us to tie together distinct strands of scholarship on procedural design, develop a taxonomy of externalities that civil procedure addresses, and propose (sometimes radical) reforms that would allow procedure to serve more of its goals at once.
First, we show that the literature on procedural design has unraveled into three distinct strands. The first strand centers on the interest in reducing cost and delay in litigation. The second strand centers on the interests in limiting gamesmanship between the parties and improving court accuracy in decision-making. The third strand centers on the many related interests in the positive effects of procedure on society, such as developing legal precedent, deterring unwanted (primary) behavior, and so on.
Second, we tie together these strands of the literature by observing that each strand is focused on how procedure can address one type of externality. The first strand of the literature addresses what we call “system externalities”—the effects of actions on other cases in the same court or court system. The second strand addresses what we call “strategic externalities”—the effects of a party’s actions on opposing parties in the same case. The third strand implicates external effects on society as a whole, which we call “public-goods externalities.
Third, and most ambitiously, we show that these three types of externalities give us a three-dimensional framework for procedural design. In this framework, we see how different aspects of procedure implicate one or another externality, or two or three at once. This, in turn, points the way toward opportunities to introduce procedural reforms tailored to types of externalities at issue. Our solutions range from surprising forms of judicial command and control (for example, the Supreme Court prohibiting parties from settling) to fees and subsidies (for example, a fund for judicially appointed neutral experts in important cases) to radical market-based reforms (for example, a cap-and-trade market in word limits for amicus briefs in the Supreme Court)
Remembering: The Constitution and Federally Funded Apartheid
Get PDFFor much of the twentieth century, the U.S. government authorized and invested heavily in segregation and racial inequality. Often it did so through federal programs authorized under Congress’s Spending Clause powers. Federal spending allowed powerful national investments in areas like health, education, and housing but frequently created segregated hospitals, schools, and communities. From the New Deal onward, Black leaders pressed constitutional arguments to hold the federal government responsible for its role in deepening racial inequality. Early on, federal lawyers and administrators recognized the strength of those arguments but explicitly decided against halting federal involvement in Jim Crow.
Decades later, the civil rights advocates prevailed. By the 1970s, the federal courts overwhelmingly agreed that the Fifth Amendment’s Equal Protection component barred federal subsidies or support for racial discrimination. The same “noaid” principle was codified in the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. However, from the 1980s onward, this hard-won constitutional mandate became increasingly difficult to enforce, blocked by judicially constructed procedural obstacles. The substantive Fifth Amendment ideal of preventing the federal government from aiding systemic discrimination receded because of increasing challenges to its substance, judicial fatigue with institutional oversight, and the sweeping scope of the problem— along with collective amnesia regarding the prior decades of constitutional struggle.
This Article reveals that forgotten constitutional history. After excavating the Fifth Amendment struggles, I argue that the no-aid norm, and the underlying reality of long-term federal participation in racial apartheid, should be remembered and debated once again. The costs of forgetting the constitutional principle and its history are significant: Civil rights frameworks have been distorted, leaving no systemic check or means of redress for the discriminatory use of federal funds. Further, the nation’s constitutional memory and deliberations have been shortchanged, leaving us unable to reckon with the past honestly and adequately. Our polity should again debate federal constitutional responsibility for Spending Clause programs, and, in doing so, confront the nation’s obligation to repair the apartheid it once bankrolled