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Mitigating Peer-to-Peer Housing Impacts: Toward A Rational Nexus P2P Housing Impact Mitigation Strategy
Get PDFTraveler lodging has been around since humans created tribes and certainly since they invented civilization. The internet and the rise of peer-to-peer, short-term housing has accelerated traveler and lodging opportunities. Today, Airbnb alone has nearly three million hosts offering more than seven million listings. This article explores the rise of “peer-to-peer,” or P2P housing, and offers economic, planning, and public policy perspectives
Race, Religion, and National Identity (Reviewing Sahar Aziz, The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Religious Freedom (UC Press, 2022))
No full textCorrecting Crooked Licensing Boards with a Revolving-Door Statute
Get PDFContrary to conventional wisdom, occupational licensing restrictions do not serve a primary purpose of protecting consumers. They instead wage war on the market economy. This reality is unsurprising when one considers the makeup of a typical licensing board, which consists primarily of active market participants. These industry incumbents scheme to keep potential competitors out. Entrance exams for florists and onerous educational requirements for interior designers—absurd as they seem—become the rule rather than the exception. Despite their propensity for anticompetitive conduct, licensing boards elude review under the Sherman Act, the nation’s chief law regulating anticompetitive conduct. Licensing boards need not defend their self-interested conduct thanks to a line of Supreme Court cases that establish relatively sweeping immunity.
Rather than rework an entire body of case law, this Note recommends a statutory solution to confront crooked licensing boards. States should look to the federal revolving-door statute for inspiration. Though the revolving-door statute addresses a slightly different subject in imposing lobbying bans on former executive branch officials, similar concerns of corruption predominate among licensing boards. Accordingly, states should craft their own revolving-door statutes and bar active market participants from occupying a majority of any licensing board’s membership
Choice of Law and Time, Part II: Choice of Law Clauses and Changing Law
Get PDFModern choice of law analysis usually honors the parties’ contractual choice of governing law. But what happens when the law selected by the parties changes between the time of their contracting and the time of litigation? Or what if the law of the state whose law would otherwise apply changes so that its policy is now offended by the choice of law clause although its policy was not violated when the parties contracted? These questions raise the often-overlooked temporal aspect of choice of law analysis. Should courts regard the law to be applied as fixed to the time of the transaction or as changeable over time? The answers to these problems are influenced by several factors: the proper concern for current state policy; the parties’ expectations; and whether the new law invalidates a previously valid transaction or, alternatively, makes a previously invalid transaction valid
Overcoming the Presumption of the Deceitful Debtor
Get PDFCongress codified presumed consumer debtor abuse into the Bankruptcy Code with the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005. Since then, distrust of low- and middle-class debtors has permeated the legal system, evidenced most visibly by how easily legislators are swayed by creditor lobbyists’ rhetoric. This distrust has also reached our courts, where judges invoke the doctrine of judicial estoppel to bar debtor-plaintiffs from pursuing tort claims undisclosed in bankruptcy petitions. Instead of addressing societal problems underlying the high number of bankruptcy filings, like financial literacy and predatory lending, this Note argues that lawmakers and courts are perpetuating those same problems in the name of abuse prevention. This Note explores the circuit split regarding bankruptcy nondisclosure and judicial estoppel and proposes a shift away from applying judicial estoppel in postbankruptcy civil claims
Climate Cap and Trade and Pollution Hot Spots: An Economics Perspective
Get PDFAlthough cap and trade is overwhelmingly preferred by economists for reducing greenhouse gases and spurring the adoption of renewables and other zero-carbon alternatives, some scholars and advocates worry that it allows firms to concentrate operations in poor and minority neighborhoods, thus leading to hot spots of harmful co-pollutants. Commentators differ on the danger of hot spots and the necessity of adjusting cap-and-trade programs to avoid them, however. This Article therefore surveys ex post economic studies of cap-and-trade programs to show that they do not lead to hot spots but may actually cool them—perhaps even better than command-and-control regulation. Accordingly, cap and trade unencumbered by unnecessary restrictions should be part of the policy mix for a just energy transition
Synthesizing Energy Transitions
Get PDFThis Article assesses the growing and cross-disciplinary literature on energy transitions to explore how it can guide law and policy reforms for the energy sector. The modern conception of energy transition centers primarily on clean energy—a shift away from fossil energy dependence. It also, however, incorporates equity as a core principle, as an increasing emphasis on energy justice and just transition seeks to create guiding norms for the energy sector’s current state of change. The concept of energy transition is critical for describing and giving meaning to a fundamental societal shift at the local, regional, national, and global scales, aligned with the overarching goal enshrined in the Paris Agreement to sharply reduce greenhouse gas emissions contributing to climate change. The energy sector, being among the most significant contributors to global climate change, is not only essential to social and economic functionality and stability broadly but also intimately embedded in everyday life. Accordingly, various disciplines bring different emphases to understandings of transition in the energy context. Our synthesis of this wide-ranging literature demonstrates how the conceptual development of energy transitions across disciplines may enrich the application and depth of this concept in United States policy reform—particularly reforms designed to substantially increase investments in low-carbon energy sources, such as those enacted, for example, by federal legislation in 2021 and 2022