SelectedWorks @ Chapman University Dale E. Fowler School of Law
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Law, Food, and Culture: Mexican Corn\u27s National Identity Cooked in \u27Tortilla Discourses\u27 Post-TLC/NAFTA
No full textThis essay offers a brief inquiry concerning food and national identity as expressed in the law. It examines how in 2008 the Tratado de Libre Comercio de America de Norte/North American Free Trade Agreement (TLC/NAFTA) eliminates Mexican tariffs for corn imports from the U.S. or Canada. Corn is examined as a product steeped in centuries of cultural significance for Mexico. This essay prepares a three-course argument. Section I incorporates insights from the food studies discipline to argue that beyond serving for nourishment food possesses enormous cultural and commercial value. This creates a ripe and abundant subject for legal analysis, focusing on how the law frames these tastes. Section II analytically serves up the cultural importance of food in Mexico\u27s political economy. It shows how food is stewed within a discourse of national identity on a global table. This identity is imagined as a community with competing menu options of nationalistic and domestic and foreign and neo-liberal. Current tariff elimination resembles a historic and cultural tortilla discourse, which poses corn and its use by popular sectors against modern interests. Section III describes a re-imagination of food and national identity within the confines of Mexican law and the recent tortilla price crisis
Fixed Revenue Auctions: Theory and Behavior
No full textIn this paper, we study auctions in which the revenue is fixed but the quantity is determined by the auction mechanism. Specifically, we investigate the theory and behavior of English quantity clock, Dutch quantity clock, last-quantity sealed bid, and penultimate-quantity sealed bid auctions. For theoretically equivalent fixed quantity and fixed revenue auctions, we find that fixed revenue auctions are robust to all the previously observed empirical regularities in fixed quantity auctions
Private Prediction Markets and the Law
No full textThis paper analyses the legality of private prediction markets under U.S. law, describing both the legal risks they raise and how to manage those risks. As the label private suggests, such markets offer trading not to the public but rather only to members of a particular firm. The use of private prediction markets has grown in recent years because they can efficiently collect and quantify information that firms find useful in making management decisions. Along with that considerable benefit, however, comes a particularly worrisome cost: the risk that running a private prediction market might violate U.S. state or federal laws. The ends and means of private prediction markets differ materially from those of futures, securities, or gambling markets. Laws written for those latter three institutions nonetheless threaten to limit or even outlaw private prediction markets, as the paper details. The paper also details, however, how certain legal strategies can protect private prediction markets from violating U.S. laws or suffering crushing regulatory burdens. The paper concludes with a legal forecast, describing the likely form of potential CFTC regulations and a strategy designed to ensure the success of private prediction markets under U.S. law
Good Faith and Fair Dealing in Commercial Leasing: The Right Doctrine in the Wrong Transaction
No full textProfessor Bogart was keynote lecturer for the 2007 Kratovil Conference Real Estate Law and Practice sponsored by the John Marshall Law School Center for Real Estate Law. This article was solicited in connection with that lecture. In this article, Professor Daniel Bogart criticizes the unfortunate habit of many courts to import the doctrine of good faith and fair dealing, as it has been developed in residential real estate law, into commercial leasing. Commercial leasing practice is hugely important to real property lawyers and generates a significant portion of their legal fees. More importantly, commercial leasing is the driving force behind much of commercial real property development. In the first Part of his article, Professor Bogart examines the doctrine of good faith and fair dealing and questions its applicability to commercial lease transactions. He draws upon the thoughtful scholarship of Professor Emily M. S. Houh and other scholars. Two approaches to good faith have dominated scholarly discussion: the Restatement Second of Contracts Section 205 and an economic analysis of lost opportunities. Section 205 of the Restatement essentially defines as good faith everything that is not bad faith. Courts adopting this approach create an open-ended laundry list of bad landlord behavior, and aim to do justice among the parties to a dispute. This is the dominant view and has been used successfully in residential leasing scenarios to prevent unscrupulous landlords from preying on tenants. This approach is also a basis for the Implied Warranty of Habitability. A second approach to good faith and fair dealing is grounded in economics and seeks only to prevent one party from opportunistically extracting after the fact some right that could have been negotiated into the initial contract document. Professor Bogart argues that this second approach more closely fits the commercial leasing context, in which parties are or could be represented by counsel and are typically more business savvy than their residential counterparts. Indeed, as Professor Bogart notes in the article, this is behavior that real estate lawyers see routinely, and call taking a second bite at the apple. Professor Bogart also argues that a casual application of the doctrine of good faith releases parties to the commercial lease from the bitter fruits of their negotiated agreements and lessens the value of good lawyering. One primary goal of courts, especially in the commercial context, should be to encourage parties to transactions to find good attorneys and then heed their attorneys\u27 advice. In the second Part of his article, Professor Bogart tests three increasingly complex hypothetical commercial lease disputes and asks whether, in any of them, the landlord or tenant violated the doctrine of good faith and fair dealing. Each hypothetical is based on an actual, litigated lease dispute that rose to the state appellate level. In one case, the court found a party to have violated the doctrine. Professor Bogart argues that none of the fact patterns should be deemed to be the basis for a breach of the doctrine of good faith
It\u27s Really About Sex: Same-Sex Marriage, Lesbigay Parenting, and the Psychology of Disgust
No full textThe effect of gay and lesbian parenting on children has been the touchstone issue in much of the recent state litigation on same sex marriage, with opponents of same sex marriage arguing that there is a rational basis for denying marriage rights to gays and lesbians because the central purpose of marriage is procreation and childrearing, but that children are harmed or disadvantaged when raised by gay or lesbian parents. To interrogate this claim, I critique the social science research that informs the concerns frequently expressed about the possible negative effects of lesbigay parenting on children\u27s emotional, psychosocial, and sexual development. In particular, I focus on research relevant to whether growing up in a lesbigay household is as positive an experience for children as growing up in a heterosexual household, as much of the literature to date has addressed the issue of whether lesbigay parenting is harmful to children. I conclude that the research fails to support the theory that denying marriage or parenting rights to same sex couples serves the welfare of children. I further argue that public opposition to gay marriage, particularly in the context of lesbigay parenting, is animated by a deeper concern - the proverbial \u27elephant in the room\u27 on gay rights issues. That elephant is the visceral disgust reaction that many Americans feel toward homosexual sex, and the resulting moral intuition that homosexuality and homosexual relationships are immoral. Thus, many people will conclude that it is better for children to be raised in heterosexual households because they do not want children exposed to the lesbigay \u27lifestyle.\u27 Nor do they want to increase the \u27risk\u27 that children will develop a homosexual orientation if they are raised by lesbigay parents. The article discusses new psychological research on moral decision making, which suggests that the \u27moral\u27 emotion of disgust is at the root of much of the opposition to gay rights. The disgust reaction is likely a byproduct of human evolution that fails to inform rational judgments about the policy questions surrounding lesbigay parenting and marriage rights
Joint Comment on CFTC Concept Release on the Appropriate Regulatory Treatment of Event Contracts,
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Exit Tragedy
No full textLast year the United States deported thousands of lawful residents.
Current immigration law requires deportation for aggravated felons , on it\u27s face this sounds reasonable