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Climate Impact Screening and Reporting: A Venture Capital Perspective
Get PDFAccording to the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) Net-Zero Scenario, about one-third of the emissions reductions needed by 2050 depend on technologies that are currently in development. Additionally, climate adaptation finance faces an even larger investment gap.
The Climate Venture Capital community must demonstrate tangible climate impact to truly earn its reputation.
However, accurately and reliably screening, evaluating, and monitoring climate impact is challenging, with many metrics and methods still needing to be ascertained, clarified, and standardized.
With the support of Princeville Capital, CCSI offers insights into unresolved issues: Attribution and baselining Paris-aligned thresholds for prioritization Indirect impact and tailored KPIs Adaptation investment thesis and scorecard
Manipulating Citadel: Profiting at the Expense of Retail Stock Traders\u27 Market Makers
Get PDFThis Article considers whether securities market strategies designed to profit at the expense of so-called “internalizers” should properly be considered illegal manipulation. An internalizer acquires from a brokerage firm the right to be the market maker for the broker’s full order flow from its retail customers, promising in return to execute each order at a price slightly better than the best price available on any exchange (“price improvement”) as well as to pay the broker a fee for each executed order (“payment for order flow”). Almost all retail trading — about 29% of the country’s total share volume — is executed in this fashion, amounting in 2021 to about $41 trillion in transactions, a figure almost twice the nation’s GDP that year.
The internalizer can run a viable business while promising both price improvement and payment for order flow because retail traders rarely possess information not already reflected in price. This makes the buy and sell orders internalizers receive less dangerous to fill than the more varied order flow going to exchanges. The internalizer’s business model, though, has a vulnerability: a trader can influence what is the best price available on the exchanges and then profit by sending an order to an internalizer that, as a result, executes at a price more favorable to her.
Using a framework that derives its key results from microstructure and financial economics, this Article seeks answers to four questions: (1) Exactly what actions in the market can traders take that would allow them to profit in this fashion? (2) What are the consequences to the various players in the market from traders undertaking such actions? (3) Would it be socially desirable to use legal prohibitions to try to prevent traders from profiting in this fashion? (4) How are such practices treated under existing law, and what reforms, if any, are desirable?
The usual rhetoric concerning the evils of manipulation stresses its unfairness and its distortion of prices. This Article, however, concludes that strategies aimed at profiting off internalizers raise no serious fairness issues. Equally surprisingly, it concludes that if these strategies were freely occurring, they would probably indirectly marginally improve price accuracy. It is unlikely, however, that this effect would be more socially valuable than the practices’ socially negative impact on liquidity. This negative social welfare assessment becomes that much bigger when one adds in the resources consumed by traders engaging in these strategies and by internalizers to protect against them, resources that otherwise would have been available to produce valuable goods and services for society.
The status of these strategies under current case law is uncertain. If they are ultimately adjudicated to be legal, their use would expand greatly. The language of Sections 9(a)(2) and 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and SEC Rule 10b-5 leave room, however, for the development of a coherent doctrine that definitively extends the Act’s prohibitions against manipulation to cover these strategies. The analysis in this Article gives the courts good reasons to do so
The Private Litigation Impact of New York’s Green Amendment
Get PDFThe increasing urgency of climate change, combined with federal environmental inaction under the Trump Administration, inspired a wave of environmental action at the state and local level. Building on the environmental movement of the 1970s, activists have pushed to amend more than a dozen state constitutions to include “green amendments” — self-executing individual rights to a clean environment. In 2022, New York activists succeeded, and New York’s Green Amendment (the NYGA) now provides that “Each person shall have a right to clean air and water, and a healthful environment.”
However, the power of the NYGA and similar green amendments turns on judicial interpretations of their scope. In the first decision to reach the issue, a New York trial court held, with little analysis, that the NYGA provides no private rights against private polluters. This conclusion could severely limit the reach and significance of state environmental rights.
This article examines a single question: Does the NYGA grant private rights that are enforceable against private parties? In answering this question, we examine the 50-year history of private litigation under green amendments, the substance and historical context of the NYGA, and the broader structure of New York’s constitution and environmental law. We conclude that the New York trial court got it wrong, and that the NYGA does provide a private cause of action against private parties. We further assess the indirect impact of constitutional environmental rights on private litigation, and conclude that the NYGA will have an enormous impact on private litigation generally, irrespective of whether New York’s courts reject private litigation under the NYGA. This discussion provides a novel evaluation of the shadow that constitutional changes cast on non-constitutional law
Congress\u27s Untapped Authority to Certify U Visas
Get PDFA crucial path to legal status for immigrant victims of crimes is the U visa, which Congress established with strong bipartisan support to protect victims of particular crimes who are helpful to law enforcement. Because the U visa was intended to encourage reporting of crimes, the application requires a certification form to be completed by a federal, state, or local authority that is investigating or prosecuting the alleged offense. Arbitrary and inconsistent certification decisions by state and local authorities make it especially important to identify relevant federal authorities that can serve as certifying authorities for U visas. This Piece argues that congressional committees and subcommittees that engage in investigations qualify as certifying authorities under the statute and regulations. To date, these congressional committees have never certified a U visa. The Piece provides three examples of congressional investigations in which U visa certification would be warranted: investigations into medical abuses of detained women, the so-called “Zero Tolerance” family-separation policy, and the use of solitary confinement in immigration detention
Financing Pathways for the Energy Transition: A Regional Approach
Get PDFThe success of the global energy transition critically requires a shift from a solely national focus to a regional perspective. Regional cooperation is not just a beneficial opportunity; it is an imperative for the future of sustainable energy. Clean energy solutions are inherently regional, necessitating interconnected systems and collaborative frameworks. This regional focus is essential for addressing the complex challenges of the energy transition, requiring comprehensive engineering, institutional, and financial solutions.
This comprehensive report highlights the crucial financing pathways needed to achieve a successful clean energy transition, focusing on four key regions: Africa, Asia and the Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Europe. In collaboration with international partners, the report identifies unique opportunities and shared challenges in addressing climate finance gaps and advancing regional energy strategies
The Prohibition of Annexations and the Foundations of Modern International Law
Get PDFThe international legal norm that prohibits forcible annexations of territory is foundational to modern international law. It lies at the core of three projects that have been central to the enterprise: (1) to settle title to territory as the basis for establishing state authority; (2) to regulate the use of force across settled borders; and (3) to provide for people within settled borders collectively to determine their own fates. Prohibiting forcible annexations is integral to each of these projects independently, and by tying them together, has had a transformative effect on the legal system as a whole. However, its significance is widely overlooked or misunderstood. Analysts have also largely failed to appreciate that it is now caught up in a broader contest over the future world order and at risk of erosion
Transforming the Welfare State, One Case at a Time: How Utrecht Makes Customized Social Care Work
Get PDFAdvanced welfare states are under pressure to customize services, promptly enough to prevent a cascade of harms. With these goals, the Netherlands in 2015 decentralized social care services to municipalities, and within municipalities to neighborhood teams in continuing contact with clients. The overall results have been disappointing. But the experience of Utrecht, the Netherlands’ fourth-largest city, has been strikingly different. By using hard-to-resolve cases to signal conflicts in rules, obstructive jurisdictional boundaries, and the shortcomings of private service providers, Utrecht is learning to customize and speed delivery of social care through incremental steps. This article explains how Utrecht’s success addresses apparently intractable limits to the adaptability of the rule-bound welfare state, such as the problem of low-level discretion or street-level bureaucracy and the division of services into silos, in the process bridging, and perhaps effacing, the gap between the Habermasian life world and the system world of formal rules
Law\u27s Machinery: Reforming the Craft of Lawyering in America\u27s Industrial Age
No full textPart of the Oxford Legal History series.
Law’s Machinery tells how Americans, in an age of industrialization, began to think of law as a tool, one that could be forged and reformed to fit their needs without regard to the traditional ways of litigating cases in court. By legislating a “code of practice,” innovators like New York attorney David Dudley Field and his associates across the elite American bar attempted to rebuild the practice of law from the ground up in the mid-nineteenth century. While many of their reforms proved futile or misguided over time, ultimately, the codifiers succeeded in making American law a machine run by, and in the interests of, professional lawyers like themselves. Often overlooked in histories of the world’s great code systems, the United States settled on a code of practice that elevated lawyers as the dominant force among America’s legal institutions. This account ranges widely from the Jacksonian Era to the end of the Gilded Age, from industrializing Gotham to the periphery of the American West and Reconstruction South, from the parlors of Brooklyn pastors and merchants to the ornamented courthouses of Wall Street. Drawing on innovative methods in digital legal history, Law’s Machinery offers a sweeping intellectual, cultural, and political history of the modernization of American legal practice.https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/books/1396/thumbnail.jp
Interactional Ordering: Reconstructing Lon Fuller\u27s Theory of Private Law
Get PDFWhile Lon Fuller is best remembered for his contributions to the fields of general jurisprudence and contract law, his work in each has long been seen as unrelated to the other. This Article shows that in a significantly underappreciated body of work, Fuller did connect the two and, in the process, developed the outlines of a robust theory of private law, best characterized as “interactional ordering.” Driven by Fuller’s efforts to develop a jurisprudence of form that was derived from conventionalism and natural law thinking, interactional ordering sees all normativity as originating in horizontal interactions between individuals in society, seeking to realize their freedom socially. This horizontal normativity forms the very substantive and structural basis for the common law as a mechanism of enforcement, and emerges as the principal end that all other forms of legal and social ordering are ultimately structured around. This Article reconstructs the central tenets of interactional ordering from Fuller’s work and shows how it represents a sophisticated account of how private law normativity operates, one that abjures commitments to both Legal Positivism and Legal Realism, a move that was central to Fuller’s overall jurisprudential worldview
Framing Indian Federalism
No full textThis article focuses on a set of historical and contemporary developments in Indian constitutionalism that implicate the question of democracy and the question of federalism. Its goal is to connect the design and application of federal powers with what many regard as an important telos of federalism, namely, the promotion of democracy. Towards this end, it holds up for consideration India’s federal model, which, it is suggested, focuses on the presence of a subnational demos rather than the political identity of subnational units. Such an understanding of federalism de-emphasizes the territorial aspect of federalism and allows federal design to accommodate different kinds of cultural and ethnic realities. This vision proceeds on the premise that the more layered the constitution of a demos, the more democratic the overall arrangement can be. Importantly, such a framework allows us to appreciate when central interventions in subnational authority might and might not be justified. The exercise of central power can occur in both pro-democracy and anti-democracy ways, as well as in pro-federal and anti-federal ways. And these sets of possibilities are related in important respects