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Computer as Confidant: Digital Investment Advice and the Fiduciary Standard
Get PDFDigital investment advisers are the fastest growing segment of financial technology (fintech) and are disrupting traditional investment advisory delivery models. The computer-led investment advisory service model may be growing particularly quickly due to a confluence of social and political factors. Politicians and regulators have increasingly focused on the standards of care applicable to investment advice providers. Fewer Americans are ready for retirement and many lack access to affordable investment advice. At the same time, comfort with digital platforms have increased, with some preferring electronic interaction over human interaction. Claiming that they can democratize retirement service by pro- viding advice meeting a fiduciary standard at a fraction of the traditional pricing model, robo-advisers hope to capitalize on these social movements and argue that they provide a solution: conflict-free advice to investors with portfolios of all sizes. Though they have voluntarily subjected themselves to the requirements of the Investment Advisers Act of 1940 (1940 Act), questions remain as to how robo-advisers will meet the fiduciary standard required by such registration. The essay recommends a two-pronged approach for the regulation of robo-advisers in the near term. First, existing regulatory tools such as examination, enforcement, and disclosure should be deployed to robustly explore the sufficiency and malleability of their existing parameters before crafting any new regulatory schemes. Second, the disclosure device should be studied to determine whether the intended beneficiary of the disclosure, retail consumers, comprehend the information being disclosed to them and whether changes to the format, delivery, and/or content of disclosures would better protect consumer investors
Permission Impossible: An Exception-Based Legislative Solution for Digitizing Copyright-Protected Works
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Scaffolding on Steroids: Meeting Your Students Where They Are Is Harder Than Ever ... And Easier Than You Think
No full textThe Motive Power in Public Sector Collective Bargaining
No full textIn the private sector, George Taylor referred to the strike as providing the “motive power” in collective bargaining. A major reason behind the enactment of public employee collective bargaining laws is to reduce the interruption of public services from job actions. This was the case with the enactment of New York’s Taylor Law.This paper, written for a conference commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Taylor Law and published in a special issue of the Hofstra Labor and Employment Law Journal focused on the Taylor Law, examines what, in the absence of a right to strike, provides the motive power for collective bargaining under the Taylor Law. It focuses on the Triborough rule as codified by the New York legislature and interpreted by NYPERB and the New York courts, coupled with severe strike penalties and a heavy dose of mediation by PERB. It examines two aspects of the Triborough rule that are unique to New York: the rule applies to permissive subject of bargaining and the rule displaces to a significant extent the statutory legislative impasse resolution provision.The paper explores alternative models adopted in other states, including three, Illinois, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, which recognize a right to strike for most public employees, but do so in significantly different ways. It then examines Florida which, like New York, has severe strike penalties but aims those penalties at unions rather than employees, and allows for employer unilateral implementation following exhaustion of impasse procedures and Michigan which went from a de facto dependence on strikes which, although technically illegal were very difficult to enjoin, to severe strike penalties including a one-for-one employee fine and a significantly reduced scope of bargaining, to significant limitations on an employer’s duty to maintain the status quo during negotiations and exhaustion of impasse procedures and a prohibition on applying improvements in compensation retroactively. The paper analyzes the policy tradeoffs lawmakers should consider when choosing from among the models
The Changing Landscape of 19th Century Courts
No full textBook Review of:Amalia D. Kessler. Inventing American Exceptionalism: The Origins of American Adversarial Legal Culture, 1800–1877. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017. 449 pp. Illustrations, appendix, notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00
Dignity Takings and “Trailer Trash”: The Case Of Mobile Home Park Mass Evictions
Get PDFMobile homes are a primary source of shelter for America’s poor and working classes. A large share of the nation’s mobile home stock is found in mobile home parks where residents own their homes but lease the land under their homes from private landlords. Urban growth has put pressure on park landlords to sell and redevelop mobile home parks. When parks are redeveloped mobile home residents are evicted and entire communities are destroyed. Residents lose their homes and home equity as they struggle to relocate their homes to different parks or are forced to abandon them. Through two continuous years of comparative ethnography inside closing mobile home parks in the two states with the largest mobile home park populations (Florida and Texas) I examine how mobile home park dispossessions are structured from the top down through municipal ordinances and financing regulations and how they are experienced from the bottom up by residents who are dehumanized in the characterization of “trailer trash.” I argue that these mass displacements constitute a dignity taking in that they dispossess residents not only of their homes and communities, but of their full moral worth, autonomy, and voice in the political processes that structure their eviction
Fucking With Dignity: Public Sex, Queer Intimate Kinship, and How the AIDS Epidemic Bathhouse Closures Constituted a Dignity Taking
Get PDFIn the name of public health, authorities in San Francisco and New York City pursued the closure of gay bathhouses in 1984 and 1985, respectively. We challenge the dominant historical narrative that justified these closings, and through that challenge, we argue that these closures constituted a dignity taking against gay and queer-identified men. Bathhouses were not simply dens of impersonal anonymous sex. They were critical sites of community development and queer kinship. Many governing authorities neither considered the value of these institutions nor grappled with queer understandings of space, contact, intimacy, and belonging. The debates and the closures that followed did substantial cultural and political work to render gay men culpable for their own community’s sudden and relentless demise. As such, these closures were part of a larger anti-gay and anti-HIV cultural discourse that dehumanized and infantilized men who have sex with other men. The bathhouse closings fostered and perpetuated a narrative of culpability, ignited intense divisions within the gay and lesbian communities, and produced within gay men a deep distrust and even fear of governing institutions and of one another. We suggest that this failure to engage with queer logic is ongoing and limits contemporary efforts of dignity restoration that include same-sex marriage recognition. Given the limits of dignity, we conclude by offering some thoughts on what queer dignity restoration might entail
PTAB Precedential Decision: Putting the Hammer Down on Filing Serial Petitions?
Get PDFPetitioners for inter partes review proceedings under the America Invents Act routinely file serial petitions to challenge a single patent. Patent owners have criticized such “follow-on” petitions as abusive. The Patent Trial and Appeal Board’s recent precedential opinion in General Plastic Industrial Co. v. Canon Kabushiki Kaisha, IPR2016-01357, Paper 19 (P.T.A.B. Sept. 6, 2017), lays out seven non-exhaustive factors to guide the Board’s consideration of such “follow-on” petitions. This Article summarizes the Board’s analysis of follow-on petitions prior to General Plastic, examines how General Plastic has affected petitioners’ success in having such petitions instituted, and suggests strategies for practitioners going-forward