Administrative Answers to Major Questions: On the Democratic Legitimacy of Agency Statutory Interpretation By Blake Emerson. Full text here. This Article critiques the legal and theoretical premises of the major questions doctrine, and proposes a revision to the doctrine that better comports with the institutional structure and ideological origins of our administrative state. The major…

Corporate Charter Competition By Lynn M. LoPucki. Full text here. Corporate charter competition has dominated the corporate-law literature for four decades. This Article draws on the theoretical and empirical insights from that vast literature to present a systems analysis of the competition. The analysis shows the competition to be a system composed of three subsystems,…

When Should Employers Be Liable for Factoring Biased Customer Feedback into Employment Decisions? By Dallan F. Flake. Full text here. In today’s customer-centric business environment, firms seek feedback from consumers seemingly at every turn. Firms factor customer feedback into a host of decisions, including employment-related decisions such as who to hire, promote, and fire; how…

Rights-Weakening Federalism By Shitong Qiao. Full text here. This Article examines whether federalism protects land rights in China from two dimensions. I first compare national law with local institutions of eminent domain, revealing that local governments take much more land than the national government approves, frequently violating, tweaking, and challenging national law. I next examine…

Foot Voting, Decentralization, and Development By Ilya Somin. Full text here. We can enhance development by making it easier for people to “vote with their feet” between jurisdictions. Foot voting is, in several crucial respects, a better mechanism of political decision-making than ballot-box voting. Foot voters generally have better incentives to acquire relevant knowledge—and use…

Data and Decentralization: Measuring the Performance of Legal Institutions in Multilevel Systems of Governance By Kevin E. Davis. Full text here. Most countries rely on multiple levels of government, and many important legal institutions are subnational in scope. There are now several indicators that purport to measure the performance of legal institutions, but they tend…

Binding Leviathan: Credible Commitment in an Authoritarian Regime By Roderick M. Hills, Jr. & Shitong Qiao. Full text here. The problem of credible commitment dogs every government, whether democratic or authoritarian. Authoritarian bureaucracies face special credible commitment problems. Fear that local officials will build up a local power base has historically induced the leadership of…

Taobao, Federalism, and the Emergence of Law, Chinese Style By Lizhi Liu & Barry R. Weingast. Full text here. All developing countries face the problem of how to build the legal and institutional infrastructure (for example, securing property rights and the rule of law) necessary to support efficient markets. The historic path for the West…

Decentralized and Anomalous Interpretation of Chinese Private Law: Understanding a Bureaucratic and Political Judicial System By Yun-chien Chang & Ke Xu. Full text here. China developed without clear entitlements, creating the China Puzzle for law and development theorists. But fundamental statutes regarding contract, torts, and property have now been enacted. Will clear delineation of private…

Positive and Negative Externalities in Real Estate Development By, Richard A. Epstein. Full text here. In this Article, I offer a unified framework for dealing with positive and negative externalities in real estate transactions. The initial move starts in an imagined world in which a single person owns all real estate, which is then sold…