By Steven L. Schwarcz. Full text here. How should we think about regulating our dynamically changing financial system? Existing regulatory approaches have two temporal flaws. The obvious flaw, driven by politics and human nature (and addressed in other writings), is that financial regulation is overly reactive to past crises. This article addresses a less obvious but…

By Tom C.W. Lin. Full text here. A new type of warfare is upon us. In this new mode of war, finance is the most powerful weapon, bullets dare not fire, financial institutions are the targets, and almost everyone is at risk. Instead of smart bombs, improvised explosives, and unmanned drones––economic sanctions, financial restrictions, and cyber…

By Salil K. Mehra. Full text here. Increasingly firms are knitting together newly available mass-data collection, Internet-driven interconnective power, and automated algorithmic selling with their traditional supply chain and sales functions. Traditional sales functions such as competitive intelligence gathering and pricing are being delegated to software “robo-sellers.” This Article offers the first descriptive and normative study of…

By Brendan S. Maher. Full text here. Benefit regulation has been called “the most consequential subject to which no one pays enough attention.” It exhausts judges, intimidates legislators, and scares off theorists. That need not be so. The reality is less complicated than advertised. Governments often consider intervention if markets fail to make some socially desirable…

By Lee Anne Fennell & Richard H. McAdams. Full text here. Welfarist law and economics ignores the distributive consequences of legal rules to focus solely on efficiency, even though distribution unambiguously affects welfare, the normative maximand. The now-conventional justification for disregarding distribution is the claim of tax superiority: that the best means of influencing or correcting…

By Lucas Issacharoff & Kyle Wirshba. Full text here. This Article takes as its starting point the recent turmoil over the continued vitality of the Fourth Amendment’s third party doctrine. The doctrine has long held that the government’s examination of information in the hands of a third party—whether a bank, a telephone company, or simply a…

By David Adam Friedman. Full text here. Advertised price discounting recently proliferated in retail markets, bringing with it deceptive discounting or “fictitious pricing.” Many retailers advertise discounts based on fictitious or false prior-reference prices. In the immediate post-war era, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) regularly prosecuted fictitious-pricing cases. The FTC ceased prosecuting those cases in 1969.…

By Erik Hovenkamp & Thomas F. Cotter. Full text here. The current approach for determining when courts should award injunctions in patent disputes involves a myopic focus on the hardships an injunction might impose on the litigants and the public. This Article demonstrates, however, that courts sometimes could rely instead on a consideration far more relevant…

By E. Tendayi Achiume. Full text here. The Syrian refugee crisis is the largest since the Second World War. This Article is the first to analyze the devastating fallout of this crisis, and to propose a novel approach to a perennial international law problem at its center. Nearly all of the more than four million refugees that…

By Andrew A. Schwartz. Full text here. Crowdfunding, a new Internet-based securities market, was recently authorized by federal and state law in order to create a vibrant, diverse, and inclusive system of entrepreneurial finance. But will people really send their money to strangers on the Internet in exchange for unregistered securities in speculative startups? Many are doubtful,…