Reconsidering Fictitious Pricing
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.…
Continue ReadingAnticompetitive Patent Injunctions
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…
Continue ReadingNote: Rejecting Tax Exceptionalism: Bringing Temporary Treasury Regulations Back in Line with the APA
By Eleanor D. Wood. Full text here. The Treasury Department has broad general rulemaking power and has historically used this power to create new regulations promulgated under APA notice-and-comment procedures. However, out of supposed necessity in the 1980s, the Treasury began increasingly using temporary regulations, which follow no such promulgation procedure, yet are binding on taxpayers…
Continue ReadingNote: Same-Sex Marriage and Disestablishing Parentage: Reconceptualizing Legal Parenthood Through Surrogacy
By Michael S. DePrince. Full text here. Parenthood is easily determined when a heterosexual married couple conceives a child through sexual reproduction. The common law marital presumption of parenthood holds that when a child is born into a marriage, the woman, having given birth, is presumed the child’s mother; likewise, the woman’s husband, by virtue of marriage…
Continue ReadingNote: Striking Before the Well Goes Dry: Exploring If and How the United States Ban on Crude Oil Exports Should Be Lifted To Exploit the American Oil Boom
By Sam Andre. Full text here. President Gerald Ford championed the adoption of the Energy Policy and Conservation Act (EPCA) in 1975 to promote American energy independence through the limiting of American crude oil exports. Through this law and related regulatory provisions, the federal government successfully shielded American energy interests from crises similar to the 1973…
Continue ReadingSyria, Cost-sharing, and the Responsibility to Protect Refugees
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…
Continue ReadingThe Digital Shareholder
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,…
Continue ReadingEquity Crowdfunding: A Market for Lemons?
By Darian M. Ibrahim. Full text here. Angel investors and venture capitalists (VCs) have funded Google, Facebook, and virtually every technological success of the last thirty years. These investors operate in tight geographic networks, which mitigates uncertainty, information asymmetry, and agency costs both pre- and post-investment. It follows, then, that a major concern with equity…
Continue ReadingCommunicating the Canons: How Lower Courts React When the Supreme Court Changes the Rules of Statutory Interpretation
By Aaron-Andrew P. Bruhl. Full text here. From time to time, the Supreme Court changes some aspect of its approach to statutory interpretation. These changes include large-scale shifts on matters such as the relative prominence of textual sources versus legislative history as well as small-scale changes exemplified by the creation, modification, or abandonment of particular interpretive…
Continue ReadingNote: A Merry-Go-Round of Metal and Manipulation: Toward a New Framework for Commodity Exchange Self-Regulation
By Samuel D. Posnick. Full text here. The 2013 revelation of Goldman Sachs’ unsavory aluminum warehousing practices led to public uproar and political backlash. In November 2014, Congress released a damning report detailing Wall Street’s involvement in numerous commodities markets and finding rampant manipulation. As a result, the Federal Reserve is reexamining its regulation of financial…
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