cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Sexuality and Incapacity

Sexual incapacity doctrines are perhaps the most important form of sexual regulation, as they control access to sex by designating who is legally capable of sexual consent. Most states have adopted sexual incapacity tests for adults that focus narrowly on assessing an individual’s cognitive abilities. These tests serve an important protective function for people with temporary cognitive impairments, such as those rendered incapable due to alcohol or drugs. However, this comes at the cost of barring many people with persistent cognitive impairments, such as Down Syndrome or Alzheimer’s Disease, from any sexual activity. This is despite the fact that said individuals often still have sexual desires and are able to engage in sexual decision-making with support from caregiving networks. The central claim of this Article is that sexual incapacity doctrine should grant legal capacity to adults with persistent cognitive impairments if they are embedded in an adequate decision-making support network. In other words, the right to sexual expression should not be withheld due to cognitive impairment alone. To justify this claim, the Article provides a theory of sexual incapacity doctrine that is grounded in the practice of supported decision-making and the normative foundations of sexual capability and relational autonomy. The Article then sets forth a novel test for sexual consent capacity: cognition-plus. This test focuses on gauging the capacity for volition, assessing the mental capacity of the individual to understand the nature and consequences of the sexual decision, and evaluating the adequacy of the decision-making support system using principles of fiduciary law. The Article concludes by applying the cognition-plus test to the case of older adults with dementia, a group of increasing importance with the aging of the population.
Building Better Bailouts: The Case for a Long-Term Investment Approach

The Article seeks to fill a crucial gap in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act: the failure to create a framework for dealing with future financial bailouts. It argues that the federal government’s ad hoc, “break even” approach to the recent bailouts not only shortchanged taxpayers, but more importantly failed to provide deterrence against the type of reckless risk-taking that led to the financial crisis. This Article argues that the key to legitimizing future bailouts and limiting moral hazard is to institutionalize a long-term investment-oriented approach that delineates clear contours and conditions for aid. It calls for establishing an independent agency, the Federal Government Investment Corporation (FGIC), to serve as an investor of last resort, which would make bailout monies contingent on beneficiaries sharing both risks and long-term returns with taxpayers. The FGIC would establish express, ex ante conditions for providing aid that would temper corporate risk-taking, protect taxpayers, and establish bounds to bailouts. Tying government bailouts to shared sacrifices with managers, shareholders, and creditors of beneficiaries, proportional profit sharing with taxpayers, and corporate governance reforms would help to ensure that future bailouts serve a productive purpose. INTRODUCTION 1350 I. NATIONALIZATIONS, FEDERALIZATIONS, BAILOUTS, AND WIND-UPS 1356 A. The Inevitability of Government Intervention During Financial Crises 1356 1. Nationalizations and Federalizations 1358 2. FDIC Wind-Ups 1362 3. The Challenges of Delineating Bailouts 1366 II. THE SHORTCOMINGS OF THE RECENT BAILOUTS 1370 A. The Troubled Asset Relief Program 1371 1. The Case of Goldman Sachs 1374 B. Assessing the True Costs of Bailouts 1377 * Associate Professor, George Washington University Law School. I would like to thank many of my colleagues at the George Washington University Law School, as well as participants in the University of North Carolina Law School faculty workshop, for their thoughtful comments. I would also like to thank Carson Le and Rachel Zelman for their research assistance.
"A Well Regulated Militia": The Second Amendment in Historical Perspective

This article argues that the second amendment was initially proposed and passed in response to some antifederalist fears of a standing army. The thrust of the Amendment was to prevent the national government from disarming the state militias. Similarly, the Amendment allowed the states to arm their own militias if Congress failed to do so under its Article I, Section 8 powers. The article notes that Madison and other Federalists who wrote the Second Amendment were fully aware of demands for an amendment to protect an individual's right to own weapons, and that the framers of the Second Amendment emphatically rejected this concept. The article concludes that the Second Amendment was not meant to protect an individual right to bear arms, but also argues that political considerations make bans on long guns and hunting rifles impossible. In the concluding paragraph the article asks: "Could Congress ban hunting rifles," and concludes "it would be politically impossible and constitutionally absurd, although it would be possible and reasonable to ban hunting, and hunting rifles, in national parks." Similarly the article concluded Congress may "regulate the ownership, sale, use, and interstate transportation of firearms" under "general federal police and commerce powers, just as the states or the national government (where it has regulatory or police power) can regulate burial, marriage, or child custody. But, just as regulations of marriage or burial must be reasonable, so too would regulations of firearms."
Informed consent v. ITAR: Regulatory conflicts that could constrain commercial human space flight

Abstract The Human Space Flight Requirements (promulgated by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration) seek to protect the fledgling commercial space flight industry by shifting risk from the operator to the space flight participants. However, in order to do this effectively the regulations require a great deal of information to be given to the participants. The information required might be extensive enough that it could be considered “technical data” under the International Traffic in Arms Regulations. If this is the case then commercial spaceflight companies will have to get export licenses for non-U.S. participants on their flights which could cause additional costs as well as other problems.
Borders and Growth

This paper presents a framework to understand and measure the effects of political borders on economic growth and per capita income levels. In our model, political integration between two countries results in a positive country size effect and a negative effect through reduced openness vis-a-vis the rest of the world. Additional effects stem from possible changes in other growth determinants, besides country size and openness, when countries are merged. We estimate the growth effects that would have resulted from the hypothetical removal of national borders between pairs of adjacent countries under various scenarios. We identify country pairs where political integration would have been mutually beneficial. We find that full political integration would have slightly reduced an average country's growth rate, while most countries would benefit from a more limited form of merger, involving higher economic integration with their neighbors.
PyCrystalField: software for calculation, analysis and fitting of crystal electric field Hamiltonians

PyCrystalField is a Python software package for calculating single-ion crystal electric field (CEF) Hamiltonians. This software can calculate a CEF Hamiltonian ab initio from a point charge model for any transition or rare earth ion in either the J basis or the LS basis, perform symmetry analysis to identify nonzero CEF parameters, calculate the energy spectrum and observables such as neutron spectrum and magnetization, and fit CEF Hamiltonians to any experimental data. The theory, implementation and examples of its use are discussed.
Small-sample confidence intervals for multivariate impulse response functions at long horizons

SUMMARY Existing methods for constructing confidence bands for multivariate impulse response functions may have poor coverage at long lead times when variables are highly persistent. The goal of this paper is to propose a simple method that is not pointwise and that is robust to the presence of highly persistent processes. We use approximations based on local-to-unity asymptotic theory, and allow the horizon to be a fixed fraction of the sample size. We show that our method has better coverage properties at long horizons than existing methods, and may provide different economic conclusions in empirical applications. We also propose a modification of this method which has good coverage properties at both short and long horizons. Copyright  2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Impulse response functions (IRFs) play an important role in describing the impact that shocks have on economic variables. They are generally obtained from vector autoregressions (VAR). It is conventional to compute the response of current and future values of economic variables to a one standard deviation increase in the current value of the structural shocks. The estimate of the IRFs and their confidence intervals are commonly based on L¨ utkepohl’s (1990) asymptotic normal approximation or bootstrap approximations to that distribution (see Kilian (1998a, 1999)). Existing methods for constructing IRFs and their confidence intervals, however, may provide different results depending on whether the series are assumed to be stationary, exactly integrated or exactly cointegrated. Even when standard methods of inference are justified asymptotically, confidence bands may have poor coverage properties in small samples in the presence of highly persistent variables, as shown by Kilian and Chang (2000). These authors compare the finitesample accuracy and average length of commonly used confidence intervals for IRF coefficients for VAR models in levels based on existing empirical studies. They caution applied researchers against inference at horizons bigger than 16 quarters, as inference becomes very unreliable. Unit root pretests do not solve the problem, as the actual coverage of IRF bands obtained after a pretest can be quite different from the nominal one. This paper proposes a new method for constructing confidence bands for multivariate IRFs in the presence of highly persistent variables. We use asymptotic approximations based on local-to-unity
The Asymmetric Conditional Beta-Return Relations of REITs

The traditional modern portfolio model posits that return is a function of beta—the stock’s sensitivity to market movements. However, much research suggests that on an empirical basis this expectation does not hold. Pettengill, Sundaram and Mathur (1995) [PSM] suggest that the problem is that expected risk-return relationships are positive, but actual outcomes can vary. Thus we implement the PSM procedure to determine if we can obtain better explanatory ability for REIT returns relative to beta. Using PSM’s suggested technique, we find evidence that REIT stocks with higher betas have more positive returns when the realized market returns exceed risk-free rates and more negative returns when the realized market returns fall below risk-free rates. Furthermore, we form REIT portfolios based on betas and find that similar results hold for portfolio level: REIT portfolios with higher betas have more positive returns when the realized market returns exceed risk-free rates and more negative returns when the realized market returns fall below risk-free rates. We also examine beta relative to up and downside risk as suggested in Harlow and Rao (1989) [HR]. By using HR conditional beta approach, we find that REIT investors seem to view losses differently than gains. Our study is to determine if we can validate the positive risk-return trade-off predicted by CAPM and to show that a significant and positive systematic beta-return relation exists in both static and conditional CAPM model settings. We believe that our research effort is the first to incorporate both static beta estimation and asymmetric beta estimation to show a significantly positive risk-return trade-off in the industry of real estate investment trusts. Using HR generalized Mean-Lower Partial Moment Asset Pricing Model, we confirm that REIT stocks with higher downside betas have higher average returns, but upside betas are insignificant in the beta-return relation for REITs. We find similar results for portfolio level as well. Consistent with the findings on real estate market index returns in Cheng (2005), our results go beyond his findings to highlight the significance of downside beta risk in REIT industry during the recent global financial crisis.
Optimal Target Criteria for Stabilization Policy

Abstract This paper considers a general class of nonlinear rational-expectations models in which policymakers seek to maximize an objective function that may be household expected utility. We show how to derive a target criterion that is: (i) consistent with the model's structural equations, (ii) strong enough to imply a unique equilibrium, and (iii) optimal, in the sense that a commitment to adjust the policy instrument at all dates so as to satisfy the target criterion maximizes the objective function. The proposed optimal target criterion is a linear equation that must be satisfied by the projected paths of certain economically relevant “target variables.” It takes the same form at all times and generally involves only a small number of target variables, regardless of the size and complexity of the model. While the projected path of the economy requires information about the current state, the target criterion itself can be stated without reference to a complete description of the state of the world. We illustrate the application of the method to a nonlinear DSGE model with staggered price-setting, in which the objective of policy is to maximize household expected utility.
Social choice and the closed convergence topology

This paper revisits the aggregation theorem of Chichilnisky (1980), replacing the original smooth topology by the closed convergence topology and responding to several comments (N. Baigent (1984, 1985, 1987, 1989), N. Baigent and P. Huang (1990) and M. LeBreton and J. Uriarte (1990a, b). Theorems 1 and 2 establish the contractibility of three spaces of preferences: the space of strictly quasiconcave preferences PSCO, its subspace of smooth preferences P infSCO supS , and a space P1 of smooth (not necessarily convex) preferences with a unique interior critical point (a maximum). The results are proven using both the closed convergence topology and the smooth topology. Because of their contractibility, these spaces satisfy the necessary and sufficient conditions of Chichilnisky and Heal (1983) for aggregation rules satisfying my axioms, which are valid in all topologies. Theorem 4 constructs a family of aggregation rules satisfying my axioms for these three spaces. What these spaces have in common is a unique maximum (or peak). This rather special property makes them contractible, and thus amenable to aggregation. However, these aggregation rules cannot be extended to the whole space of preferences P which is not contractible and therefore does not admit continuous aggregation rules satisfying anonymity and unanimity, Chichilnisky (1980, 1982). The results presented here clarify an erroneous example in LeBreton and Uriarte (1990a, b) and respond to Baigent (1984, 1985, 1987) and Baigent and Huang (1990) on the relative advantages of continuous and discrete approaches to Social Choice.
Does legal capacity matter? A survey of WTO Members*

Previous studies of WTO dispute settlement have sought to evaluate whether a Member's legal capacity influences its odds of bringing litigation before the multilateral trade regime. Because direct measures of legal capacity are elusive, these studies have had to use indirect proxies, such as per capita income or number of delegates in Geneva. Yet, the reliability of these measures is questionable. To gauge legal capacity more directly, we surveyed all WTO Members, posing questions concerning their professional staff, bureaucratic organization at home, bureaucratic organization in Geneva, experience handling general WTO matters, and involvement in WTO litigation. Using responses from this survey, we constructed an index of Members' WTO legal capacity that speaks more fully to the challenges of dispute settlement than do commonly used proxies, none of which are strongly correlated with our measure. We supplemented this survey with over three dozen semi-structured interviews with Members' representatives in Geneva, the results of which bear out the importance of properly measuring legal capacity.
The Globalization of Corporate Law: The End of History or A Never-Ending Story?

Abstract: Considerable scholarship during the last few decades addresses the question of whether corporate laws are becoming global by converging on commonly accepted approaches. Some scholars have asserted that such convergence is occurring around the most efficient laws and institutions, thereby marking the "End of History" for corporate law. This Article responds to such assertions by developing three claims not previously given due attention in the convergence literature. First, it demonstrates that the history of corporations and corporate law has been one of seemingly constant movement toward global convergence, yet the resulting convergence is always incomplete or transitory. Next, it points out that because forces besides efficiency also produce convergence, convergence often occurs around corporate laws and institutions that have no particular efficiency or other normative advantage, or that necessarily represent stable equilibrium points. Finally, the Article asks what are the important corporate laws and institutions by which to measure the extent of convergence at any one time. It develops the answer that a stable convergence is least likely for the most important corporate law issues, which are characterized by tensions between competing policies and no easy solutions for the problems presented. INTRODUCTION 476 I. THE HISTORY OF CONVERGENCE IN CORPORATE LAW 480 A. The Early Roots of Convergence 480 B. Continuous Borrowing and Transplants 485 1. The General Patterns 485 2. Converging on Limited Liability 487 3. Regulations to Protect Non-shareholder Interests ..... 487 4. Cycles of Regulation and Deregulation in Protecting Shareholders 491 II. WHY CONVERGENCE IN CORPORATE LAW OCCURS ...... 494 A. The Efficiency Hypothesis 494 1. Economic Darwinism and Corporate Laws 494 2. Forces for Divergence 495 B. Inefficient Convergence 496 1. Fads and Fashions 496 2. The Endogenous Variables Problem 500 3. Rent-Seeking 505 III. WHAT IS IMPORTANT IN MEASURING CONVERGENCE 507 A. The Assumptions of Academics 507 B. The Tough Policy Issues 511 1. Mandatory Versus Permissive Corporate Law ......... 512 2. Authority Versus Accountability for Corporate Managers 515 CONCLUSION 520 INTRODUCTION While corporations, at least the largest ones, commonly operate on a global scale, the laws governing their internal affairs (in other words, the rights and duties of their owners and managers) are national or subnational.1 In the last few decades, considerable scholarship has focused on whether these national and sub-national corporate laws are becoming, like many of the corporations they govern, global - in this case by converging upon commonly accepted approaches.2 Earlier comparative corporate law scholarship was to a great extent a technical affair, occupied with describing differences in specific rules - e. …
Skating on Thin Intermediation: Can Libraries Survive?

ABSTRACT Predictions about the end of libraries point to a real crisis, but assign the wrong cause. Libraries will not be displaced by technology like Google, but can be undermined by librarians’ own reactions to patron demand for Google-like experiences. Librarians can respond with a “weak model” that prioritizes the satisfaction of patrons, or a “strong model” that recognizes higher values rooted in the status of librarianship as a profession. Although recent trends favor the dominance of the weak model, only by embracing the strong model can librarians survive the challenges that threaten libraries.
Internal Capital Markets in Financial Conglomerates: Evidence from Small Bank Responses to Monetary Policy

This paper looks at internal capital markets in financial conglomerates by comparing the responses of small subsidiary and independent banks to monetary policy. I find that internal capital markets in financial conglomerates relax the credit constraints faced by smaller bank affiliates. Further analysis indicates that those markets lessen the impact of Fed policies on bank lending activity. The paper also examines the role of internal capital markets in influencing the investment allocation process of those conglomerates. My findings suggest that frictions between conglomerate headquarters and external capital markets are at the root of investment inefficiencies generated by internal capital markets. CURRENT THEORETICAL RESEARCH HAS FOCUSED on the role of internal capital markets in influencing conglomerate investment. One line of argument, put forth by Alchian (1969) and Weston (1970), and extended by Gertner, Scharfstein, and Stein (1994) and Stein (1997), stresses the potential efficiencyenhancing role of internal capital markets. These markets can be useful in reducing information asymmetries between project managers and investors, and in providing for better allocation of funds across projects within the firm. A competing line of research, however, argues that internal capital markets can hinder investment efficiency. Scharfstein and Stein (2000) and Rajan, Servaes, and Zingales (2000), among others, emphasize the potential for agency problems and power grabbing to generate inefficient subsidization across projects. Whether internal capital markets enhance or hinder investment efficiency has become an important empirical issue. Initial evidence on the existence of internal capital markets was based on correlations between investment and cash flows of different parts of the same conglomerate (Lamont (1997) and Houston, James, and Marcus (1997)). Subsequent empirical work addressed the more complex issue of allocation
Global Takeoff of New Products: Culture, Wealth, or Vanishing Differences?

The authors study the takeoff of 16 new products across 31 countries 430 categories to analyze how and why takeoff varies across products and countries. They test the effect of 12 hypothesized drivers of takeoff using a parametric hazard model. The authors find that the average time to takeoff varies substantially between developed and developing countries, between work and fun products, across cultural clusters, and over calendar time. Products take off fastest in Japan and Norway, followed by other Nordic countries, the United States, and some countries of Midwestern Europe. Takeoff is driven by culture and wealth plus product class, product vintage, and prior takeoff. Most importantly, time to takeoff is shortening over time and takeoff is converging across countries. The authors discuss the implications of these findings.
A THEORY OF EXPROPRIATION AND DEVIATIONS FROM PERFECT CAPITAL MOBILITY

There are many reasons why commodity trade fails to equate the rewards to factors of production in different countries. Consequently, there is an incentive for factor movements between countries. While movements of factors, especially capital, are important in the world economy, they have not been sufficient to equate factor returns among countries. The failure of capital flows to equate returns to capital is frequently attributed to political risks and left outside the sphere of economic analysis. Specifically, investments abroad, especially in LDC's, are said to be more subject to the risk of expropriation, or at least to unpredictable changes in the tax and exchange control regime adopted by the host country. Fears of foreign investors have often been realised: Williams (I975) estimates that about 20 % of the value of foreign investments carried into or made during I956-72 in LDC's was expropriated without compensation in this period.' In the past, researchers in disciplines other than economics have been responsible for most of the analysis of expropriations. We argue that an important set of economic considerations affect the nature of these impediments to capital mobility, and this paper provides a theory of expropriation based on maximising behaviour by host countries and investors. We use this theory to identify industry and national characteristics increasing the threat of expropriation and implying large deviations from equal returns on capital, and to examine host country and home country policies minimising distortions from the threat of expropriation. Three broad conclusions follow from the analysis: First, the threat of expropriation can significantly distort the international allocation of capital even if the act of expropriation is relatively rare. In the extreme, acts of expropriation would never occur in a world of perfect foresight and rational decision-making, yet actions by investors to ensure that countries do not expropriate would be distorting. Second, the ability of a country's, government to expropriate foreign investments may actually reduce its welfare. Furthermore, a host may be better off if home governments can retaliate against an expropriating country. Indeed, an increase in the penalty imposed on an expropriating country may increase its welfare; a government's power to expropriate after investments are made may * Alasdair Smith and an Associate Editor made numerous valuable suggestions. We would also like to thank G. M. Grossman, R. W. Jones, L. A. Sjaastad, N. H. Stern and J. E. Stiglitz for comments. Much of Eaton's work on this paper was completed while he was a visitor at the Graduate Institute for International Studies, Geneva. An earlier version of this paper appeared under the same title as RPDS
The Wasted Sacrifice of Lessors' Lost Profit Claims in Bankruptcy

Bankruptcy Code section 502(b)(6) sets the maximum allowable amount of a real property lessor's claim for damages arising for breach of lease in a tenant's bankruptcy case. To the extent a lessor's damages claim under nonbankruptcy law exceeds the maximum amount, it is disallowed. The implicit premise for such disallowance is that real property lessors' damages claims are less worthy of respect in bankruptcy than other claims for damages against the debtor. Real property leases are legally distinct from leases of personal property or other contractual relationships that allocate property rights. But, it does not obviously follow from the distinction that a damages claim for breach of a real property lease is inferior to other claims. This article considers section 502(b)(6) in light of the political, economic, and legal forces that shaped it. It explores the history of real property lessors' claims for damages in bankruptcy cases from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present. It then considers the stated justifications for disallowance of lessors' claims under section 502(b)(6) and concludes they are unconvincing. Disallowance of part of lessors' damages claims under section 502(b)(6) reflects and perpetuates irrational bias against such claims. Moreover, such disallowance contradicts both contractual theory and modern bankruptcy policy.
The economics of universal service: An analysis of entry subsidies for high speed broadband

Abstract Universal service is a policy objective that all individuals or households have access to some service. Subsidy policies to accomplish universal service may arise when private provision is non-universal. In the context of rural high speed wired broadband subsidies, this paper examines novel household-level cable and satellite broadband subscription data from North Carolina to examine household adoption and substitution patterns across broadband types to evaluate how many currently unserved regions warrant an entry subsidy. This paper has three main findings: (i) fewer than 43% of households adopt high speed broadband in areas currently served by a single broadband provider, (ii) there exists evidence of a significant elasticity of substitution between high speed wired broadband and the lower speed options of satellite broadband and DSL, and (iii) a generous upper bound on the number of regions that warrant an entry subsidy is 64%. These results suggest a policy of universal high speed wired broadband service in North Carolina would be unlikely to achieve universal adoption, would connect many households already with internet access and who would not substitute, and in many regions would be prohibitively costly even assuming very generous estimates of the consumer surplus generated. From the perspective of social welfare, to justify connecting the 5% least dense areas of North Carolina would require each adopting household value high speed wired broadband access at more than $1519 per month.
The Individual Mandate, Sovereignty, and the Ends of Good Government: A Reply to Professor Randy Barnett

People who are politically "conservative" or "libertarian" in the way those terms are often deployed in contemporary American public discourse almost universally regard the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA)1 as objectionable and, in a related but distinct vein, unconstitutional. The favorite focus of such conservative and libertarian protest is the Act's so-called individual mandate the requirement that individuals buy health insurance from a private mar-
Cooperative metabolic resource allocation in spatially-structured systems.

Natural selection has shaped the evolution of cells and multi-cellular organisms such that social cooperation can often be preferred over an individualistic approach to metabolic regulation. This paper extends a framework for dynamic metabolic resource allocation based on the maximum entropy principle to spatiotemporal models of metabolism with cooperation. Much like the maximum entropy principle encapsulates ‘bet-hedging’ behaviour displayed by organisms dealing with future uncertainty in a fluctuating environment, its cooperative extension describes how individuals adapt their metabolic resource allocation strategy to further accommodate limited knowledge about the welfare of others within a community. The resulting theory explains why local regulation of metabolic cross-feeding can fulfil a community-wide metabolic objective if individuals take into consideration an ensemble measure of total population performance as the only form of global information. The latter is likely supplied by quorum sensing in microbial systems or signalling molecules such as hormones in multi-cellular eukaryotic organisms.
Soviet venality: A rent-seeking model of the communist state

While the recent Fall of Communism has focused the interest of economists on the admittedly fascinating problems associated with the ongoing economic reform process, the study of the functioning of actual communist economies still seems mired in the conventional model of central planning. This model is predicated on the assumption that communist rulers are unselfish drones who single-mindedly maximize the public interest. Our article proposes an alternative, public choice model. We suggest that the Soviet-style system represents a modern incarnation of the mercantilist economies of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, and that venality, not ideology, drives these economies in practice.
Leverage and strategic preemption: Lessons from entry plans and incumbent investments

Abstract This paper empirically investigates the effect of leverage on strategic preemption. Using new data on entry plans and incumbent investments from the American casino industry, I find that high leverage prevents incumbents from responding to entry threats. Facing the same set of entry plans, low-leverage incumbents expand physical capacity (by 30%), whereas high-leverage incumbents do not. This difference in investment matters because capacity installations preempt eventual entry. Stock market reactions to withdrawn plans imply that effective preemption increases incumbent firm value by 5%. My findings suggest that leverage matters for industry composition, not just firm-level investment.
The Bush Tax Cut and National Saving

Following through on pledges made during his election campaign, President Bush proposed and Congress passed a substantial tax cut in 2001, the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act (EGT...
Adopting Law Firm Management Systems to Survive and Thrive: A Study of the Australian Approach to Management-Based Regulation

In Australia, amendments to the Legal Profession Act require that incorporated legal practices (ILPs) take steps to assure compliance with provisions of the Legal Profession Act 2004. Specifically, the legislation provides that the ILP must appoint a legal practitioner director to be generally responsible for the management of the ILP. The ILP must also implement and maintain “appropriate management systems" to enable the provision of legal services in accordance with the professional obligations of legal practitioners. Because the new law did not define “appropriate management systems” (AMS) the Office of Legal Services Commissioner for New South Wales worked with representatives of other organizations and practitioners to develop guidelines and an approach for evaluating compliance with the statutory requirements. The collaboration resulted in an “education toward compliance” strategy in which a designated director for an ILP completes a self-assessment process (SAP), evaluating the ILP’s compliance with ten specific objectives of sound legal practice. To evaluate the new regulatory regime, Professor Susan Fortney conducted a mixed method empirical study of incorporated law firms in New South Wales Australia. In Phase One of the study, all incorporated law firms with two or more solicitors were surveyed. In Phase Two, legal services directors were interested. This article discusses the survey findings, focusing on the relationship between the self-assessment process and the ethics norms, systems, conduct, and culture in firms.
Egalitarianism and the Problem of Tort Liability

Is the negligence standard in accident law acceptable to the egalitarian? The egalitarian - the egalitarian who would compensate only losses for which the actor was not responsible - cannot accept either a system of strict liability for all accidents or a system of social insurance for all accidents. A system of tort law acceptable to the responsibility - egalitarian must be a system based on negligence. But what will negligence mean? A negligence system in which the notion of reasonableness is based on efficiency, I argue, is a system that redistributes wealth from the less well off to those better off. I consider alternative notions of reasonableness, ending up with a principle of proportional responsibility and distinguishing between commercial and non-commercial cases.
Is Copyright Infringement a Strict Liability Tort

Scholars and lawmakers routinely refer to copyright infringement as a strict liability tort. The strictness of copyright liability has long been criticized as immoral, inefficient, and inconsistent with usual tort doctrine. However, this Article questions whether copyright infringement really is a strict liability tort. It advances the thesis that copyright infringement in the United States is a fault-based tort, closely related to the tort of negligence. Using both doctrinal and economic methods, this Article explicates the role that fault plays in copyright infringement. Doing so not only demonstrates that copyright’s liability rule is more normatively defensible than previously appreciated, but also provides a unique tort perspective on the nature of the fair use doctrine. By seriously engaging with the analytic question of whether liability for copyright infringement is strict or not, we highlight how the fair use analysis blends and confuses two separate issues: on one hand, did the defendant cause the plaintiff harm, and, on the other, was that harm justifiable? The Article concludes that, while no substantive changes need to be made to copyright’s liability rule, judges ought to restructure the fair use analysis in order to keep these concepts distinct from one another.
"This is why we play": Characterizing Online Fan Communities of the NBA Teams

Professional sports constitute an important part of people's modern life. People spend substantial amounts of time and money supporting their favorite players and teams, and sometimes even riot after games. However, how team performance affects fan behavior remains understudied at a large scale. As almost every notable professional team has its own online fan community, these communities provide great opportunities for investigating this research question. In this work, we provide the first large-scale characterization of online fan communities of professional sports teams. Since user behavior in these online fan communities is inherently connected to game events and team performance, we construct a unique dataset that combines 1.5M posts and 43M comments in NBA-related communities on Reddit with statistics that document team performance in the NBA. We analyze the impact of team performance on fan behavior both at the game level and the season level. First, we study how team performance in a game relates to user activity during that game. We find that surprise plays an important role: the fans of the top teams are more active when their teams lose and so are the fans of the bottom teams in an unexpected win. Second, we study fan behavior over consecutive seasons and show that strong team performance is associated with fans of low loyalty, likely due to "bandwagon fans." Fans of the bottom teams tend to discuss their team's future such as young talents in the roster, which may help them stay optimistic during adversity. Our results not only contribute to understanding the interplay between online sports communities and offline context but also provide significant insights into sports management.
The Supreme Court and Exclusions by Racetracks

html?res=9FODE3DD 1 03DE433A2575AC1A9609C94649ED7CFs see also Negroes and the New Civil Rights Law, BROOK. DAILY EAGLE, June 21, 1895, at 6, available at http://eagle.brooklynpubliclibrary. org/Default/Skins/BEagle/Client.asp?Skin=BEagle (stating penalty section of law opens wide door for blackmail). 78. See Grannan, 44 N.Y.S. at 799 (voiding rule because it regulates illegal offense). 79. See id. ("Its purpose is plain. It was intended to and had the effect of regulating an offense against the law, and if the means were provided, or were knowingly permitted by the association for such purpose, its officers would offend against the Penal Code.").
The Dynasty Advantage: Family Ties in Congressional Elections

Political dynasties, families in which multiple members have held elected office, commonly feature in the U.S. Congress. I explored the electoral origins of this phenomenon and determined that members of political dynasties have a significant advantage over first-generation politicians in open-seat House elections. Using an original dataset containing candidate- and district-level covariates for all candidates in open-seat House contests between 1994 and 2006, I found that dynastic politicians enjoy “brand name advantages,” giving them a significant edge over comparable nondynastic opponents. In contrast, hypotheses concerning potential advantages stemming from past political experience and fundraising ability yield null results.
A Dual Catastrophe of Protectionism

This Article argues that rampant parochial protectionism in the United States, a striking example of which is the recent skirmish over the Vietnamese seafood trade, yields catastrophic effects in domestic constitutional as well as foreign policy terms. Moreover, these harmful effects extend not only to the United States but also to the rest of the world. The Article consists of four Parts. Part I documents the trade dispute over Vietnamese catfish and shrimp exports to the U.S. market, with special attention to the question of how powerful southern lobbies prevailed over the broader economic interests of consuming industries and consumers. Part II explores the roles played by all three governmental branches - direct as well as indirect, actual as well as potential - in facilitating and enabling this distortion of free trade principles. Part III addresses the devastating effects, both internal and external, of this kind of protectionism; namely, that such measures result in a dual catastrophe in the sense that they serve parochial interests at enormous expense to the United States and the global economy (i.e., "constitutional failure"), while gravely damaging the reputation of the United States abroad (i.e., "foreign affairs failure"). To avoid similar catastrophes in the future, Part IV suggests that the United States must achieve greater legislative and procedural transparency both domestically and internationally, through a more inclusive policy-making process and a stronger commitment to multilateralism. Finally, the Article concludes by arguing that the United States must play a more authentic leadership role in the international community, rather than resorting to the dead-end of Exceptionalism.
Rewired warfare: rethinking the law of cyber attack

The most significant debate regarding the applicability of international humanitarian law to cyber operations involves interpretation of the rules governing cyber “attacks”, as that term is understood in the law. For over a decade, the debate has been a binary one between advocates of the “permissive approach” developed by the author and a “restrictive approach” championed by those who saw the permissive approach as insufficiently protective of the civilian population and other protected persons and objects. In this article, the author analyses that debate, and explains a third approach developed during the Tallinn Manual project. He concludes by suggesting that the Tallinn Manual approach best approximates the contemporary law given the increasing value which societies are attributing to cyber activities.
Physics of three dimensional bosonic topological insulators: Surface Deconfined Criticality and Quantized Magnetoelectric Effect

We discuss physical properties of “integer” topological phases of bosons in D=3+1 dimensions, protected by internal symmetries like time reversal and/or charge conservation. These phases invoke interactions in a fundamental way but do not possess topological order; they are bosonic analogs of free-fermion topological insulators and superconductors. While a formal cohomology-based classification of such states was recently discovered, their physical properties remain mysterious. Here, we develop a field-theoretic description of several of these states and show that they possess unusual surface states, which, if gapped, must either break the underlying symmetry or develop topological order. In the latter case, symmetries are implemented in a way that is forbidden in a strictly two-dimensional theory. While these phases are the usual fate of the surface states, exotic gapless states can also be realized. For example, tuning parameters can naturally lead to a deconfined quantum critical point or, in other situations, to a fully symmetric vortex metal phase. We discuss cases where the topological phases are characterized by a quantized magnetoelectric response θ, which, somewhat surprisingly, is an odd multiple of 2π. Two different surface theories are shown to capture these phenomena: The first is a nonlinear sigma model with a topological term. The second invokes vortices on the surface that transform under a projective representation of the symmetry group. We identify a bulk-field theory consistent with these properties, which is a multicomponent background-field theory supplemented, crucially, with a topological term. We also provide bulk sigma-model field theories of these phases and discuss a possible topological phase characterized by the thermal analog of the magnetoelectric effect.
Regime‐switching in stock index and Treasury futures returns and measures of stock market stress

We investigate bivariate regime-switching in daily futures-contract returns for the US stock index and ten-year Treasury notes over the crisis-rich 1997–2005 period. We allow the return means, volatilities, and correlation to all vary across regimes. We document a striking contrast between regimes, with a high-stress regime that exhibits a much higher stock volatility, a much lower stock–bond correlation, and a higher mean bond return. The high-stress regime is associated with higher average values of stock-implied volatility, stock illiquidity, and stock and bond futures trading volume. The lagged implied volatility from equity-index options is useful in modeling the time-varying transition probabilities of the regime-switching process. Our findings support the notions that: (1) stock market stress can have a material influence on Treasury bond pricing, and (2) the diversification benefits of combined stock–bond holdings tend to be greater during times with relatively high stock market stress. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 30:753–779, 2010
Tenure: Endangered or Evolutionary Species

Advocates of tenure emphasize its contributions to professional excellence and the quest for truth. These benefits are more important than individual benefits or the costs to those who fail to gain tenure or to universities that lose their flexibility. Critics argue that tenure creates excessive social and individual costs, because unproductive tenured faculty hinders opportunities to hire new faculty or implement programmatic innovation. This article reviews some of the challenges to the system of academic tenure: the efforts to reform, curtail or eliminate it. It will discuss exogenous factors undermining the institution, and then suggest some areas where tenure should evolve, particularly focusing upon academic tenure in legal education. The author argues that the hierarchical structure of traditionally tenured faculty and other faculty, clinicians and legal writing professors, employed on short or long-term contracts, has undermined academic freedom and tenure.
BANKER FEES AND ACQUISITION PREMIA FOR TARGETS IN CASH TENDER OFFERS: CHALLENGES TO THE POPULAR WISDOM ON BANKER CONFLICTS

Our results are broadly consistent with the predictions of a benign view of the role of investment banks in advising acquisition targets. Fees to investment banks are correlated with attributes of transactions and target firms in ways that make sense if banks are being paid for processing information. The more contingent (and, therefore, risky) the fees, the higher they tend to be, all else held constant. Variation in target acquisition premia also can be explained by fundamental deal attributes. Contrary to the jaundiced view of fairness opinions, greater fixity of fees paid by targets is not generally associated with higher acquisition premia, and there is no evidence that investment banks are suborned by acquirors with whom they have had a prior banking relationship.