cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Righteous Fathers, Vulnerable Old Men, and Degraded Creatures: Southern Justices on Miscegenation in the Antebellum Will Contest

Although scholars have long addressed the role of legislators and local elites in policing the color line between black and white, antebellum jurists hearing will contests also played a special role, different from the roles they played in miscegenation prosecutions, but just as effective, nonetheless. State court justices, who heard cases involving bequests to the putative slave children of slaveholding elite men, exercised their power to police by deciding when the color line had been breached. In those cases, miscegenation between white men and slave women or free women of color was not the problem, however. Instead, the color line was breached in those cases when white men recognized and accorded slave women and their mixed-race children status through manumission and property. Official recognition by white relatives meant access to whiteness. Black personal freedom, combined with access to money and land, were threats to the social order of slavery and white supremacy. Free blacks were deemed uncontrollable and arrogant, particularly when they had money. They were perceived as a bad influence upon the bonded. In the eyes of many jurists, wealthy free black status was to be denied at all costs, for the benefit of the white social order, and the white relatives or creditors seeking to establish their claim to the decedent's estate. In this article, I explore the attitudes of antebellum jurists towards slavery, miscegenation, and the transfer of property from elite white men to black slave women, free women of color, and their mixed-race children, as found in antebellum will contests. This article is a historical study, in which I do a case-by-case analysis and categorization of the language used by state high court justices of the South in describing the white men who * Assistant Professor, Department of Legal Studies, and Adjunct Assistant Professor, Department of History, University of Massachusetts-Amherst. J.D., New York University School of Law; Ph.D., History, University of Virginia. This article is part of a work in progress on official and community responses to evidence of miscegenation as found in the wills of elite white men of the antebellum South. Much thanks to Pamela D. H. Cochran, Paul Finkelman, Tanya K. Hernandez, and Charles McCurdy for their encouragement. Thanks also to Barbara Morgan, reference librarian, for her research help, and to those who participated in the following: the University of Massachusetts-Amherst Legal Studies faculty colloquia series; the "Marriage and its Alternatives" Interdisciplinary Seminar in the Humanities and Fine Arts, University of Massachusetts-Amherst; and the Baylor Institute for Faith and Learning Pruitt Symposium: "Slavery, Oppression and Prejudice." This article is dedicated to Charles Hagley, Robert Hagley, Alexander Purcell, and Andrew Purcell. 1 Jones: Righteous Fathers, Vulnerable Old Men, and Degraded Creatures: So Published by TU Law Digital Commons, 2004
A Jackson Portrait for Jamestown, "A Magnet in the Room"

Robert Houghwout Jackson (1892-1954) was Solicitor General and Attorney General in the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court and chief American prosecutor at Nuremberg, but Jackson's values and outlook were anchored in western New York, where he grew up and then practiced law for twenty years before joining the New Deal. Jackson also had, throughout his adult life, particularly close ties to the city of Buffalo, the University of Buffalo and its School of Law. Today, Jackson's enduring significance is becoming increasingly visible due to notable efforts based in his home region and adult hometown of Jamestown, New York. In early 2001, the Robert H. Jackson Center was established in Jamestown - and on the web - to advance Jackson's legacy through educational programming, exhibitry and special events that connect his life and ideas to today's issues and challenges. This essay, based on remarks that were delivered at the July 2002 Jackson Center dedication of Justice Jackson's portrait, discusses his own participation in tribute and dedication events, his various portraits that are displayed in locations throughout the country, and the magnetic power of great people and their depictions. An image of the portrait of Jackson by painter Lurabel Long Colburn will be published alongside this essay.
Framework Agreements in Procurement: An Auction Model and Design Recommendations

Framework agreements (FAs) are procurement mechanisms commonly used by buying agencies around the world to satisfy demand that arises over a certain time horizon. This paper is one of the first in the literature that provides a formal understanding of FAs, with a particular focus on the cost uncertainty bidders face over the FA time horizon. We generalize standard auction models to include this salient feature of FAs and analyze this model theoretically and numerically. First, we show that FAs are subject to a sort of winner’s curse that in equilibrium induces higher expected buying prices relative to running first-price auctions as needs arise. Then, our results provide concrete design recommendations that alleviate this issue and decrease buying prices in FAs, highlighting the importance of (i) monitoring the price charged at the open market by the FA winner to bound the buying price; (ii) implementing price indexes for the random part of suppliers’ costs; and (iii) allowing suppliers the flexibility to...
California's Anti-Discrimination Legislation, Proposition 14, and the Constitutional Protection of Minority Rights: The Fiftieth Anniversary of the California Fair Employment and Housing Act

Fifty years ago, in 1959, the State of California outlawed racial discrimination in employment. But it took the California Legislature four more years to prohibit racial discrimination in private housing, and the immediate response was a successful campaign by the real-estate industry to repeal the law through a voter initiative. This essay tells the story of that campaign and the courageous judicial decisions that nullified the initiative. I address four related events in California’s civil rights legal history. They are (1) the adoption of the Fair Employment Practices Act (FEPA), the Hawkins Act and the Unruh Act by the California Legislature in 1959; (2) the subsequent passage in 1963 of the Rumford Fair Housing Act; (3) Proposition 14, the 1964 initiative campaign that nullified the Rumford Act and parts of the Unruh Act, creating a California Constitutional right to discriminate against members of racial minority groups; and (4) the judicial decisions that rejected that nullification. I will conclude that our courts acted with great courage, defying the will of the voters, to protect minority rights.
An Examination of the Efficiency, Foreclosure, and Collusion Rationales for Vertical Takeovers

We investigate the efficiency, foreclosure, and collusion rationales for vertical integration in a large sample of vertically related takeovers. The efficiency rationale, as discussed under the transaction cost economics and property rights theories, posits that vertical integration mitigates contractual inefficiencies between suppliers and customers (termed as holdup) and provides incentives to undertake relationship-specific investments. In contrast, the foreclosure and collusion rationales suggest that vertical integration is anticompetitive in nature. Specifically, the foreclosure argument suggests that vertical integration is used to raise costs of rival firms, and the collusion argument suggests that vertical integration facilitates coordination between the integrated firm and its rivals. To distinguish between the three hypotheses, we examine (1) the announcement period wealth effects to the merging firms, rival firms, and customer firms; and (2) the operating performance changes to the merging firms in vertical takeovers. We find that firms expand their vertical boundaries consistent with an efficiency enhancing rationale. This paper was accepted by Brad Barber, finance.
Transformativism: A paradigm whose time has come

Events of 2020 as a result of the death of George Floyd and COVID-19 pandemic have brought to the forefront several of the issues that the United States in particular and the entire world have struggled with, including racial inequities and inequalities in healthcare delivery, the so-called systemic racism, and police brutality, among several other social injustice issues.
Democracy and State Capacity: Complements or Substitutes?

When it comes to social welfare, we do not have clear understanding of whether it is more important to have democracy or a capable state. Specifically, most studies do not consider the possibility that effects of democracy are conditioned or obscured by differences in the capabilities of states to deliver services effectively. This article contends that better developmental outcomes can result from either democracy or state capacity, but the combination of high levels of both democracy and state capacity is not synergistic. Empirical evidence from a time-series-cross-sectional dataset covering up to 162 countries during the 1965–2010 time period supports the conclusion that these factors partially substitute for each other with respect to improving outcomes in school enrollment and infant mortality. These findings provide a more optimistic answer to the query of Ross (Am J Polit Sci 50(4): 860–874, 2006) as to whether democracy is good for the poor. Once accounting for state capacity, we find that democracy leads to better development outcomes.
Opting In and Out of Fiduciary Duties in Cooperative Ventures: Refining the So-Called Coasean Contract Theory

Professor O’Kelley comments on a familiar problem in the law of closely held business associations - the alleged exploitation of weaker or minority investors by stronger or majority participants. The fact pattern is simple. At the outset of the cooperative venture, a stronger participant assumes the role of proprietor, partner, or majority shareholder, while the weaker participant assumes the role of agent, partner, or minority shareholder. For whatever reason, the venturers do not explicitly guarantee or protect the weaker participant’s right to income or continued participation in the venture. Consequently, at some later date the stronger participant reduces or eliminates the weaker investor’s participation in or return from the cooperative venture. The weaker investor then seeks equitable relief, claiming that the stronger venturer’s actions violate the implied fiduciary duties owed to the weaker participant. This comment explores how efficiency minded judges should apply the Cosean Contract Theory, and, thus, some light on the theory itself.
WHY GOVERNMENTS IMPLEMENT TEMPORARY STABILIZATION PROGRAMS

This paper provides a political economy explanation for temporary exchange-rate-based stabilization programs (where the exchange rate is used as a nominal anchor) and their optimal duration by focu...
Ethnicity, acculturation, and Plagiarism: a Criterion Study of unethical academic Conduct

Ethics have received increased attention from the media and academia in recent years. Most reports suggest that one form of unethical conduct—plagiarism—is on the rise in the business schools. Stereotypes of Asian students as being more prone to plagiarize are frequently found in the literature, though not concretely substantiated. This study used a behavioral criterion to examine the relationships among ethnicity, acculturation, and plagiarism in a sample of 158 undergraduate and graduate students. Significant differences in plagiarism behavior were found based on level of student acculturation, but not ethnicity. Considerations and implications for training and managing international students and workers are discussed.
Transaction costs, industry experience and make-or-buy decisions in the population of early U.S. auto firms

Abstract We study the determinants of make-or-buy decisions for engines made by every recorded U.S. auto firm during 1917–1933. Most make-or-buy studies testing predictions of transaction cost economics exclude smaller firms, even though their make-or-buy behavior might be different from large firms’ due to capital constraints or other factors. We find that transaction cost effects on make-or-buy choices were nevertheless important at the population level. We also find that firm experience in the industry, as well as pre-entry experience, significantly affected make-buy choices. These experience effects may reflect the interaction of mechanisms emphasized in evolutionary and transaction cost theories.
The evolution of money as a medium of exchange

Abstract This paper uses an evolutionary approach to explain the origin of money as media of exchange in a primitive economy, where agents specialize in production for the purpose of trading for their own consumption goods. A general class of dynamics, which is consistent with Darwinian dynamics, is applied to the selection of strategies. The model produces many of the well-known results regarding the importance of intrinsic value and the proportion of agents specializing in different goods. In addition, the model also shows the importance of initial trading strategies and of the mutations of agents’ strategies in selecting equilibria.
Enabling Work for People with Disabilities: A Post-Integrationist Revision of Underutilized Tax Incentives

Federal employment strategies for people with disabilities do not seem to be working. Scholars argue that the Americans with Disabilities Act and similar legislation that exemplify the disability theory of integrationism with the goal of integrating people with disabilities into mainstream employment cannot succeed. Society cannot eradicate barriers to employment for people with disabilities simply by the integrationist modest approach of reasonable accommodation. A post-integrationist approach may be required to provide legitimate equal employment opportunities for people with disabilities. In December 2002, the General Accounting Office released its report on its study of three federal business tax incentives to encourage employment of people with disabilities. This Article evaluates this federal employment strategy using post-integrationist theory. The Article proposes significant legislative modifications to empower these tax provisions and the Earned Income Tax Credit to enable work for people with disabilities.
Banishing the Sovereign? Internal and External Sovereignty in Arendt

According to Hannah Arendt “the great and, in the long run, perhaps the greatest American innovation in politics as such was the consistent abolition of sovereignty within the body politic of the republic, the insight that in the realm of human affairs sovereignty and tyranny are the same.” It is very clear that Arendt considers the American abolition of sovereignty to pertain to internal affairs only; first, because she explicitly says “within the body politic,” and second because she rightly implies that one of the points of forming a more perfect union by moving from a confederacy to a federal state in 1787 was to enhance external sovereignty. The task was to “reconcile the advantages of monarchy in foreign affairs with those of republicanism in domestic policy.” It would be absurd to call this a chance or careless remark, given the correspondence of its thrust with the intentions of the authors of The Federalist that had to be entirely clear to Arendt. But is it possible to leave external sovereignty untouched, while abolishing internal sovereignty? The first part of this essay will explore the meaning of the abolition of sovereignty in Arendt’s work (I). We turn next to her conception of the American model of internal sovereignty (II) and then to the tenability of her analysis of the boundary between external and internal sovereignty in the American case (III). We provide an assessment of what is wrong with her model conceptually and historically (IV) and conclude with a proposal for a corrective in the spirit if not in the letter of her work (V).
Nudging Cannot Solve Complex Policy Problems

We deepen Adam Burgess’ insight that under current conditions nudging cannot solve complex policy problems reliably and without controversy. We do so by integrating his concerns about nudging into Braden Allenby and Daniel Sarewitz's three-leveled model of the basic problems technology can address and generate. We use this model to explain why the UK experiment with nudging has revolved around techno-fixes with limited policy potential, and conclude that nudging is best seen as an emerging form of soft law.
The duty of clarity

This article shows that the Constitution contemplates that judges are to exercise a duty of clarity before declining to follow legislation because it violates the Constitution. That is, they were to exercise the power of judicial review only if the legislation at issue proved to be in manifest contradiction of a constitutional provision. But judges were also expected to use the ample legal methods of clarification available to pin down the Constitution’s precise meaning.The best categorization of this duty of clarity and clarification is that it was an aspect of the judicial power granted under Article III of the Constitution. Thus, the article rejects James Bradley Thayer’s form of judicial deference - that legislation should be uphold on the basis of any interpretation that could be embraced by “a rational person” - as extreme and unwarranted. Thayer followed a jurisprudential tradition that developed subsequent to the Framing in which judicial review was fundamentally a political rather than a legal exercise and in which judges necessarily made law in the interstices of a written text’s unclear commands without any clear framework of discipline provided by legal rules. As a result, Thayer’s concept of constitutional deference has a larger scope and effect than it did at the jurisprudence of the Founding where judges were not seen as lawmakers in that sense and where the judicial duty of clarity has jurisprudential roots in natural law rather than positivism. But the article also rejects the notion that judicial review permits judges to overturn legislation based on their own view of the Constitution, even if their interpretation is not clearly the best one. The duty of clarity casts doubt on the legality of constitutional construction as opposed to constitutional interpretation in the course of judicial review, because constitutional construction can occur only when the meaning of the Constitution is unclear.
Adverse Drug Reactions: Harnessing Experiential Data to Promote Patient Welfare

Part I of this Article evaluates the pre-approval and post-approval regulatory framework governing prescription drugs, and the FDA's spontaneous reporting system for adverse events, as it contrasts that system with the regulatory mechanisms used to monitor risks associated with other products. Part II summarizes the recent series of prescription drug marketing withdrawals prompted by reports of unexpected adverse reactions. Finally, Part III offers some possible solutions designed to improve the efficiency of post-approval surveillance so that fewer patients will suffer the consequences of unexpected adverse drug reactions and interactions. This Article concludes that the existing regulatory system requires fundamental reprioritization and more substantial structural reforms in order to avoid a troubling replay of recent prescription drug withdrawals. The proposed reforms may help to enhance a physician's ability to provide quality patient care based on optimal knowledge of the safety and efficacy of pharmaceutical products.
Public policy towards entrepreneurial finance: spillovers and the scale-up gap

Research in the area of public policy towards entrepreneurial finance has traditionally been focused on financing gaps, and whether or not government programs successfully address market failures for those financing gaps. More recently, a growing literature has identified externalities across different forms of entrepreneurial finance. These externalities include but are not limited to spillovers from one form of finance to another (such as from crowdfunding to venture capital, etc.), spillovers from domestic to international investment, and spillovers from early stage to late stage investment. Sometimes these externalities are positive and other times they are negative. In this paper, we review what is known about these spillovers and highlight a need to better understand these spillovers for the optimal design of a government’s portfolio of policy towards entrepreneurial finance.
From Preemption to Circumvention: If Technology Regulates, Why Do We Need Regulation (And Vice Versa)?

In this article, the author discusses the law and regulation related to technology. It focuses on technologies including TrackMeNot, Adnostic and Values-at-Play (VAP) for online protection. The working of these technologies and the need of regulations in their designing and their limitations are discussed.
Discrete Bethe-Sommerfeld conjecture for triangular, square, and hexagonal lattices

We prove the discrete Bethe-Sommerfeld conjecture on the graphene lattice, on its dual lattice (the triangular lattice), and on the extended Harper lattice. For each of these lattice geometries, we analyze the behavior of small periodic potentials. In particular, we provide sharp bounds on the number of gaps that may perturbatively open, we describe sharp arithmetic criteria on the periods that ensure that no gaps open, and we characterize those energies at which gaps may open in the perturbative regime. In all three cases, we provide examples that open the maximal number of gaps and estimate the scaling behavior of the gap lengths as the coupling constant goes to zero.
The effects of import competition on worker health

Abstract Occupational health is an important determinant of workers' welfare. Existing mechanisms and evidence from the international trade and occupational safety literatures combine to predict that import competition impacts work place injuries, especially at small firms that are most affected by foreign imports. We examine this prediction with novel data on injuries at US manufacturers using Chinese import growth in 1996–2007 as a shock to competition. The data show that injury rates in the competing US industries increase over the short to medium run, particularly at smaller establishments. Back-of-the-envelope calculations show that injury risk increases by 13% at the smallest establishments, the equivalent of a 1% to 2% reduction in workers' wages.
Lower neural value signaling in the prefrontal cortex is related to childhood family income and depressive symptomatology during adolescence.

Abstract Lower family income during childhood is related to increased rates of adolescent depression, though the underlying mechanisms are poorly understood. Evidence suggests that individuals with depression demonstrate hypoactivation in brain regions involved in reward learning and decision-making processes (e.g., portions of the prefrontal cortex). Separately, lower family income has been associated with neural alterations in similar regions. Motivated by this research, we examined associations between family income, depression, and brain activity during a reward learning and decision-making fMRI task in a sample of adolescents (full n = 94; usable n = 78; mean age = 15.2 years). We focused on brain activity for: 1) expected value (EV), the learned subjective value of an object, and 2) prediction error, the difference between EV and the actual outcome received. Regions of interest related to reward learning were examined in connection to childhood family income and parent-reported adolescent depressive symptoms. As hypothesized, lower activity in the subgenual anterior cingulate (sACC) for EV in response to approach stimuli was associated with lower childhood family income, as well as greater symptoms of depression measured one-year after the neuroimaging session. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that lower early family income leads to disruptions in reward and decision-making brain circuitry, contributing to adolescent depression.
Perceiving Political Polarization in the United States: Party Identity Strength and Attitude Extremity Exacerbate the Perceived Partisan Divide

An important component of political polarization in the United States is the degree to which ordinary people perceive political polarization. We used over 30 years of national survey data from the American National Election Study to examine how the public perceives political polarization between the Democratic and Republican parties and between Democratic and Republican presidential candidates. People in the United States consistently overestimate polarization between the attitudes of Democrats and Republicans. People who perceive the greatest political polarization are most likely to report having been politically active, including voting, trying to sway others' political beliefs, and making campaign contributions. We present a 3-factor framework to understand ordinary people's perceptions of political polarization. We suggest that people perceive greater political polarization when they (a) estimate the attitudes of those categorized as being in the "opposing group"; (b) identify strongly as either Democrat or Republican; and (c) hold relatively extreme partisan attitudes-particularly when those partisan attitudes align with their own partisan political identity. These patterns of polarization perception occur among both Democrats and Republicans.
The Access to Knowledge Mobilization and the New Politics of Intellectual Property

Intellectual property law was once an arcane subject. Today it is at the center of some of the most highly charged political contests of our time. In recent years, college students, subsistence farmers, AIDS activists, genomic scientists, and free-software programmers have mobilized to challenge the contours of intellectual property (IP) law. Very recently, some from these groups have begun to develop a shared critique under the umbrella of “access to knowledge” (A2K). Existing accounts of the political economy of the field of IP have suggested that such a mobilization was unlikely. This Article takes the emergence of the A2K mobilization as an opportunity to develop a richer and less deterministic account of the contemporary politics of IP. It draws upon “frame mobilization” literature, which illuminates the role that acts of interpretation play in instigating, promoting, and legitimating collective action. The frameanalytic perspective teaches that before a group can act it must develop an account of its interests and theorize how to advance these interests. These acts of interpretation are both socially mediated and contingent. Ideas can be a resource for those engaged in mobilization, but one that is not fully in their control. Frames thus can lay the scaffolding for a countermovement even as they pave the way for a movement’s success. Law is a key location for framing conflicts because it provides groups with symbolic resources for framing, and because groups struggle within the field of law to gain control over law’s normative and instrumental benefits. Law thus exerts a gravitational pull on framing processes. Engagement with law can influence a group’s architecture, discourse, and strategies, and can also create areas of overlapping agreement and— as importantly—a language of common disagreement between opposing groups. The Article closes by suggesting some implications of this point, which should be of interest to those who design legal institutions and who engage in social mobilization. Most intriguing, perhaps, is the role it suggests that law may play in the creation of global publics and polities. author. This Article has benefited greatly from the suggestions of more readers than I can thank here. I owe a special debt of gratitude to my colleagues at U.C. Berkeley School of Law and Yale Law School, and particularly to Professors Catherine Albiston, Jack Balkin, James Boyle, Yochai Benkler, Lauren Edelman, Terry Fisher, Oona Hathaway, David Lieberman, Peter Menell, Robert Merges, Robert Post, Carol Rose, Pamela Samuelson, Reva Siegel, and Molly S. Van Houweling. I note, finally, that I have engaged in advocacy work around access-tomedicines issues in connection with some of the groups discussed herein. All views expressed here are, of course, my own. 0804.KAPCZYNSKI.0885.DOC 3/12/2008 8:47:12 PM the new politics of intellectual property 805 article contents
Taking Stock of the Responsibility to Protect

When the U.N. Security Council voted to authorize the use of military force in Libya in March 2011, observers greeted the decision as a triumph for the responsibility to protect, the notion that states have a responsibility to protect their own people, and that the international community has a responsibility to step in when the state fails its responsibility. After years of debate and controversy, the initiation of military action in Libya was seen as an indication that the international community in general, and the United States in particular, finally had embraced the responsibility to protect and was willing to put words into action. This Essay critically examines the role the responsibility to protect played in the U.S. government’s public justifications for supporting intervention in Libya. It argues that although a sense of responsibility factored into the Obama Administration’s explanations for supporting intervention, that responsibility played only a secondary role, subordinated to U.S. interests in protecting regional stability, deterring violent repression by other dictators, and shoring up the credibility of the United Nations. Because the responsibility to protect constituted only one part of the government’s stated motivation for intervention, identifying the intervention as being driven by the responsibility to protect risks undermining the core of the responsibility to protect, mutating the principle into a new form that envisions a responsibility that is triggered only when other state interests motivate intervention. This deference to state interests, however, was exactly what the responsibility to protect principle sought to overcome. Moreover, identifying an intervention motivated by interests as an exercise of the responsibility to protect risks equating the principle of responsibility with mere interest, thus confirming the fears of many states that the responsibility to protect provides political cover for powerful states’ military adventurism and imperialism. Should proponents of the principle wish to further their goal of convincing otherwise uninterested states to take notice of foreign atrocities, and if they wish to avoid legitimating interventions based on narrow national interests, they should be careful not to conflate what motivated the Libya intervention with the responsibility to protect. The decision to intervene thus marked an advancement of the principle of responsibility to protect in U.S. foreign policy, but it should not be characterized as a successful manifestation of the responsibility to protect.
Was there a Nasdaq bubble in the late 1990s

Abstract Not necessarily: a firm's fundamental value increases with uncertainty about average future profitability, and this uncertainty was unusually high in the late 1990s. After calibrating a stock valuation model that takes this uncertainty into account, we compute the level of uncertainty that is needed to match the observed Nasdaq valuations at their peak. The uncertainty we obtain seems plausible because it matches not only the high level but also the high volatility of Nasdaq stock prices. In general, we argue that the level and volatility of stock prices are positively linked through firm-specific uncertainty about average future profitability.
Asymmetric regulation and airport dominance in international aviation: evidence from the London-New York market.

International airline markets have the rather unusual feature of partial deregulation with asymmetric regulatory constraints: Some carriers face entry restrictions different from others for a given route. Like domestic air travel, international travel also features hubs, where a single carrier may dominate a given airport. This article examines the effects of asymmetric regulation and airport dominance on airlines' fares in the London-New York market, a market uniquely suited for identifying the effects of both of these issues. Comparison data from the symmetrically regulated Frankfurt-New York and Paris-New York markets enable a differ ence-in-differences identification strategy. Regulatory restrictions are found to decrease an affected carrier's fares, whereas airport dominance increases a dominant airline's fares.
Beliefs in Repeated Games

Consider a two-player discounted infinitely repeated game. A player's belief is a probability distribution over the opponent's repeated game strategies. This paper shows that, for a large class of repeated games, there are no beliefs that satisfy three properties: learnability, a diversity of belief condition called CSP, and consistency. Loosely, if players learn to forecast the path of play whenever each plays a strategy that the other anticipates (in the sense of being in the support of that player's belief) and if the sets of anticipated strategies are sufficiently rich, then neither anticipates any of his opponent's best responses. This generalizes results in Nachbar (1997).
Virtual Clients: An Idea in Search of a Theory (with Limits)

Lawyers owe professional obligations to clients and it is usually pretty easy to identify a lawyer's clients, but it is getting more difficult. In recent decades, courts have recognized duties to individuals or entities who are in no sense traditional clients. These duties might lead to liability or disqualification from a matter. This Article, which was given as the Tabor Lecture at Valparaiso University School of Law, identifies seven categories of "virtual clients" and tries to define each category, the justifications for it, and the consequences of virtual client status. It distinguishes other circumstances in which a lawyer may have duties to third parties. The Article cautions against the risks to the traditional attorney-client relationship and the availability of counsel if the virtual client categories are too casually employed.
Mathematical foundation of the replicating portfolio approach

AbstractIn the last few years, the first theoretical foundations for replicating portfolios – probably the most prevailing technique for risk capital calculation in life insurance – have been given in a series of papers by Beutner, Pelsser and Schweizer. In these papers, the asymptotic behaviour of replicating portfolios concerning the approximation of the terminal value (TVL) and the fair value distribution of the liabilities (FVL) has been investigated in detail. We complement this line of research by providing results on approximations based on a finite number of replicating instruments. We do so by providing the link between the approximation error of the TVL distribution, the FVL distribution and the error in the resulting risk capital figure, either value at risk or some coherent risk measure. We further allow for a variety of practically relevant formulations of the replication problem, including cash flow matching approaches. In contrast to the existing literature, all our results apply to approac...
Challenges to the Impartiality of State Supreme Courts: Legitimacy Theory and “New-Style” Judicial Campaigns

Institutional legitimacy is perhaps the most important political capital courts possess. Many believe, however, that the legitimacy of elected state courts is being threatened by the rise of politicized judicial election campaigns and the breakdown of judicial impartiality. Three features of such campaigns, the argument goes, are dangerous to the perceived impartiality of courts: campaign contributions, attack ads, and policy pronouncements by candidates for judicial office. By means of an experimental vignette embedded in a representative survey, I investigate whether these factors in fact compromise the legitimacy of courts. The survey data indicate that campaign contributions and attack ads do indeed lead to a diminution of legitimacy, in courts just as in legislatures. However, policy pronouncements, even those promising to make decisions in certain ways, have no impact whatsoever on the legitimacy of courts and judges. These results are strongly reinforced by the experiment's ability to compare the effects of these campaign factors across institutions (a state Supreme Court and a state legislature). Thus, this analysis demonstrates that legitimacy is not obdurate and that campaign activity can indeed deplete the reservoir of goodwill courts typically enjoy, even if the culprit is not the free-speech rights the U.S. Supreme Court announced in 2002.
Ontario v. Quon: In Search of a Reasonable Fourth Amendment

Courts have interpreted the Fourth Amendment to protect individuals’ privacy from unreasonable government intrusion. The Fourth Amendment limits government activity in a wide variety of contexts, including criminal investigations, routine traffic stops, student searches, and public employee drug screenings. Courts look to societal expectations when determining what sorts of intrusions merit protection under the Amendment. Yet as social norms adjust to new technologies, the Supreme Court has struggled to place its finger on the emerging social consensus of what the Amendment should protect. The Court’s most recent decision Ontario v. Quon is a perfect example of this struggle. While the Court’s decision was unanimous, it provides little if any guidance or clarity to the already murky legal landscape of the Fourth Amendment. For decades scholars have decried the unpredictable and incoherent application of the Fourth Amendment. Many are concerned that the fact sensitive proportional balancing of government interests and individual interests, which the Warren Court announced as the touchstone of the Fourth Amendment’s application, has given way to a results-driven, unpredictable chaos that offers no clear guidance on the metes and bounds of privacy’s protection from government intrusion. Quon is unlikely to assuage these concerns. This Note reviews the Fourth Amendment’s development, its application to the Quon case, and draws on recent privacy scholarship to discuss gaps in the Court’s analysis and application of the Fourth Amendment.
Do School Incentives and Accountability Measures Improve Skills in the Middle East and North Africa? The Cases of Jordan and Tunisia.

There is general agreement that skill-enhancing school reforms in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region are necessary for economic, political and social reasons. Using student-level data from Jordan and Tunisia, this study assesses the relationship between skills and the following school incentive and accountability measures: pedagogical autonomy, school competition, freedom to hire and fire teachers, publicly posting data, and parent involvement in school affairs. Quantile regression analyses of mathematics, science, and reading skills of 15-year-old students suggest that students in schools with incentive and accountability measures do not have higher skills than students in school without the measures; this suggests that schools with incentive and accountability measures are no more efficient than other schools that have not adopted the measures. In terms of equity, the reforms are not associated with higher skills for the less skilled; a notable exception is parent involvement in Tunisia, which is associated with higher science and reading skills among low-skilled students. The main policy implication is that school incentive- and accountability-based reform should not be pursued until researchers have identified the effective design properties of each incentive and accountability measure.
Drought, Sustainability, and the Law

Researchers and responsible officials have made considerable progress in recent years in efforts to anticipate, plan for, and respond to drought. Some of those efforts are beginning to shift from purely reactive, relief-oriented measures to programs designed to prevent or to mitigate drought impacts. Considerably less attention has been given to laws that may affect practices and policies that either increase or decrease drought vulnerability. Water law regimes, drought response and relief legislation, and laws governing broader but related issues of economic policy—especially agricultural policy—should be evaluated more comprehensively to enhance incentives for more ―water sustainable‖ practices in agriculture and other sectors of the economy. Those changes will be increasingly important if current climate change models are correct in their prediction that many parts of the world can expect more frequent and more severe conditions of meteorological drought in the ensuing decades.
Cheap Talk, Fraud, and Adverse Selection in Financial Markets: Some Experimental Evidence

Typically the seller of a financial asset has better information about an asset’s quality than any of its potential buyers. Left unchecked, this asymmetry can lead to adverse selection, with sellers of all but the lowest quality assets withdrawing from the market. To overcome this adverse selection problem, the seller’s superior information needs to be communicated accurately to the buyer. In this article we examine the ability of two alternative communication mechanisms to mitigate the adverse selection observed in experimental markets. Because of the efficiency gains that can be achieved by eliminating adverse selection and because of the obvious incentives sellers have to provide misleading information, regulators have focused considerable attention on communication between sellers and buyers. From the inception of the SEC,
MINIMUM WAGES, GLOBALIZATION AND POVERTY IN HONDURAS

Summary We test whether minimum wage legislation is an effective poverty reduction tool in a poor country trying to stay competitive in the global economy. In Honduras, increases in relatively high minimum wages lead to reductions in poverty, especially extreme poverty. However, the impact is felt only in households with workers in large firms and felt more strongly among those with low wage workers. Increases in the minimum do not affect poverty in sectors where minimum wages are not enforced or do not apply. Hence minimum wages can be a poverty reduction tool in the formal sector, which competes globally.
Backyard evolutionary biology: Investigating local flowers brings learning to life

Inquiry-based learning allows students to actively engage in and appreciate the process of science. As college courses transition to online instruction in response to COVID-19, incorporating inquiry-based learning is all the more essential for student engagement. However, with the cancelation of in-person laboratory courses, implementing inquiry can prove challenging for instructors. Here, I describe a case that exemplifies a strategy for inquiry-based learning and can be adapted for use in various course modalities, from traditional face-to-face laboratory courses to asynchronous and synchronous online courses. I detail an assignment where students explore the developmental basis of morphological evolution. Flowers offer an excellent example to address this concept and are easy for students to access and describe. Students research local flowering plants, collect and dissect flower specimens to determine their whorl patterns, and generate hypotheses to explain the developmental genetic basis of the patterns identified. This task allows students to apply their scientific thinking skills, conduct guided exploration in nature, and connect their understanding of the developmental basis of evolutionary change to everyday life. Incorporating inquiry using readily available, tangible, tractable real-world examples represents a pragmatic and effective model that can be applied in a variety of disciplines during and beyond COVID-19.
Compressed Timeline of Recent Experience in Monkey lPFC

Cognitive theories suggest that working memory maintains not only the identity of recently-presented stimuli but also a sense of the elapsed time since the stimuli presentation. Previous studies of the neural underpinnings of working memory have focused on sustained firing, which can account for maintenance of the stimulus identity, but not for representation of the elapsed time. We analyzed single-unit recordings from the macaque lateral prefrontal cortex (lPFC) during performance of a delayed-match-to-category task. The sample stimulus triggered a consistent sequence of neurons, each neuron in the sequence firing during a circumscribed period of time. The sequences initiated by different sample stimuli were distinct but overlapping, with the degree of overlap reflecting the visual similarity of the stimuli that caused the sequences. These sequences of neurons encoded both stimulus identity and the elapsed time. The temporal code became less precise as the sample stimulus receded into the past. These findings suggest that working memory is maintained as a compressed timeline, consistent with longstanding cognitive theories of human memory.
The Economic Efficacy Of Banking Mergers: 2006-2008

The most recent financial crisis has spurred a number of mergers and acquisitions in the financial industry, specifically among banks. This study examines the hypothesis that mergers and acquisitions did not produce better performing institutions during the 2006 to 2008 period. Data were compiled for six accounting-based ratios for 105 firms directly involved in mergers or acquisitions during this period. An empirical comparison of both firm-to-firm and firm-to-industry performance shows that firms did not benefit from the mergers for the majority of ratios tested. On the whole, these results reveal the inefficiencies of mergers and acquisitions, supporting the hypothesis of this study.
Is it time to reduce the minimum tick sizes of the E‐mini futures?

On the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), so-called “E-mini” index futures contracts trade on the electronic GLOBEX trading system alongside the corresponding full-size contracts that trade on the open outcry floor. This paper finds that the current minimum tick sizes of the E-mini S&P 500 and E-mini Nasdaq-100 futures contracts act as binding constraints on the bid-ask spreads by not allowing the spreads to decline to competitive levels. We also find that, while exchange locals trade very actively on GLOBEX, they do not tend to act as liquidity suppliers. Taken together, our empirical results suggest that it is time for the CME to consider decreasing the minimum tick sizes of the S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100 E-mini futures contracts. A tick size reduction is likely to result in lower trading costs in the E-mini futures markets. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 25:79–104, 2005
An analysis of the importance of both destruction and creation to economic growth

Abstract A growth model is studied in which the destruction (or exit) and creative (or research) decisions are decoupled. This approach emphasizes that different agents make these interrelated decisions. The growth rate equals the product of a measure of the destruction and creation rates. The determinants of income mobility, income inequality, the lifespan of a firm, and the growth rate are studied. The equilibrium can either yield too high or low a level of innovation, but the destruction rate may also be too high or low. A non-linear tax/subsidy scheme, which alters the innovation and exit decisions, can improve welfare.