Category: Articles

American foundations and other philanthropic giving entities hold about $1 trillion in investment assets, and that figure continues to grow every year. Even as urgent contemporary needs go unmet, philanthropic organizations spend only a tiny fraction of their wealth each year, mostly due to restrictive terms in contracts between donors and firms limiting the rate…

In the past few years, we have seen the rise of a new model of production and consumption of goods and services, often referred to as the “sharing economy.” Fueled by startups such as Uber and Airbnb, sharing enables individuals to obtain rides, accommodations, and other goods and services from peers via personal computer or…

Since the terrible shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, lawmakers and school officials continue to deliberate over new laws and policies to keep students safe, including putting more police officers in schools. Yet these decisionmakers have not given enough attention to the potential negative consequences that such laws and policies may have,…

The Big Data revolution is upon us. Technological advances in the degree to which third parties can record information about individuals, along with increases in the use of predictive analytics, are transforming the way that business is conducted in practically all sectors of the economy. This is particularly true in the insurance industry, where a…

The United States is facing a retirement crisis, in significant part because defined benefit pension plans have been replaced by defined contribution retirement plans that, whatever their theoretical merit, have left significant numbers of workers unprepared for retirement. A troubling example of the continuing movement away from defined benefit plans is a new phenomenon euphemistically…

Copyright law lacks a coherent method to determine non-literal infringement. The core inquiry, “substantial similarity,” purports to assess whether two works are so alike that an accused work infringes the original. Substantial similarity is a fundamental limit on the scope of copyright, but it is plagued by confusion and governed by a series of arcane…

The Obama Administration’s “Clean Power Plan” for addressing industrial carbon emissions is controversial as a matter of environmental policy. It also has important constitutional implications. The rule was initially crafted not by officers or employees of the Environmental Protection Agency, but by two private lawyers and a scientist with industry ties. Private parties operate extra-constitutionally,…

An event study is a statistical method for determining whether some event—such as the announcement of earnings or the announcement of a proposed merger—is associated with a statistically significant change in the price of a company’s stock. The main inputs to an event study are historical stock returns for the companies under study, benchmark returns…

The Supreme Court decision in Halliburton Co. v. Erica P. John Fund, Inc., 134 S. Ct. 2398 (2014), reaffirmed the availability of the fraud-on-the-market presumption of “reliance” for purposes of a Rule 10b-5 class certification. At the same time, the Court held that defendants could rebut the presumption if they could provide “direct evidence” that…

Securities class actions play a crucial, if contested, role in the policing of securities fraud and the protection of securities markets. The theoretical understanding of these private enforcement claims needs to evolve to encompass the broader set of goals that underlie the securities regulatory impulse and the publicness of those goals. Further, a clear grasp…