The Legal Workshop

Jasmine Revolutions

Will the Internet help topple tyrants, or will it further cement their control? Prominent skeptics challenge the notion that the Internet will help rid the world of dictators and, worse yet, hold that it may even assist autocrats in manipulating the public. I defend the liberalizing promise of cyberspace. Where others discredit the value of the Internet to dissidents, I respond to the main critiques of that position—that Internet activism is futile, that the Internet is simply the new opiate of the masses, and that autocrats will benefit more from the Internet than dissidents. I argue that dictators have revealed their own appraisals of the Internet: when threatened, they shut it down. Tyrants today fear the Internet more than they benefit from it. Recent events confirmed this truth: on the day when the rebels marched into Tripoli, they restored Libya’s connection to the Internet.
The upheavals in Tunisia and Egypt… Read More »

Interactive Contracting in Social Networks

Mark Chen

Rethinking Legal Globalization: The Case of Transnational Personal Jurisdiction

Donald Earl Childress III

Transnational law and globalization talk is in vogue. Scholars have created a massive oeuvre of transnational legal scholarship. Judges, including United States Supreme Court Justices, frequently travel abroad to teach transnational law and take part in law reform efforts in foreign countries. In some cases, judges cite foreign law. United… Read More »

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: Financial Regulation for the 21st Century

Leonard Kennedy & Patricia McCoy & Ethan Bernstein

The recent financial crisis, the worst since the Great Depression, was partly the result of federal regulatory failure. This regulatory apparatus was simply not up to the task of responding to new products offered in the midst of the dramatic growth in lending. Some lenders took advantage by issuing increasingly… Read More »

Dodd–Frank’s Say on Pay: Will It Lead To A Greater Role for Shareholders in Corporate Governance?

Randall S. Thomas & Alan R. Palmiter & James F. Cotter

For the past twenty years, executive pay in U.S. public companies has been controversial. Some say its set by captured boards and is too high. Some say it reflects the marketplace in action, and executives get what they’re worth. Some say its being reformed and increasingly rewards the right things.… Read More »

Credit Card Pricing: The CARD Act and Beyond

Oren Bar-Gill & Ryan Bubb

Credit card contracts have come under increased public and political scrutiny. This scrutiny culminated in the passage, by an overwhelming bipartisan majority, of the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act of 2009 (the CARD Act) and in the creation, as part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection… Read More »

The Limits of ‘Name and Shame’ in International Financial Regulation

Edward F. Greene & Joshua L. Boehm

The global financial crisis left no doubt that national regulatory systems were flawed across many dimensions. Legislatures in key jurisdictions, in response, authorized sweeping reforms that promise to remake the landscape of financial regulation, once fully implemented. Much commentary has since focused on the merits of those reforms – and… Read More »

Revitalizing the Patent System to Incentivize Pharmaceutical Innovation: The Potential of Claims with Means-Plus-Function Clauses

Wanli (Lily) Tang

Traditionally, the United States patent system has been considered successful in promoting innovation in the pharmaceutical industry. In the past few years, however, loss of patent protection has caused sales revenue for innovative firms to plummet. Many firms have heavily cut their investments in research and development (R&D) for new… Read More »

Have No Fear (“Of Piling Inference Upon Inference”): How United States v. Comstock Can Save the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act

Margaret K. O'Leary

I. Introduction
In United States v. Comstock, the Supreme Court upheld under the Necessary and Proper Clause Congress’s creation of a post-sentence federal civil-commitment scheme for sexually dangerous individuals in federal custody. Comstock sparked a number of questions, including what effect the fungible five-consideration test the Court used to uphold the… Read More »

Hidden or on the Hip: The Right(s) to Carry After Heller

James Bishop

The right to carry a loaded firearm—either openly or concealed—has never been more controversial. The country is still reeling from shootings in Florida and Arizona by gunmen who obtained and carried their weapons in accordance with permissive state laws, and a national debate is raging over self-defense and access to handguns. …READ MORE » Read More »