In 2016, we co-authored a symposium article, The Grass is Not Always Greener: Congressional Dysfunction, Executive Action, and Climate Change in Comparative Perspective, 91 Chi.-Kent L. Rev. 139 (2016), that compared the impact of polarization on the process of creating climate change law and policy in the United States and Australia. We found that while […]

The social cost of greenhouse gases provides the best available method to quantify and monetize the climate damages attributable to the emission of an incremental unit of heat-trapping pollution. Accordingly, the metric can be highly useful for crafting policies that will reduce the nation’s greenhouse gas footprint, with potential usages including weighing the impacts of […]

As the Biden Administration works on updating the social cost of carbon (SCC), some economists are urging a different approach, known as the “Marginal Abatement Cost” (MAC) method or the “target-consistent” approach. Rather than attempting to calculate all the damage caused worldwide by each ton of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere, the MAC approach […]

The Supreme Court’s ongoing efforts to narrow the contours of administrative agencies’ policymaking discretion comes at a particularly inopportune time. The nation faces a set of increasingly complex and pressing national problems, including climate change, that require the simultaneous application of careful deliberation and expertise, something Congress is ill-suited to do in the best of […]

Do foreign lives matter? When? How much? If one nation damages another, what are its obligations, as a matter of law and policy? These questions can be approached and understood in diverse ways, but they are concretized in debates over the “social cost of carbon,” which is sometimes described as the linchpin of national climate […]

Climate change poses an enormous risk to plant and animal species across the planet. Mean global temperatures have already increased by approximately 1ºC, causing environmental changes that affect species abundance, distribution, behavior, physiology, genetics, and survival prospects. These changes, combined with other human stressors, have already resulted in the extinction of some species and imperiled […]

The lenders that fund Chapter 11 reorganizations exert significant influence over the bankruptcy process through the contract associated with the debtor-in-possession (DIP) loan. In this Article, we study a large sample of DIP loan contracts and document a trend: over the past three decades, DIP lenders have steadily increased their contractual control of Chapter 11. […]

Public enforcement actions frequently result in the distribution of money to people affected by violations of market protection laws. This “public compensation” returns billions of dollars to consumers, investors, and others each year. The law of public compensation appears confusing at first impression because of inconsistent use of nomenclature and conceptual confusion. However, courts have […]

This Article addresses an important question in modern antitrust: when large investment funds have holdings across an industry, is competition depressed? The question of the impact of common ownership on competition has gained much attention as the role of institutional shareholding has grown, with the funds of the three largest management companies holding in aggregate […]

Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPACs)—touted as a better alternative to an IPO for taking a company public—have become the next big thing in the securities markets. This Article analyzes the structure of SPACs and the costs embedded in that structure. We find that costs embedded in the SPAC structure are subtle, opaque, higher than has […]

As the Supreme Court reconsiders whether Congress can so freely provide for criminal enforcement of agency rules, this Article assesses the critique of administrative crimes though a federal criminal law lens. It explores the extent to which this critique carries over to other instances of mostly well-accepted, delegated federal criminal lawmaking—to courts, states, foreign governments, […]

The century-long separation of banking and commerce enshrined in U.S. law has weakened in recent decades. The academic literature has thus far focused mainly on conceptual benefits and costs of the trend, arguing that the integration of banking and commerce might lead to efficiency gains through diversification in a greater number of distinct business lines, […]

This Note examines the relationship between presidential signing statements and administrative decision-making over the Obama and Trump presidencies and from a variety of institutional angles, updating previous studies rooted in a narrow set of observations from the mid-2000s. It identifies occasions where presidents, agencies, and other Executive Branch actors have referenced statements in the course […]

Bankruptcy has a tort problem. Chapter 11 predictably subordinates the claims of tort and other involuntary creditors to those of financial lenders, a fact which encourages firms to rely excessively on secured debt and discount the interests of those they might incidentally harm. For this reason, many scholars have advocated changing repayment priorities to move […]

A huge literature contemplates the theoretical relationship between judicial deference and agency rulemaking. But relatively little empirical work has studied the actual effect of deference on how agencies draft regulations. As a result, some of the most important questions surrounding deference—whether it encourages agencies to focus on policy analysis instead of legal analysis, its relationship […]