Faculty Fellows
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Avishalom Tor
Director, Research Program on Law and Market Behavior, Professor of Law
Spotlight Research: Nudges that Should Fail?
Nudges that Should Fail evaluates more fully the case of failed nudges and examines the unaddressed problem of successful yet undesirable nudges. This analysis shows that the failure of nudging bears only limited diagnostic value while the success of a nudge is even less indicative of its normative status. The article concludes with recommendations for policy makers who wish to employ nudges that are not only efficacious but also likely to advance the subjective well-being of the individuals they target.
Other Research:
- The Target Opportunity Costs of Successful Nudges, in Consumer Law and Economics
- New Developments in Competition and Economics
- Social Comparison Before, During, and After the Competition in Social Comparison, Judgment, and Behavior
- Justifying Competition Law in the Face of Consumers’ Bounded Rationality, in New Developments in Competition Law and Economics
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Sadie Blanchard
Associate Professor of Law
Spotlight Research: Nominal Damages as Vindication
A recent Supreme Court decision inspired a resurgence of interest in an old mystery: how can nominal damages vindicate a plaintiff for past harm? The Court relied on the longstanding common law practice of entitling a plaintiff to sue for violation of her rights, even without demonstrating harm in fact, and to recover nominal damages. Courts have long asserted that awarding nominal damages in such suits vindicates the plaintiff. But they have not explained just how awarding $1 provides vindication, and serious observers scoff at the idea that it does. This Article offers a theory of vindication through nominal damages litigation. It argues that permitting suits for nominal damages enables courts to function as producers of presumptively reliable reputation-relevant information. Plaintiffs pursue, and courts have long allowed, lawsuits for nominal damages when these suits might provide information that effectively remedies or deters harm.
Other Research:
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Patrick Corrigan
Associate Professor of Law
Spotlight research: Footloose with Green Shoes? Can Underwriters Profit from IPO Underpricing?,
In this article Corrigan sets forth a more satisfactory explanation for the use of green shoe options and overallotments in IPOs: they are used to maximize the principal trading payoffs of underwriters.
Other research:
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Martijn Cremers
Martin J. Gillen Dean, Mendoza College of Business and the Bernard J. Hank Professor of Finance Concurrent Professor of Law
Spotlight Research: "Is the Staggered Board Debate Really Settled?"
This article addresses a previous study in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Settling the Staggered Board Debate, and shows that the staggered board debate is very much alive rather than settled. It shows that our prior result that the adoption of a staggered board is associated with a positive increase in firm value is robust to the criticism in previous study. Second, it shows that previous study's conclusion that staggered boards have no significant association with firm value is based on statistical tests that have “poor power,” that is, tests that are unlikely to find a robust association even if such association is actually supported by the data. In contrast, the tests that indicate that our earlier results are robust have both much better statistical power and good “size,” making it unlikely that we can find a positive association between staggered boards and firm value if no such association exists in the data.
Other Research:
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Nicole Stelle Garnett
John P. Murphy Foundation Professor of Law
Spotlight Research: Post-Accountability Accountability
As parental choice in the American educational landscape continues to expand, debates about accountability for chosen schools will only intensify. The questions of whether, when, and how the law ought to regulate the quality of the schools participating in parental-choice programs are important and vexing ones for the law of education. The article, Post-Accountability Accountability, examines these questions and proposes principles to guide regulatory design efforts.
Other Research:
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Dan Kelly
Professor of Law and Director of the Notre Dame Fitzgerald Institute for Real Estate
Spotlight Research: Fiduciary Principles in Fact-Based Fiduciary Relationships, in Oxford Handbook of Fiduciary Law
This chapter examines how courts apply fiduciary principles when a fiduciary relationship is based on the particular facts of a case. It begins with a discussion of the triggers for fact-based fiduciary relationships, giving emphasis on factors that courts take into account in making ad hoc fiduciary determinations as well as the relationship between fact-based and status-based fiduciary relationships. It also explains why courts may recognize fact-based fiduciaries in certain limited circumstances before analyzing the fiduciary duties within fact-based fiduciary relationships, including the duties of loyalty and care along with other legal obligations such as confidentiality, good faith, and disclosure. The chapter concludes by addressing remedies in fact-based fiduciary relationships.
Other Research:
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Maria Maciá
Associate Professor of Law
Spotlight Research: Mandatory Disclosure for Ethical Supply Chains: A Conflict Mineral Case Study
Mandatory disclosure requirements for corporate supply chains have the potential to leverage consumer and investor sensibilities to incentivize corporations to source more ethically. Despite their growing prevalence, there are few empirical studies of their effects: whether they actually put pressure on companies remains untested. This Article supplies such evidence by examining the consumer and investor responses to corporate supply chain disclosures made pursuant to Section 1502 of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. The act requires publicly traded companies to disclose to the Securities and Exchange Commission whether their supply chain contains “conflict minerals” (minerals important in global supply chains whose sourcing supports the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo and surrounding areas). The law aims to give customers and investors information about corporate supply chains, with the hope that they will support companies that source responsibly and punish those that do not. But whether this is actually accomplished is an open question.
Other Research:
Pinning Down Subjective Valuations: A Well-Being Analysis Approach to Eminent Domain
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Steve Yelderman
Professor of Law
Spotlight Research: Do Patent Challenges Increase Competition?
This article is the first to seriously scrutinize the claim that patent challenges lead to increased competition. It identifies a number of conditions that must hold for a patent challenge to provide this particular benefit, and evaluates the reasonableness of assuming that the procompetitive benefits of patent challenges are generally available. This article synthesizes legal doctrine, recent empirical scholarship, and several novel case studies to identify categories of challenges in which the potential benefits for competition are smaller than previously thought or, in some cases, completely unavailable.
Other Research: