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Volume 4.1
Horizons of Risk: Climate Stress and the Federal Reserve
David A. Wishnick
Associate Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center.

Thanks to Nakita Cuttino, Anna Gelpern, David Hyman, Don Langevoort, Adam Levitin, Morgan Ricks, Hillary Sale, Bob Thompson, Jon Zytnick, and workshop participants at Georgetown, Rutgers, Vanderbilt, and the AALS Financial Regulation Midyear Meeting for helpful comments and engaging discussions. For their skilled research assistance, I thank Maddie Bowen, Matteo Crow, and Amelia Lucas.

Contemporary financial supervision depends on knowledge about risk. Threats to bank soundness and financial stability abound, but they present themselves in amorphous ways. How should supervisors assess their significance? This Article examines a process being employed by the Federal Reserve (Fed) to assess threats posed by climate change.

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Volume 4.1
A Commitment Rule for Insolvency Forum
Anthony J. Casey
Donald M. Ephraim Professor of Law and Economics and Faculty Director of the Center on Law and Finance at The University of Chicago Law School. Email: ajcasey@uchicago.edu.

This research is funded by the Becker Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago. The Richard Weil Faculty Research Fund and the Paul H. Leffmann Fund also provided generous support. I thank Carrie Boone, Taerin Kim, and Emma Xu for their excellent research assistance. A preliminary version of this article was presented at Singapore Management University during my stay as SGRI Visiting Professor in September 2023.

Aurelio Gurrea-Martínez
Associate Professor of Law and Head of the Singapore Global Restructuring Initiative at Singapore Management University. Email: aureliogm@smu.edu.sg.

For excellent research assistance, I would like to thank Linus Koh.

Robert K. Rasmussen
Professor of Law and J. Thomas McCarthy Trustee Chair in Law and Political Science at USC Gould School of Law. Email: rrasmussen@law.usc.edu.

In this Article, we propose a new rule for determining the proper forum for insolvency proceedings. Currently, the Model Law on Cross-Border Insolvency (Model Law)—promulgated by the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL)—looks to a debtor’s center of main interest (COMI) to determine the proper forum for a foreign main insolvency proceeding. This rule is flawed.

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Volume 4.1
Event Contracts Are a Step Too Far for Derivatives Regulation
Ilya Beylin
Associate Professor, Seton Hall Law School, B.A.S. Stanford University, J.D. University of Chicago Law School. 

Devin Droll and Najma Hassan provided valuable research assistance. I am grateful for feedback from Tom W. Bell, Onnig H. Dombalagian, Gary E. Kalbaugh, Stephen Lubben, Gideon Mark, Fabio Mattos, Todd Phillips, Andrew Verstein, Adam Wells and participants at the Seton Hall Law School summer scholarship seminar, inaugural Metropolitan Junior Scholars workshop and the AALS Financial Institutions Regulation mid-year meeting at The Wharton School. All errors are my own.

This Article develops two branches of history towards understanding derivatives markets and their regulation. First, using a comprehensive database of derivatives products that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has authorized, this Article traces stages in the development of derivatives products.

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Volume 4.1
Captured Innovation: Technology Monopoly Response to Transformational Development
Reed Showalter
Reed Showalter is an Attorney Advisor at the Department of Justice Antitrust Division. He was a Senior Policy Advisor at the White House National Economic Council until January 20, 2025. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the United States Department of Justice or the White House.
Laura Edelson
Laura Edelson is an Assistant Professor at Northeastern University.

This Article examines how monopoly power warps incentives to innovate within the largest tech companies across history.

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Public Interest and Politics: How FTC v. Kroger Illustrates the Modern Role of the State Attorney General
Jonathan Coleman
University of Chicago Law School '25.

Behind the failed Kroger–Albertsons merger lies a story of coalitions and ambition. FTC v. Kroger offers a case study of how the state attorney general’s role has evolved from local law enforcement to national policymaking. In the federal case, state attorneys general divided along partisan lines in their efforts either to block the merger or to see it enforced. After tracing the development of the office in modern America, this essay argues that FTC v. Kroger captures the dual nature of the state attorney general as both guardian of the public interest and political actor. Ultimately, the case illustrates how the state attorney general now shapes nationally significant federal litigation through multistate coalitions that can elevate the attorney general to the national stage.

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Online Edition '25
Equitable Estoppel Against the Federal Government: The Case of SEC v. Coinbase
Uven Chong
University of Chicago Law School ‘26

The now-dismissed case against Coinbase is a symptom of a dynamic regulatory environment where rules for cryptocurrency trading are uncertain. The hallmark uncertainty within the cryptocurrency industry creates a fertile ground for evaluating equitable estoppel claims, where companies are forced to rely on inconsistent messages and unsettled policy to their detriment.

Indeed, Coinbase raised an equitable estoppel defense in its case against the SEC. Coinbase argued that it relied on the SEC’s representations that Coinbase was not violating securities law. The facts of Coinbase’s case could lay the groundwork for future cases to push the traditionally strict boundaries of equitable estoppel against government entities.

The purpose of this comment is to evaluate the strength of Coinbase’s equitable estoppel claims. Given the case’s dismissal, equitable estoppel is no longer relevant to Coinbase. But by evaluating the strength of the doctrine against this case, future cryptocurrency firms may be able to use its lessons as a defense should the policies shift against cryptocurrency firms again.

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Online Edition '25
The Potential Antitrust Implications of Tying Hardware with AI
Chase Hiatt
University of Chicago Law School ‘26

Artificial intelligence (AI) has begun to significantly impact many sectors of the economy and everyday life. As generative AI models improve at unimaginable rates, AI will become continually integrated into our daily lives. This will undoubtedly involve integrating AI tools into the technology that millions of people use daily, including PCs, phones, digital watches, and televisions—technology that many people cannot live without. Indeed, some companies are already beginning to do so. Seems great, right? Maybe so, but only time will tell how effective the integration of AI into hardware will be.

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Online Edition '25
Materiality, the ‘Reasonable Investor,’ and the SEC’s New Climate-Related Disclosures Rule
Bernard S. Sharfman
Research Fellow with the Law & Economics Center at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School.

The touchstone of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) new rule on climate-related disclosures, The Enhancement and Standardization of Climate-Related Disclosures for Investors (the “Rule”), is materiality. As Cyndy Posner pointed out, there are over 1,000 references to material or materiality in the Rule. Such an approach must have pleased those commentators who feared the Rule would result in public companies being burdened with providing costly disclosures of non-material information and investors being overwhelmed with information they do not need or want.