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Volume 1.1
Pills in a World of Activism and ESG
Caley Petrucci
Climenko Fellow & Lecturer on Law, Harvard Law School

Comments welcome at cpetrucci@law.harvard.edu

Guhan Subramanian
Joseph Flom Professor of Law & Business, Harvard Law School; Douglas Weaver Professor of Business Law, Harvard Business School; Faculty Chair, Harvard Law School Program on Negotiation; Faculty Chair, Harvard Business School Mergers & Acquisitions Executive Education Program; Chairman of the Board of Directors, LKQ Corp. (NASDAQ: LKQ)

Professor Subramanian served as an expert witness for The Williams Companies and Versum Materials, Inc. in the poison pill litigation that is discussed in the text. We thank participants at the University of Chicago Business Law Review Symposium and the Harvard JD/MBA Seminar for their thoughtful comments on earlier drafts. We also thank Marc Schwab for his excellent research assistance.

Easterbrook and Fischel’s The Economic Structure of Corporate Law advances their now famous passivity thesis, which posits that managers should remain passive in the face of an unsolicited tender offer for the company’s shares. Consistent with the broader Chicago-school economic belief, Easterbrook and Fischel argue that markets are generally efficient, and therefore restrictions on the market (like poison pills) are bad. In doing so, Easterbrook and Fischel also consider and reject externalities that might cause the market for corporate control to not function well.

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Volume 1.1
Who Can Tax Telecommuters?: A Case for an Economic Presence Regime
Garry Canepa
J.D. 2022, The University of Chicago Law School

Many thanks to Professor Julie Roin for her useful feedback and rigorous criticisms, making any faults in reasoning my own. Thanks to The University of Chicago Business Law Review editors for their extensive comments and edits.

Should telecommuters who work across states be taxed by the state that they are physically working in? By the state their office is located in? By both? This issue was raised in New Hampshire v. Massachusetts. There, New Hampshire challenged the taxing authority of a Massachusetts rule that taxed New Hampshire residents who had worked within a Massachusetts office prior to COVID-19 related restrictions but were telecommuting from New Hampshire.

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Volume 1.1
Domestic Corporations and the Alien Tort Statute
Joseph Downey
J.D. Candidate 2023, The University of Chicago Law School

This Comment analyzes the history, jurisprudence, and contemporary status of the Alien Tort Statute, which allows foreign citizens to bring suit in US courts for violations of international law. It attempts to answer two unresolved questions relating to the Alien Tort Statute. First, can domestic corporations be sued under the statue? Based on an analysis of the statute’s text, its history, and lower court decisions, this Comment argues that they rightly should be.

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Volume 1.1
Mandatory Financial Disclosures as Total Regulatory Takings
Jay Khurana
MAcc 2018, Case Western Reserve University; B.S. 2017, Case Western Reserve University; J.D. Candidate 2023, The University of Chicago Law School

Many thanks to the staff and editors of the University of Chicago Business Law Review and to Professor Douglas Baird for their helpful feedback.

In the aftermath of the GameStop phenomenon in early 2021, there have been increasing calls for expanded mandatory financial disclosures particularly regarding hedge funds and short selling. Efforts to increase disclosure requirements on hedge funds may implicate the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment. This comment argues that mandatory disclosure of a firm’s total portfolio—‌its long, short, and derivative positions—‌constitutes an uncompensated taking of its trade secrets.

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Volume 1.1
The FTC and the CPRA’s Regulation of Dark Patterns in Cookie Consent Notices
Danyang Li
J.D. Candidate 2023, The University of Chicago Law School

Dark patterns are designed to confuse and manipulate users to select the option preferred by website owners. Dark patterns are especially prevalent in cookie consent notices, which are notices that websites display to inquire users regarding their cookie preferences. Cookies are often used by websites to track and store user information for functional and marketing purposes. Dark patterns exploit various psychological biases, and the interaction among the biases will likely exacerbate their effects. This Article examines 100 cookie consent notices from the most popular e-commerce websites in the United States and offers a set of empirical data on the current landscape of dark patterns in cookie consent notices.

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Volume 1.1
Tyson and Leviathan: USDA Rulemaking and the PSA Harm to Competition Requirement
Spencer James Parts
J.D. Candidate 2023, The University of Chicago Law School

Many thanks to Clare Downing, Robert Clark and the University of Chicago Business Law Review staff. Thanks also to Professor Randal Picker and to Renic Sloan for their helpful comments, and to Pallavi Guniganti for first introducing me to this topic. 

Facing concentration in meatpacking, farmers and ranchers are making increasingly urgent calls for protection from practices they claim make it difficult for them to earn a living. Among the statutes they have turned to for recourse is the Packers and Stockyards Act, a 1921 law that prohibits meatpackers from engaging in unfair, deceptive, or unjustly discriminatory practices. Courts, however, have made PSA cases more difficult to win by requiring that plaintiffs prove “harm to competition” to bring a successful case. Recently, the USDA has intervened in this debate, alternately supporting each side of the harm to competition question in controversial rulemakings, and it is now planning to once again propose a rule saying the PSA does not require harm to competition.