UCLR Online
Professor Lee Fennell’s groundbreaking Slices and Lumps incisively reconceptualizes how the gig—or “slicing”—economy impacts the structuring of work. But it goes even further to alert us to how “delumping the working experience” (p 6) can transform the infrastructure of work, from an individual’s task design to the agglomeration costs and benefits of untying and retying workers to desks, work to benefits, and worksites to surrounding communities.
The importance of aggregation and division in modern antitrust policy cannot be overstated. Illegal acts of collusion are defined by the agreement of separate competitors to join together in acting as though they were a single firm in a collusive scheme.
Regulations, like other legal instruments, often arrive in lumps. An agency, for example, can issue a rule addressing many different subjects, each of which could be split off and issued as a separate regulation.
Law engages aggregation and division in at least one additional, closely related way: law must sometimes decide the proper unit of analysis not just in deciding whether the law has been violated, but also to decide what body of law applies.
One of the many virtues of Lee Fennell’s terrific new book, Slices & Lumps: Division and Aggregation in Law and Life, is her insistence that property scholars vigilantly seek out gaps in existing arrangements. Where there’s a gap, there’s an opportunity to unlock suppressed value.
A popular tweet (popular to a certain segment of folks roughly 250,000 strong, at least) chants, “Who are we? Single young professionals. What do we want? For perishable groceries to be sold in smaller portion sizes.”
Spend too long within the pages of Lee Fennell’s Slices and Lumps and you begin to see slices and lumps everywhere.
Should we reevaluate the sentences of individuals we incarcerate for long periods of time for crimes committed in their youth after they’ve served a decade or more in prison?
In April 2019, Notre Dame Law in London hosted a conference entitled “Investigating Intersections of Corporate Governance & Compliance” with scholars from the United States and United Kingdom participating. The goal of the conference was to facilitate dialogue within and amongst legal scholarly disciplines regarding the ways in which governance and compliance intersect. The effort was a resounding success, and The University of Chicago Law Review Online graciously agreed to publish the six papers presented at the conference.
In 2013, Kareem Serageldin pleaded guilty to conspiracy to falsify books and records of a financial institution. He was mismarking the value of securities at Credit Suisse in order to make them appear more valuable than was really the case. Judge Hellerstein sentenced him to thirty months in prison for his crime.
On March 6, 2019, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) announced that it would be taking an active role in prosecuting violations of the Commodities Exchange Act (CEA) that involve foreign corruption. On the same date, the CFTC published an enforcement advisory further signaling its intention to investigate and prosecute violations of the laws and regulations of the CEA linked to foreign corrupt practices, such as violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA).
The compliance units in financial institutions have experienced explosive growth since the financial crisis. This is not surprising given the equally rapid growth in regulations governing the financial sector.