UCLR Online
Commentators have explored many important questions in the wake of Seila Law LLC v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Do Myers v. United States and Humphrey’s Executor v. United States still stand for the proposition that Congress can impose limitations on the president’s removal authority for agency heads as long as it does not retain a role for itself?
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.
Slices and Lumps, the remarkable new book by Professor Lee Fennell, begins from the title itself to tell a story about the instability of how the world is organized. Lumps can be natural things, formed in a bowl by humidity’s kiss, but slices are often the work of human intervention.
Slices and Lumps is a recipe book for thinking. Using a deceptively simple analytical framework, the book showcases the power of conceptualizing the world through the prism of “slices” and “lumps.”
Economists often employ a convenient set of assumptions regarding the goods that individuals care about and the form of individuals’ preferences for these goods.
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.
A new class of assets has revolutionized capital raising, redefining antiquated notions of the terms “coins” and “tokens,” and capturing an increasingly significant role in financial markets. Celebrated by cryptoenthusiasts, blockchain-based coin offerings expand opportunities for entrepreneurs to raise capital and individual, retail, and institutional investors to invest.
The links between business, human rights, and compliance are often nonobvious. Firstly, these are disciplines and discourses that have evolved separately. Secondly, in the few incidental contexts where human rights and compliance have been mentioned together, it has often been in the context of voluntary initiatives that fall at the less compelling end of the compliance spectrum.
Creating systems to create, promote, and encourage ethical behavior within firms is a maddeningly difficult endeavor. The interplay between legal and regulatory requirements, the creation of compliance policies and procedures, and the instillation of ethical behavior within firms is not a new challenge, but it may be at a tipping point.