Lawyer Speech in the Regulatory State

A lawyer’s speech as advisor and advocate not only holds First Amendment value for the client and for the public, but also for the functioning of American democracy. This is supported both by foundational values undergirding the First Amendment as well as Supreme Court doctrine. This Article builds upon that analysis to posit that lawyers for the regulatory state ought not to be treated as government employees for purposes of the First Amendment when engaged in speech about workplace conditions related to curbing abuse of power, corruption, or other illegality. While this position runs counter to the existing precedent of closely divided Supreme Court decisions, it finds support in a historical and philosophical understanding of free speech principles

Prioritizing Professional Responsibility and the Legal Profession: A Preview of the United States Supreme Court’s 2009–2010 Term

This term, the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear ten cases on the role of attorneys and the practice of law. In doing so, the Court is departing from its normal practice of hearing two, or at most three, cases on professional responsibility. Prof. Renee Knake of Michigan State University College of Law reviews the professional responsibility cases on the Court\u27s docket and examines how they could influence the practice of law

The Jesuit Archives and Research Center: Your Next Research Destination?

This article provides background information on the Jesuit Archives & Research Center (JARC), describes types of materials at JARC related to the history of education, and explains how to use the resources housed at JARC. As the Reference Archivist at JARC, Ann Knake facilitates the use of these archival collections by fielding reference inquiries and coordinating research visits

The fate of the passbook: Why it vanished in the US but survived in Germany during the stagflation period (1966–1983)

In his article, Sebastian Knake challenges the general assumption that traditional savings accounts in the US disappeared naturally as a result of the combination of interest rate regulation and extraordinarily high market interest rates during the stagflation period. By comparing the US experience with simultaneous developments in West Germany, he finds that the opportunity costs of owning a regular passbook were comparable in both countries. In contrast to the US case, however, the passbook remained a cornerstone of household saving in Germany. Drawing upon research in several bank archives in the US and Germany, Knake explains these divergent developments in terms of fundamental differences in how banks and their customers communicated over prices. In the US, a peculiar combination of regulative rules forced banks, and especially savings institutions, to aggressively promote new types of bank accounts that were introduced by federal regulation authorities, thereby increasing nominal interest rate expectations. In Germany, by contrast, banks confined information about advantageous investment opportunities to the smallest possible share of the customer base. These divergent communication strategies reflect a difference in the balance of power in the bank–customer relationship. Ger man customers depended on their primary—and in most cases only—bank relationship to acquire information on alternative investments, while US customers could draw on several relationships with banks and savings institutions to obtain the relevant information. Thus, the fate of the passbook was sealed by the ability or inability of banks to keep their customers in the dark about the real opportunity costs of passbook saving

Changing Forecasts - Forecasting Change

Since the late 1960s, the rising volatility of financial markets in the US has troubled econometricians and bank managers alike. Both professions have found it increasingly difficult to forecast savings deposit flows. This article explores these challenges by focusing on two developments. First, it explores the internal adjustment process among econometric models of the savings deposit market. To achieve this aim, I use the so-called FMP (MPS) macro model used by the Federal Reserve Board since 1970 and the deposit forecast model of the Philadelphia Saving Fund Society (PSFS), the oldest and largest savings bank in the US. I find that economists failed to find timeless determinants for the market for savings deposits, partly because the determinants of expectation formation of households kept changing. Instead, economists relied on a large number of time-dependent dummy variables. Second, the article shows how the conditions of the market for savings deposits shaped the demand for macroeconomic forecast models. Here, I again use PSFS as a case study. I show that the demand for econometric models in the banking industry skyrocketed in the 1970s but abated somewhat in the 1980s. While the rising volatility led bank managers to seek sophisticated tools to predict deposit flows, the deregulation of the banking industry and the accompanying change in customer behavior devalued macro models as a reliable forecast technique for individual banks. Instead, it became crucial for banks to predict the future behavior of competing institutions

Democratizing the Delivery of Legal Services

Article published in the Ohio State Law Journal