Distinguishing the “Truly National” From the “Truly Local”: Customary Allocation, Commercial Activity, and Collective Action

This Essay makes two claims about different methods of defining the expanse and limits of the Commerce Clause. My first claim is that approaches that privilege traditional subjects of state regulation are unworkable and undesirable. These approaches are unworkable in light of the frequency with which the federal government and the states regulate the same subject matter in our world of largely overlapping federal and state legislative jurisdiction. The approaches are undesirable because the question of customary allocation is unrelated to the principal reason why Congress possesses the power to regulate interstate commerce: solving collective action problems involving multiple states. These problems are evident in the way that some federal judges invoked regulatory custom in litigation over the constitutionality of the minimum coverage provision in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The areas of health insurance and health care are not of exclusive state concern, and it is impossible to lose—or to win—a competition requiring skillful lawyers or judges to describe them as more state than federal, or more federal than state. Nor is it most important what the answer is. More promising are the approaches that view congressional authority as turning on either commercial activity or collective action problems facing the states. My second claim is that these two approaches have advantages and disadvantages, and that the choice between them exemplifies the more general tension between applying rules and applying their background justifications. I have previously defended a collective action approach to Article I, Section 8. My primary purpose in this Essay is to clarify the jurisprudential stakes in adopting one method or the other and to identify the problems that advocates of each approach must address

Awareness, understanding and behavior of Islamic banking : Results of a special study

Islamic banking is a growth industry in Malaysia. This research aims to determine the current awareness, understanding and behavior of a specific bank’s customers towards Islamic financing

Why Malaysians join and stay on in a Multi-Level marketing Company

Studies on the Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) industry have noted its impressive exponential growth in the past 30 years in terms of total volume of sales and number of salespersons involved. The purpose of this study is to identify the reasons why Malaysians join and continue to remain in the industry. It was found that the main reasons for joining and remaining in MLMs can be grouped into financial independence, personal freedom, types of products and benefits, product credibility and incentives. The initial data was collected by interviewing a sample of MLM distributors in Kuching and Kota Samarahan, Sarawak, Malaysia. The findings were then extrapolated onto a questionnaire to a larger sample throughout Malaysia. Generally, the findings indicate that the desire for money and product features made respondents to join and stay on. The management of MLM companies should look more into the development and promotion of the product rather than the method of selling. This paper provides new knowledge of why people remain in MLMs, and this is important to academia as well as for MLM management

Supersymmetric Axion-Neutrino Merger

The recently proposed supersymmetric $A_4$ model of the neutrino mass matrix is modified to merge with a previously proposed axionic solution of the strong CP problem. The resulting model has only one input scale, i.e. that of $A_4$ symmetry breaking, which determines both the seesaw neutrino mass scale and the axion decay constant. It also solves the $\mu$ problem and conserves R parity automatically.Comment: 7 pages, no figur