Revisiting Barter under the CISG

As the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (hereinafter “UNCITRAL”) circulated a draft of what eventually became the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sales of Goods (hereinafter “CISG”), it examined the need for uniform law with respect to barter transactions. At that time in 1978, various international organizations were concerned that, while barter transactions were infrequent at the domestic level, such transactions carried growing importance in international trade

Is Lawfare Worth Defining - Report of the Cleveland Experts Meeting - September 11, 2010

This is the report of the Cleveland Experts Meeting

Is Lawfare Worth Defining - Report of the Cleveland Experts Meeting - September 11, 2010

This is the report of the Cleveland Experts Meeting

Economic Policy After a Lost Decade--from Over-Spending to Innovation

In this article, I want to focus on one aspect of our economic recovery-namely, how do we grow an economy without relying upon debt-fueled overconsumption? I argue that the magnitude of the 2007-2009 collapse was based significantly on unsustainable spending that had propped up the previous expansion. National policy during the first years of the last decade turned a sizable national surplus into a huge deficit through war spending, tax cuts, and expansion of public programs that were not paid for.The spending patterns of American families followed a similar pattern in which traditional savings rates shrunk precipitously while family debt expanded. The combination of deficit spending at the federal level and expansion of family spending, fueled by savings reduction and overuse of debt, had a positive effect on economic growth while it lasted. But the trend could not continue.So now, as the economy is once again growing, we have to make sure that growth occurs in a way that is sustainable

Toward a More Strategic National Stockpile

The COVID–19 pandemic exposed major deficiencies in the United States’ approach to stockpiling for emergencies. States, cities, and hospitals across the country had meager inventories of critical medical items on hand when the pandemic first reached U.S. soil, and the federal government’s Strategic National Stockpile proved far too small to serve the country’s needs in the first several months of the crisis. As nationwide shortages spread, many state governments were compelled to bid against each other to procure scarce medical supplies—a distribution approach that disadvantaged low-income and minority communities and left countless healthcare professionals and staff ill-equipped to protect themselves against a deadly virus. These severe supply shortages, which hindered the country’s early pandemic response, have since generated an unprecedented push to reform the nation’s stockpiling policy structure. This Article uses a simple cost-benefit model to highlight shortcomings in the existing U.S. stockpiling policy regime and to identify specific avenues for addressing them. Among other things, U.S. stockpiling policies need to better account for important differences in the rotatability of supplies and should incentivize more private stockpiling of the most rotatable emergency items. Targeted reforms of commandeering laws and price-gouging restrictions could further strengthen private incentives to stockpile and may even help to clarify how states and the federal government share responsibilities in the nation’s stockpiling effort. And much more federal support is needed to incentivize the build-out and maintenance of domestic supply chains for the least-rotatable emergency goods. Such tailoring of policies and programs to better fit the unique attributes of stockpiling activities can help ensure the nation is far better equipped to respond the next time disaster strikes