Daily Archives: July 6, 2007

The Absorption Nation

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immigration_protest.jpgIn this TCS op-ed, Don Boudreaux points out an incongruity in the current political debate over immigration:

In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson complained that King George III “has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.”

In a related blog post, Professor Boudreaux asks the following:

Why is it that today, the wealthiest time in our history, so many Americans fear immigration? Why do so few Americans today share Jefferson’s understanding that more free people in America mean an even more prosperous America?

Read the entire op-ed.

Legal investment banking on climate change

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Susman.jpgThe Dallas Morning News’ Eric Torbenson examines a potential growth area for business plaintiffs’ lawyers and another burgeoning risk for business — lawsuits asserting responsibility for damagres caused by climate change. And guess who’s right in the middle of it? None other than Houston’s longtime business plaintiff’s lawyer, Steve Susman:

Steve Susman of Susman Godfrey in Houston has been a pioneer in such litigation. He led the charge this year to force TXU Energy into building fewer coal-fired plants in Texas than it had planned.
Now he’s among several lawyers talking with a group of Inuits in northern Canada who have seen an entire island sink under rising seas from global warming. The tribe is weighing its options, including suing carbon-emitting corporations such as power companies for heating the planet, he said.
“Melting glaciers isn’t going to get that much going, but wait until the first big ski area closes because it has no snow,” said Mr. Susman, who teaches a climate-change litigation course at the University of Houston Law School. “Or wait until portions of lower Manhattan and San Francisco are under water.”
Some lawyers are trying to tie the damage from Hurricane Katrina to global warming ñ and the energy companies who may have contributed to that warming.
Mr. Susman predicts large insurance companies, which have paid out billions of dollars in claims in the past two decades because of powerful hurricanes, eventually will become plaintiffs in broad greenhouse-effect litigation against energy companies. [. . .]
“You’re going to see some really serious exposure on the part of companies that are emitting CO-2,” Mr. Susman predicted. “I can’t say for sure it’s going to be as big as the tobacco settlements, but then again it may even be bigger. . .”

Oh, my.

Nimmer on over-regulation of e-commerce

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Ray%20Nimmer070607.jpgRay Nimmer, the Dean and Leonard Childs Professor of Law at the University of Houston Law Center, is one of Houston’s foremost legal thinkers and an internationally recognized expert in legal issues relating to e-commerce. Ray’s academic and administrative duties do not leave him much time to blog, but when he does, it’s always worth reading. His latest post is on the risk of over-regulating e-commerce:

In our world, significant change seldom flows smoothly. While many embrace change, others resist it. Some of the resistance is due to what Lewellyn explained years ago: ìYou wake up then to the fact that the throne your subject matter once occupied is overshadowedî; that is a fearful situation for many. The costs imposed on commerce by reaction to that fear are extravagant and harmful.
In my view, rather than protecting the status quo, the role of law generally should be to establish a responsive body of rules that support change and that limit regulation to cases where actual clear abuse otherwise exists. This has been the tradition of U.S. commercial law. But it has not consistently been the way in which law related to electronic commercial transactions has evolved. Instead, we have seen an explosion of new law, often regulatory in nature, . . . Too often, political arguments and interest group politics weigh in toward the view that the proper role of law is to regulate commerce, rather than to support it. Much of this lies simply in a grab for position enforced through law, rather than in the marketplace. . .
But when a regulatory approach is taken in a period of rapid social change, the result is an enormous expansion of new law and we pay a huge price for this. Its short-term effect lies in the creation of an often-bewildering array of new rules and regulations with which commercial entities must deal, and which seldom reflect sound or considered legal or social policy.

Read the entire post.