SSRN

Privacy Is Not Theft by Neil Richards.

In the post‑pandemic era of generative AI, something unusual has happened to the way powerful institutions talk about privacy. Instead of asking for consent or relying on legal fictions, some companies and governments increasingly treat personal data as something they can simply take framing privacy protections as obstacles to innovation, safety, or technological progress. Richards argues that this emerging ideology mirrors the dystopian mantra from Dave Eggers’ The Circle: “Privacy is theft.”

The essay uses Jonathon Penney’s work on chilling effects, alongside broader trans‑Atlantic privacy scholarship, to dismantle this ideology. Richards highlights three contemporary developments that embody the shift: Meta’s aggressive push of “smart” glasses, the use of facial‑recognition tools by federal agents, and Zoom’s presumption that all meetings should be transcribed and analysed by AI. Each reflects a worldview in which data extraction is inevitable and virtuous and in which resistance is framed as selfish or regressive.

Penney’s research shows why this framing is hollow. Privacy is not a barrier to progress but a precondition for individuality, dissent, creativity, and democratic life. Treating privacy as theft obscures a deeper truth: the real “theft” occurs when powerful actors appropriate personal data and reshape social norms without meaningful consent. Richards argues that defending privacy is essential if societies want to preserve democratic autonomy, eccentric individuality, and the space for new, even heretical, ideas.

Read: http://spkl.io/618978KGX

‘This Is Our Hemisphere’: Trump and the Transformation of Intervention in the Americas by Justina Uriburu.

This article argues that the second Trump administration is reshaping inter‑American relations by openly asserting a right to intervene in the domestic affairs of Latin American and Caribbean states. To situate this shift, the piece first traces the history of the non‑intervention principle embedded in the 1948 OAS Charter a norm that long required the United States to maintain legal cover for intervention and enabled Latin American states to contest U.S. actions.

The article then turns to the present, contending that the administration has repositioned the Americas as a central foreign‑policy priority and moved toward overt displays of coercion, breaking with decades of legal‑rhetorical restraint. Compounding this disruption is the muted response from many Latin American and Caribbean governments, a departure from earlier patterns of contestation shaped by fear, strategic calculation, or ideological alignment.

The result is a layered account of how U.S. foreign policy is received by medium and small powers and how shifts in rhetoric, legal framing, and regional diplomacy interact. The article offers a valuable lens for understanding contemporary inter‑American order and the evolving politics of non‑intervention.

Read: http://spkl.io/618378J0x

The Labor Market Amplification of Climate Policy by Camille Cousin, Jean‑Guillaume Sahuc, and Gauthier Vermandel.

Debates on climate policy often focus on carbon pricing, transition paths, and long‑run welfare but they typically treat the labour market as frictionless. This paper shows why that assumption is costly. Using an estimated nonlinear macro‑climate model with search‑and‑matching frictions and endogenous carbon dynamics, disciplined by U.S. data, the authors demonstrate that labour‑market structure fundamentally reshapes both the short‑run and long‑run effects of decarbonisation.

In the model, carbon pricing and climate damages alter firms’ incentives to create jobs, generating persistent unemployment and amplifying transition dynamics. Labour frictions significantly deepen short‑run contractions associated with net‑zero policies. Yet they also nearly double long‑run gains from avoided climate damages, because tighter labour markets magnify the benefits of reduced climate‑related productivity losses.

The takeaway is clear: ignoring labour frictions mismeasures both the costs and benefits of climate policy including the scope for a double dividend from revenue recycling. Accounting for labour‑market structure is essential for realistic modelling of decarbonisation and for designing effective climate‑transition policy.

Read: http://spkl.io/618478Jt2

Law Power by Mark Jia

International‑relations scholarship has long theorised military, economic, and cultural power yet it lacks a general account of legal power. This article fills that gap by introducing “law power”: a nation‑state’s ability to use law to influence others and secure its interests. In an era of juridified geopolitics, Jia argues, law power has become a leading form of national power, operating alongside and sometimes substituting for more familiar tools of statecraft.

The article shows how law power illuminates patterns across diverse phenomena: states’ strategic use of foreign courts, the expansion of extraterritorial jurisdiction, and the export of regulatory norms. It also raises foundational questions about the resources, construction, and distribution of law power questions long asked about military and economic power but rarely applied to law. Finally, it demonstrates how a law‑power lens clarifies contemporary geopolitics, revealing where rising powers are building legal influence and where established powers are seeing it erode. The result is a compelling framework for understanding how states deploy legal systems, institutions, and norms as instruments of geopolitical competition.

Read: http://spkl.io/618678JmI

Do More Empathic Hospital Trusts Have Better Outcomes? Developing and Testing a System Empathy Index by Jeremy Howick, Amber Bennett‑Weston, and Jason Oke.

Empathy is widely recognised as beneficial in clinical encounters, yet most research focuses on individual practitioners. This study asks a deeper question: can empathy be measured at the system level and does it matter for outcomes? The authors develop the first “system empathy index” for NHS trusts, built from nine domains ranging from organisational culture and leadership to workload, environment, practitioner empathy, and staff wellbeing. Using publicly available data, each trust receives a 1–10 score.

The results are striking. A modest 0.25‑point increase in system empathy is associated with 76% higher odds of being rated good or outstanding for safety and 46% higher odds for effectiveness. Higher‑empathy trusts also show lower sickness and absenteeism, better self‑reported staff health, reduced burnout, and lower spending on temporary staff and consultancy. In short, empathy at the system level correlates with better patient outcomes, healthier staff, and more efficient financial performance.

While causal pathways require further study, the findings suggest that organisational empathy is not a soft ideal but a measurable driver of performance and that system‑level interventions may be as important as individual training for improving care.

Read: http://spkl.io/618778Jd7

Erie and the Constitution’s Constraints on General Law by Anthony J. Bellia Jr. and Bradford R. Clark.

This article revisits Erie Railroad v. Tompkins through a structural constitutional lens. The authors argue that the Constitution created a system of conditional federal supremacy: federal law may displace state law only when enacted through the exclusive procedures the Constitution prescribes the Constitution itself, valid federal statutes, and treaties. Absent one of these predicates, residual state sovereignty remains intact.

Against that backdrop, the authors trace how early federal courts applied “general law” only when constitutionally grounded for example, when state law adopted it, when Congress authorized it, or when the Constitution’s structure required it (as in the law of nations or interstate equality cases). The problem arose in the late nineteenth century, when courts expanded this practice into a broad doctrine of “federal general common law,” displacing state law in diversity cases without any valid source of supreme federal law. Erie declared that move unconstitutional.

Crucially, Erie did not abolish all federal use of general law. On the same day, the Court applied general law (recast as federal common law) to preserve the constitutional equality of the States in an interstate water dispute. Subsequent cases confined federal common law to narrow enclaves tied to uniquely federal interests or structural imperatives. The only coherent reading, the authors argue, is that federal courts may apply general law only when the Constitution, Congress, treaties, or state law supply a lawful predicate.

The article warns that modern proposals to revive broad general common law conflate these constitutionally grounded uses with unwritten law that federal courts historically lacked authority to impose. Such revival risks eroding state sovereignty and bypassing the Constitution’s exclusive lawmaking procedures. Erie, on this account, remains essential to preserving the balance between national supremacy and residual state authority.

Read: http://spkl.io/61897BLg1

Stacking the Deck by Tracey E. George, Albert Yoon, and Mitu Gulati.

A federal judicial clerkship has long been a coveted, one‑year apprenticeship a government‑funded “Golden Ticket” that opens doors across the legal profession. Historically, only future Supreme Court advocates or elite candidates ever passed through those gates twice. That norm has broken. Increasing numbers of graduates now take two, three, even four clerkships in succession, a practice known as stacking.

Drawing on roughly 130 interviews with federal judges, the authors trace both the rise of stacking and the structural forces driving it. Their central claim is provocative: stacking is not a pathology but a rational market response to an information failure. Judges lack reliable signals about candidates, and well‑intentioned reforms have inadvertently intensified the problem. Additional clerkships become a way to de‑risk hiring — even though each extra slot reduces opportunities for others and delays clerks’ entry into practice.

Judges broadly agree that some forms of stacking are troubling, yet few see easy solutions. The incentives push toward individual rationality and collective inefficiency. This paper offers a clear diagnosis of those structural failures and evaluates the most promising paths forward, contributing to ongoing debates about clerkship‑market design and the future of legal‑profession pipelines.

Read: http://spkl.io/61837BLjR

Strong Wills, Strong Outcomes? Bank Resolvability and Credit Supply by Irem Erten and Steven Ongena.

“Living wills” the crisis‑resolution plans required of large banks are meant to strengthen financial stability. But do they also reshape bank behaviour in normal times? This paper uses a sharp regression‑discontinuity design around the 2019 U.S. regulatory threshold that exempted banks below $250B in assets from living‑will requirements. The results show that resolvability is not just a crisis‑era constraint; it meaningfully affects day‑to‑day credit supply.

Banks freed from living‑will obligations became more profitable, saw higher shareholder value, and expanded lending — offering more favourable terms, especially on loans that are harder to resolve (e.g., those without covenants) and in countries with weaker creditor rights. The pattern suggests that enforcing detailed resolution plans can unintentionally contract credit, particularly in segments where resolution is most complex.

The paper provides causal evidence on how resolvability requirements shape bank incentives, and it highlights why the design of crisis‑planning rules matters for credit supply dynamics in normal times as well as in downturns.

Read: http://spkl.io/61807BLpp

This paper studies whether U.S. tensions with specific foreign countries affect how much U.S. disclose (or hide) the identities of their foreign suppliers in records.

Read: http://spkl.io/61857Bx9f
Subscribe: http://spkl.io/61867Bx9A

S&P Global

This article argues that has fundamentally transformed modern by compressing & accelerating the “kill chain” (from detecting targets to acting on them).

Read: http://spkl.io/61827Bxgu
Subscribe: http://spkl.io/61847Bxgr

Information Matters