Spring 2026 Workshop

Feb. 9, 2026 (Mon)

4:20 - 6:10 PM

Brian Feinstein

Associate Professor of Legal Studies & Business Ethics
The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania

Presentation (in-person only) will be in Case Lounge (JGH 701)

Valuing Administrative Democracy

Public engagement has long sat at the heart of administrative law’s democratic aspirations. For proponents, opportunities for individuals to participate in agency decision-making help reconcile the administrative state with democratic ideals. Yet a tide of skepticism is swelling. The ascendant “abundance movement” argues that overemphasizing participatory procedures slows government action while delivering incommensurate benefits. Others—including most Supreme Court justices—cast presidential control as the sole credible means of securing agencies’ perceived legitimacy and accountability. Although proponents and critics alike rely on assumptions about the value that the public places on participatory mechanisms, little evidence exists about how people actually view these mechanisms and how they consider tradeoffs, including those involving procedurally caused delays.

This Article supplies that evidence. It presents results from experiments in which over 5,800 participants read agency policy vignettes that varied in their use of participatory tools. Some experiments also varied in the reported length of the rulemaking process—a key cost of procedure that critics emphasize. Participants then assessed the agency’s accountability, legitimacy, fairness, and related qualities.

Across experiments, a consistent pattern emerges: people value agencies that invite and ensure robust participation. The largest shifts in attitudes occur when agencies move beyond basic notice-and-comment to offer structured deliberation or targeted outreach to underrepresented groups. The public’s appetite for meaningful voice is also remarkably durable; even when participatory mechanisms lengthen rulemaking by years, support for those tools remains strong. These findings indicate that the public values not only administrative efficiency but also a government that listens widely, thoughtfully, and carefully.

The policy implications are pragmatic: to strengthen agencies’ perceived connection to democratic values, officials should preserve notice-and-comment as a floor, improve representational balance, and deploy “thicker” engagement opportunities, especially early-stage deliberation among key stakeholders. They should also consider ways to eliminate the most extreme delays while also resisting the urge to streamline participatory procedure across the board. Administrative democracy’s future will hinge less on slogans for or against “procedure” and “participation” than on careful, evidence-based design choices that deliver opportunities for voice when the public is willing to wait for them.

Feb. 23, 2026 (Mon)

4:20 – 6:10 PM

Anna Kovner

Executive Vice President and Director of Research
Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond

Presentation (in-person only) will be in Case Lounge, JGH 701.

Tracing Bank Runs in Real Time

We use high-frequency interbank payments data to trace deposit flows in March 2023 and identify twenty-two banks that suffered a run, significantly more than the two that failed but fewer than the number that experienced large negative stock returns. The runs were driven by a small number of large depositors and were related to weak fundamentals. However, we find evidence for the importance of coordination because run banks were disproportionately publicly traded and many banks with similarly bad fundamentals did not suffer a run. Banks survived the run by borrowing new funds and raising deposit rates, not by selling securities.

March 23, 2026 (Mon)

4:20 – 6:10 PM

Michael Bordo

Board of Governors Professor of Economics
Distinguished Professor Emeritus
Rutgers University

Edward Prescott

Senior Economic and Policy Advisor
Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland

Presentation (in-person only) will be in Case Lounge, JGH 701.

Federal Reserve Structure and the Production of Monetary and Banking Policy Ideas

The authors will present their work on the role that the decentralized structure of the Federal Reserve System played in producing and disseminating new ideas on monetary and banking policy starting in the 1960s. On monetary policy they will describe how the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis first introduced monetarism and the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis then introduced rational expectations and new econometric methods into the Federal Reserve. They tie these monetary policy innovations to internal reforms to the FOMC in the 1950s, increased ties with academia starting in the 1960s, and the Federal Reserve’s decentralized structure. These ideas were controversial at the time and they argue that the Fed’s decentralized structure allowed the debate to air and in the long run improved monetary policy. They also describe how ideas from industrial organization entered the Federal Reserve in the 1960s in order to meet a demand for merger analysis in banking markets. Like with monetary policy, the new ideas came from academia and some Reserve Banks innovated in knowledge production. The effort was cooperative between the Reserve Banks, the Board, and the other bank regulatory agencies. The authors describe reasons for the difference with monetary policy.

March 30, 2026 (Mon)

4:20 – 6:10 PM

Jared Ellias

Scott C. Collins Professor of Law
Harvard Law School

Presentation (in-person only) will be in Case Lounge, JGH 701.

The Global Law of Debt

Corporate debt financing and the restructuring of large corporations are now governed by what this Article calls the “global law of debt,” a transnational system shaped more by law firms, investment banks, and investors in New York and London than by national laws or court decisions. Large companies can now optimize governing law on a transaction-by-transaction basis, for example by borrowing in New York and then restructuring that debt in the United Kingdom, or by borrowing in London through English-law governed contracts with New York-law interpretation for select provisions.  This Article provides the first account of this development, tracing its origins to the 1960s, when New York and London debt professionals expanded into each other’s markets, creating an entangled system that fostered mutual learning and competition.  In 1978, Congress enacted a new bankruptcy law that gave American lawyers and investors corporate restructuring expertise that they later exported abroad.  In the post-pandemic era, London emerged as a global restructuring hub rivaling the United States.  These developments have produced a robust global debt market, but they have also unsettled long-standing assumptions about the rights of creditors as Chapter 11’s primacy fades and controversial American innovations that erode creditor protections proliferate globally.

April 13, 2026 (Mon)

4:20 – 6:10 PM

Mariana Pargendler

Beneficial Professor of Law
Harvard Law School

Presentation (in-person only) will be in Case Lounge, JGH 701.

Overcoming Corporate Separateness: The Early Origins of Group Liability for Workers and Beyond

This paper documents and examines Brazil’s pioneering imposition of joint and several liability for labor obligations on parent companies since 1937, complicating existing narratives about the German origins of group law. We uncover evidence that nationalism and resistance to foreign corporate groups contributed significantly to this legal development. Central to Brazil’s groundbreaking 1937 reform holding parent companies liable for subsidiaries’ labor obligations was the concern about protecting local workers from foreign groups attempting to evade legal responsibilities through separate legal entities. This innovation has shown remarkable durability and contemporary relevance. A 2024 decision by the Brazilian Supreme Court applied the economic group doctrine to enforce its orders against X (formerly Twitter) by freezing the assets of the Brazilian subsidiaries of Starlink, also controlled by Elon Musk. 

Our comparative analysis reveals a gradual, if contested, trend toward eroding corporate separateness to protect workers across jurisdictions. Moreover, this development appears to be more common in the Global South, with Portugal standing as the sole Global North country examined to converge with Brazil’s comprehensive statutory approach—and only after a 70-year delay. These findings suggest that challenges in state capacity and the geographic divide between capital and labor, often pronounced along North-South lines, can shape the evolution of limited liability and corporate separateness doctrines in ways that challenge conventional narratives in corporate and comparative law.

April 27, 2026 (Mon)

4:20 – 6:10 PM

Andrew Baker

Assistant Professor of Law
UC Berkeley School of Law

Presentation (in-person only) will be in Case Lounge, JGH 701.

That’s Just Like, Your Opinion, Man: Fact, Opinion, and the Function of Securities Law

This study examines the relationship between the threat of liability under our securities laws and the phrasing firms use in their disclosures. We fine-tune a BERT model to classify sentences in SEC filings as factual or opinion-based and apply it to (i) 17,276 public company annual reports from 2007–2021 and (ii) 2,229 IPO prospectuses from 2011–2024. We show that firms that increase the amount of factual language in the Risk Factors section of their annual reports encounter a trade-off. Those firms experience an increase in abnormal stock returns in the weeks following the change in content, but are also more likely to be sued for making more certain statements in the ensuing years. In the IPO sample, we find that the Supreme Court’s expansion of liability for opinion-based statements was associated with decreased IPO underpricing. We develop evidence that this effect is largely attributable to the market placing more weight on those opinions rather than changes in the factual content of IPO disclosures. Our results show that the threat of liability under the securities laws can improve price accuracy through its effect on the credibility of firm disclosures.