Professor Broome discusses the interest following the enactment of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in establishing a federal charter option for insurance companies. She summarizes previous efforts to obtain a federal insurance charter. The paper attempts to draw some lessons for the insurance...

Financial regulation has traditionally been “hard”: national legislatures and regulators (and sometimes international bodies) require certain kinds of behavior and forbid others, on pain of business sanctions, fines, or even criminal penalties. When a financial crisis happens, the usual...

Recent developments in banking, including high-profile prosecutions for illegal activities, portend further regulatory interventions on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet the structure of much banking regulation requires banks to make good faith determinations of the kinds of risks to which their...

There is an active debate among corporate law professors about the extent to which European companies are converging on the Anglo-American shareholder-wealth-maximizing model of the corporation. In this model, the paramount obligation of corporate officers and directors is to maximize the...

Before the landmark State Street case in 1998, the courts and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) had often denied patents to inventions that were no more than methods of doing business. But State Street swept away three decades of complex, inconsistent case law, firmly establishing the...