Robert Ahdieh
Visiting Professor of Law (Fall 2008)
Assistant Info
Courses/Current Research • Contracts
• International Trade Law
• Corporate Federalism
• Emerging Markets Law
• Regulatory Design
Education • J.D., Yale University, 1997
• A.B., Princeton University, 1994
Media Contact: Media Relations, (212) 854-2650.
Detailed Biography Professor Ahdieh, with the Emory University School of Law, served as law clerk to Judge James R. Browning of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, before his selection for the Honor's Program in the Civil Division of the U.S. Department of Justice.
While still in law school, Professor Ahdieh published what remains one of the seminal treatments of the constitutional transformation of post-Soviet Russia: Russia's Constitutional Revolution - Legal Consciousness and the Transition to Democracy. Ahdieh's work has also appeared in the Michigan Law Review, the NYU Law Review, the Southern California Law Review, and the Emory Law Journal, among other publications.
Professor Ahdieh's scholarly interests revolve around questions of regulatory design. His particular emphasis has been various non-traditional modes of regulation, including especially those grounded in dynamics of coordination. Paradigms of coordination, though relatively less attended to in the legal literature, hold significant promise both in helping us to theorize existing regulatory patterns and in fostering new regulatory constructs.
Professor Ahdieh has explored these issues in a variety of transactional areas, including corporate and securities law, international trade and finance, and contracts. Within these, Ahdieh’s work has emphasized two particular patterns of coordination: The first – intersystemic governance – draws on domestic regimes of federalism and transnational regimes of global governance and subsidiarity, to highlight patterns of jurisdictional overlap that, in their very complexity, may offer significant benefits. The second – patterns Professor Ahdieh places under a rubric of ‘The New Regulation’ – draws more directly on coordination game dynamics, to highlight various non-traditional regulatory forms, as well distinct occasions for potential regulatory intervention.
Publications
Books
Russia’s Constitutional
Revolution - Legal Consciousness and the Transition to Democracy (1997).
Articles
From Federalism to Intersystemic Governance:
The Changing Nature of Modern Jurisdiction, 57 Emory L.J. 1
(2007).
From Federal Rules to Intersystemic
Governance in Securities Regulation, 57 Emory L.J. 233 (2007) (essay).
The Dialectical Regulation of Rule 14a-8:
Intersystemic Governance in Corporate Law, 2 J. Bus. & Tech. L.
165 (2007).
[Selected for reprinting in 40 Securities L. Rev. __ (forthcoming 2008) as
one of top securities law articles published
in 2007].
Dialectical
Regulation, 38 Conn. L. Rev.
863 (2006).
[Solicited as lead article for annual commentary issue of Connecticut Law Review, for discussion and analysis by selected respondents].
The Strategy of Boilerplate, 104
Mich. L. Rev. 1033 (2006).
From
“Federalization” to “Mixed Governance” in Corporate Law: A Defense of Sarbanes Oxley, 53 Buff. L. Rev. 721
(2005) (essay).
[Selected
for reprinting in 38 Securities L.
Rev. 293 (2006) and 48 Corp. Practice Commentator 91 (2006), as one of top corporate or
securities law articles published in
2005].
The Role of Groups in Norm Transformation: A
Dramatic Sketch, In Three Parts, 6 Chi. J. Int’l L. 231 (2005).
Between
Dialogue and Decree: International Review of National Courts, 79 N.Y.U.
L. Rev. 2029 (2004).
Between
Mandate and Market: Contract Transition in the Shadow of the International Order, 53 Emory L.J. 691 (2004), reprinted in ICFAI J. Int’l Bus. L., Apr. 2005, at 13.
Law’s
Signal: A Cueing Theory of Law in Market Transition, 77 S. Cal. L. Rev 215
(2004).
Making
Markets: Network Effects and the Role of Law in the Creation of Strong Securities Markets, 76 S. Cal. L. Rev. 277 (2003).
Other
Publications
Book Review, Soili Nysten-Haarala, Russian Law in Transition
(2001), for Slavic Review
(2003).
Works in Progress
The New Regulation –
In recent years, legal scholars have focused increasing attention on various non-traditional modes of
regulation. Among other examples,
private legal systems, the privatization of traditional government functions,
standard-setting activities, and public
subsidies, as well as norm-seeding efforts and patterns of regulatory cueing, might
be noted. For all this attention,
however, relatively little effort has been made to theorize these patterns more
broadly. This book will offer one such account,
under the rubric of “The New Regulation.”
Traditional analysis of public regulation tends to rely on Prisoner’s
Dilemma game dynamics to rationalize both the
function and form of regulatory interventions. Notwithstanding relative inattention to it in
the legal literature, however, game theory also acknowledges other patterns of
strategic incentive and interaction. Perhaps most important are coordination games,
in which mismatched incentives (and the resulting prospect of defection) are
not the operative concern, but rather the need
to align players’ expectations. Such patterns suggest a potential “network-building”
function for law and regulation in globally engaged, modern
industrial economies. The latter, in
turn, suggests distinct occasions for potential regulatory intervention, as
well as distinct forms such regulation might take. In this, it may help to explain much of the regulatory
activity scholars have observed in recent years.
Governing Standards –
Interrelated patterns of globalization and heightened reliance on high-technology in recent years have increased the centrality of
standardization dynamics in both transnational and domestic social
ordering. This book seeks to engage this
important trend. To begin, it will
consider the drivers behind standardization, highlighting network effect dynamics,
among other positive externalities motivating the creation of common
standards. Further, it will question the conventional game theoretic modeling of
standard-setting processes, suggesting the potential for greater conflict than
commonly acknowledged. Most
significantly, the book will analyze the mechanisms of standardization. Both the economics and legal literature rely
on a tripartite construction of standard-setting mechanisms, from de facto to de jure standard-setting at the extremes, with group (or committee) standard-setting by private actors in the
middle. Using a series of case studies, the book will suggest a fourth
possibility, in which public actors play a limited, yet critical, role in
facilitating otherwise private group standard-setting.
The (Misunderstood) Genius of American Corporate Law
This article challenges the corporate literature’s all but
universal association of jurisdictional competition with the success of corporate law
in mediating the principal-agent conflict between the managers and shareholders
of the modern public corporation. I emphasize
the limited role of competition – as opposed to efficient capital markets – in the vertical agency
relationship. Instead, I suggest, competition’s value can be found in its minimization of
the horizontal inefficiencies arising between the corporation and state
authorities, as the latter shirk or self-deal.
The End of History in the Securities Markets? – Consolidation
and Competition in Networked Markets –
This
article analyzes the implications of network economies for the balance of centralization and fragmentation in
market microstructure, amidst a wave of recent mergers in the securities
markets.
The Limits and Lessons of Federalism in Corporate Law
This article will successively consider the institutional underpinnings of
jurisdictional competition in corporate law, as well as the growing body of empirical studies
of such competition. With regard to
each, it considers implications for competition in other areas of law, including environmental law, banking law,
and others. In
each of these areas,
scholars have invoked the asserted success of competition in corporate law, as
evidence of its utility. In reality,
however, the institutional framework of charter competition is not readily
replicated. Even if it were, moreover,
the empirical results of competition may be difficult to square with our
normative goals in those areas.
