- Lawrence W. Waggoner, The American Law Institute Proposes Simplifying the Doctrine of Estates (May 21, 2010). U of Michigan Public Law Working Paper No. 198, available at SSRN.
- Lawrence W. Waggoner, Curtailing Dead-Hand Control: The American Law Institute Declares the Perpetual-Trust Movement Ill Advised (June 1, 2010). University of Michigan Public Law Working Paper No. 199, available at SSRN.
- Lawrence W. Waggoner, The American Law Institute Proposes a New Approach to Perpetuities: Limiting the Dead Hand to Two Younger Generations (June 1, 2010). University of Michigan Public Law Working Paper No. 200, available at SSRN.
- Lawrence W. Waggoner, Congress Should Impose a Two-Generation Limit on the GST Exemption: Here's Why (July 15, 2010). U of Michigan Public Law Working Paper No. 205, available at SSRN.
The growth of the Internet has provided ample occasion for futurists to make bold predictions about the changes it will bring, and their consequences for markets, governments and persons.
As these consequences become evident, governments are responding with legislation and treaties designed to hasten or, more often, forestall those developments.
Predictions have ranged from cybernetic anarchy (both utopian and distopian) to the instantiation of a fascistic regime of surveillance that would make Orwell look like a piker. Some see a winner-take-all economy of massive new monopolies emerging on the back of network effects, others see the growth of a new economy in which intermediaries are replaced by huge open networks of buyers and sellers trading with e-cash on anonymous electronic exchanges — and evading their taxes. Meanwhile enthusiasts of electronic democracy and popular empowerment offer a vision sharply at odds with that of Cassandras of globalization for whom the Internet provides yet another occasion for decision-making authority to seep away towards relatively undemocratic trans-national bodies. One would think that such contrasting predictions cannot all be correct. Strangely, however, there is at least some truth in each of them, for the Internet phenomenon is becoming as complicated as the world into which it is woven. The Internet is neither “fraud’s playground” nor democracy’s. Indeed, there is more than one “Internet”. Thus, today, lawyers and policymakers should not let themselves be blinded by the term, but rather must identify the very few areas where the Internet genuinely creates a radical change that requires a radical legal response, reserving for the large majority of cases a nuanced and evolutionary approach to the political and legal challenge of cheap worldwide digital communications.
