Issue 4

Glass Versus Steagall: The Fight over Federalism and American Banking

In 1933, Congress passed the Glass-Steagall Act as a response to the Great Crash of 1929. Two basic responses to the banking crisis were on the table in the weeks prior to the Act’s passage: unification of the national banking system under federal control or preservation of the state unit banking system augmented by a full federal guarantee of deposits made in every American bank. The conflict between these two alternatives represented the final episode in the nearly 150-year-long struggle between state and federal authorities for control over the banking system.

The competition dated back to 1791 and posed the question of how the values and structure of American republican federalism should be engrafted onto the banking system. This Note begins by arguing that the answer, in 1791, was competitive dual federalism. It frames this federal-versus-state competition and then presents the two broad ideologies that drove the struggle, typified by Senator Carter Glass and Representative Henry Steagall. Next, this Note presents the so-called Vandenberg Amendment—adopted as part of the Glass-Steagall Act—as representative of a long-overlooked model of cooperative federalism for banking.

This Note concludes by suggesting that, contrary to the traditional scholarly account, the Glass-Steagall Act as shaped by the Vandenberg Amendment represented a fundamental change to the existing American banking structure, reversing the choice made in 1791 by rejecting a competitive dual federalism model in favor of a cooperative federalism one.

Concurrent Damages

In areas as diverse as copyright, pollution, consumer protection, and electronic privacy, statutory damages have become a familiar form of civil remedy. Yet judges are discovering that these formulaic awards can swing by orders of magnitude for arbitrary reasons—resulting in windfalls for some but little relief for others—due to the rigidly linear way in which the awards stack up, count by count. The irony is that too much structure, rather than too little, is what generates such capricious outcomes.

This Article proposes a solution: allow courts to run damages concurrently. As with concurrent criminal sentencing, the judge would recognize every act of violation, and yet group the nominal counts so that the effective penalties do not stack up arbitrarily. This simple option enables judges to tailor the structure of damages to match more closely how the harms actually add up (“Should the copyright damages accumulate per song, per album, per artist, or per playlist—in this case?”). Moreover, it can displace the troubling fudges—such as fictional awards—that some courts use when bound by the rigidity of statutory damages. Creating a concurrent damages option may thus make possible not only more accurate and consistent compensation but also clearer, truer signals for future actors and future courts.

Immigration’s Family Values

This Article takes an institutional approach to analyzing how the law determines parentage in diverse doctrinal contexts. We argue that immigration and citizenship law use different parentage tests than family law not because lawmakers have failed to properly incorporate family law principles but because lawmakers’ interests are not the same in the immigration context. State family law’s primary interests are protecting children, preserving well-functioning parent-child relationships, and ensuring that each child has two parents who are designated as legally and financially responsible. Immigration and citizenship law, in contrast, implicate the federal government’s interest in achieving optimal numbers of immigrants and citizens. In addition, because the benefits of lawful immigrant status and U.S. citizenship are so extensive, an important state interest in determining parentage in the immigration and citizenship context is the ferreting out and prevention of fraud. As a general rule, the context in which parentage disputes arise in immigration and citizenship cases differs greatly from the circumstances that lead to custody or divorce proceedings. Thus, the “family values” espoused by immigration and citizenship law are very different from those we are accustomed to seeing in family court.

Where immigration and citizenship law fail, they fail on their own terms, and we must understand their core values in order to critique them and to offer workable solutions. For example, current federal policy privileges interests in optimal citizenship and immigration and in fraud prevention at the expense of allowing U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents to exercise their own liberty interests in preserving parent-child relationships. We critique this policy, however, not because it deviates from state family law principles but because it fails to recognize the government’s interests in preserving the family relationships of its citizens.

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