Law Commons^™

Pleading Patterns And The Role Of Litigation As A Driver Of Federal Climate Change Legislation, Juscelino F. Colares, Kosta Ristovski

Faculty Publications

Based on a variant of the Elliott-Ackerman-Millian theory that variable, potentially inconsistent and costly litigation outcomes induce industry to seek federal preemptive legislation to reign in such costs, we collect data on climate change-related litigation to determine whether litigation might motivate major greenhouse gas emitters to accept a preemptive, though possibly carbon-restricting, legislative compromise. We conduct a spectral cluster analysis on 178 initial federal and state judicial filings to reveal the most relevant groupings among climate change-related suits and their underlying pleading patterns. Besides exposing the general content and structure of climate change-related filings, this study identifies major specific pleading …

Tinkering With The Machinery Of Life, Ben L. Trachtenberg

Faculty Publications

Recent adjustments by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Transportation (DOT) to their cost–benefit analysis procedures could cause tremendous changes to federal regulation. For decades, federal agencies have calculated the value of a statistical life (VSL) and have used that number when evaluating the costs and benefits of proposed regulations. If a regulation was expected to save lives, the number of lives saved could be multiplied by the VSL to monetize the benefits. Because, however, lives saved in the future were given the same nominal value as lives saved in the present, the real value of future …

On The Hijacking Of Airplanes (And Agencies): The Faa, "Agency Capture," And Airline Security, Mark C. Niles

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

On September 11, 2001, millions of Americans watched in awe and horror as over a period of less than two hours, a succession of commercial airliners crashed first into the two World Trade Center towers in New York City, and then into the Pentagon in suburban Virginia. As government officials and news organizations scrambled in the first hours after the events to gather information, possible explanations for the crashes were offered. One theory was the obvious assumption that the planes had all been hijacked by "terrorists" using some kind of weapons (guns, bombs) that had presumably been smuggled onto …