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David M Driesen

2010

Environmental Law

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Law

Two Cheers For Feasible Regulation: A Modest Response To Masur And Posner, David M. Driesen Aug 2010

Two Cheers For Feasible Regulation: A Modest Response To Masur And Posner, David M. Driesen

David M Driesen

This response to Masur and Posner's "Against Feasibility" argues that the feasibility principle has normative and practical advantages over cost-benefit analysis. Normatively, it shows that the happiness literature's suggestion that jobs may be much more important than consumption to welfare supports the feasibility principle's emphasis on maximizing pollution reduction without producing widespread plant shutdowns. It shows that the practical problems Masur and Posner associate with feasibility analysis arise under cost-benefit analysis as well.


Purposeless Construction, David M. Driesen Jan 2010

Purposeless Construction, David M. Driesen

David M Driesen

This Article critiques the Supreme Court’s tendency to embrace “purposeless construction” — statutory construction that ignores legislation underlying goals. It constructs a new democratic theory for purposeful construction, defined as an approach to construction that favors construction of ambiguous text to advance a statute’s underlying goal. That theory maintains that statutory goals, especially those set out in the legislative text or frequently proclaimed in public, tend to reflect public values to a greater extent than other statutory provisions. Politicians carefully choose goals for statutes that “sell” the statute to the public. In order to do this, they must announce goals …