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Testing The Ossification Thesis: An Empirical Examination Of Federal Regulatory Volume And Speed, 1950-1990, Jason Yackee

Jason Yackee

We present one of the first empirical assessments of the prominent ossifica-tion thesis in administrative law scholarship. Scholars argue that the federal courts’ embrace of the “hard look” doctrine of judicial review in the 1970s, along with the imposition of procedural constraints on agency autonomy by the White House and Congress in the 1980s, have severely limited the ability of federal agencies to regulate in the public interest. This conventional wis-dom has remained largely untested. To test it, we constructed an original da-tabase of the universe of notice-and-comment rules proposed and promul-gated by the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) …