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Full-Text Articles in Law
Ernst Freund, Felix Frankfurter And The American Rechtsstaat: A Transatlantic Shipwreck, 1894-1932, Daniel R. Ernst
Ernst Freund, Felix Frankfurter And The American Rechtsstaat: A Transatlantic Shipwreck, 1894-1932, Daniel R. Ernst
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
From the passage of the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 through the New Deal, American legislators commonly endowed administrative agencies with broad discretionary power. They did so over the objections of an intellectual founder of the American administrative state. The American-born, German-educated lawyer and political scientist Ernst Freund developed an Americanized version of the Rechtsstaat—a government bound by fixed and definite rules—in an impressive body of scholarship between 1894 and 1915. In 1920 he eagerly took up an offer from the Commonwealth Fund to finance a comprehensive study of administration in the United States. Here was his chance to show …
Climate Change And The Clean Air Act, Lisa Heinzerling
Climate Change And The Clean Air Act, Lisa Heinzerling
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
In Massachusetts v. EPA, petitioners - twelve states, three cities, an American territory, and numerous health and environmental groups - have asked the Supreme Court to hold that the Clean Air Act gives EPA the power to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles and that EPA may not decline to exercise this power based on statutorily irrelevant factors. The problem petitioners ultimately seek to address - climate change - is unique in its scope and complexity. But the legal issues before the Court in Massachusetts v. EPA are neither particularly grand nor particularly complex. They are the kinds of …
Statutory Interpretation In The Era Of Oira, Lisa Heinzerling
Statutory Interpretation In The Era Of Oira, Lisa Heinzerling
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
In recent years, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) within the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has asserted a remarkable degree of authority over administrative agencies' rulemaking processes. One of the ways in which OIRA has exercised power over agencies has been to foist upon them its own views about the requirements of the statutes under which they operate. The most notable trend in this area has been OIRA's insistence on converting technology-based environmental laws into cost-benefit laws. In OIRA's hands, for example, the Clean Water Act ("the Act") is being transformed from a technology- based regime …
Applying Cost-Benefit To Past Decisions: Was Environmental Protection Ever A Good Idea?, Lisa Heinzerling, Frank Ackerman, Rachel Massey
Applying Cost-Benefit To Past Decisions: Was Environmental Protection Ever A Good Idea?, Lisa Heinzerling, Frank Ackerman, Rachel Massey
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
In this Article, however, we do not mount a critique from outside the technique of cost-benefit analysis. Instead, we examine an argument that proponents of cost-benefit analysis have offered as a linchpin of the case for cost-benefit: that this technique is neither anti- nor pro-regulatory, but rather a neutral tool for evaluating public policy. In making this argument, these proponents have often invoked the use of cost-benefit analysis to support previous regulatory decisions (their favorite example involves the phase down of lead in gasoline, which we shall shortly discuss) as a sign that this technique can be used to support …
The Humbugs Of The Anti-Regulatory Movement, Lisa Heinzerling, Frank Ackerman
The Humbugs Of The Anti-Regulatory Movement, Lisa Heinzerling, Frank Ackerman
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
It is so hard to get beyond cynicism these days. Even a symposium devoted to this goal has, as reflected in the articles by Professors Cynthia Farina, Jeffrey Rachlinski, and Mark Seidenfeld, succeeded primarily in suggesting that regulators are not so much selfish as they are obtuse, stubborn, and sometimes downright dumb. Undoubtedly this is true some of the time. But Farina, Rachlinski, and Seidenfeld want to convince us that it is true enough of the time to warrant quite large-scale solutions. In this Comment, we take issue with this pessimistic assessment of regulatory behavior by discrediting the most prominent …
Defending Courts: A Brief Rejoinder To Professors Fried And Rosenberg, David C. Vladeck
Defending Courts: A Brief Rejoinder To Professors Fried And Rosenberg, David C. Vladeck
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Harvard Professors David Rosenberg and Charles Fried have presented a provocative, sweeping critique of the theoretical foundations of tort liability that leaves virtually no aspect of our current tort system untouched, or perhaps more accurately, unscathed. Their article throws down the gauntlet to defenders of traditional tort law. For instance, Rosenberg and Fried take aim at the jury system, arguing that ex post liability rules created by juries are inefficient and should be replaced, whenever possible, by ex ante liability rules set by legislative bodies. And they attack the idea that compensation plays a legitimate role in structuring our tort …