Law Commons^™

Expressive Theories Of Law: A Skeptical Overview, Matthew D. Adler

Faculty Scholarship

An "expressive theory of law" is, very roughly, a theory that evaluates the actions of legal officials in light of what those actions mean, symbolize, or express. Expressive theories have long played a role in legal scholarship and, recently, have become quite prominent. Elizabeth Anderson, Robert Cooter, Dan Kahan, Larry Lessig, and Richard Pildes, among others, have all recently defended expressive theories (or at least theories that might be characterized as expressive). Expressive notions also play a part in judicial doctrine, particularly in the areas of the Establishment Clause and the Equal Protection Clause.

This paper attempts to provide a …

Beyond Efficiency And Procedure: A Welfarist Theory Of Regulation, Matthew D. Adler

Faculty Scholarship

Normative scholarship about regulation has been dominated by two types of theories, which I term "Neoclassical" and "Proceduralist." A Neoclassical theory has the following features: it adopts a simple preference-based view of well-being, and it counts Kaldor-Hicks efficiency as one of the basic normative criteria relevant to the evaluation of regulatory programs. A Proceduralist theory is concerned, not solely with the quality of regulatory outcomes, but also with the governmental procedures that produce these outcomes: it gives intrinsic significance to the procedures that regulatory bodies follow. (One example of a Proceduralist theory is the civic republican theory of regulation advanced …

Implementing Cost-Benefit Analysis When Preferences Are Distorted, Matthew D. Adler, Eric A. Posner

Faculty Scholarship

Cost-benefit analysis is routinely used by government agencies in order to evaluate projects, but it remains controversial among academics. This paper argues that cost-benefit analysis is best understood as a welfarist decision procedure and that use of cost-benefit analysis is more likely to maximize overall well-being than is use of alternative decision-procedures. The paper focuses on the problem of distorted preference. A person's preferences are distorted when his or her satisfaction does not enhance that person's well-being. Preferences typically thought to be distorted in this sense include disinterested preferences, uninformed preferences, adaptive preferences, and objectively bad preferences; further, preferences may …

Clear Consensus, Ambiguous Commitment, Christopher H. Schroeder

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Abdication Or Delegation? Congress, The Bureaucracy, And The Delegation Dilemma, Mathew D. Mccubbins

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Rethinking Cost-Benefit Analysis, Matthew D. Adler, Eric A. Posner

Faculty Scholarship

This paper analyzes cost-benefit analysis from legal, economic, and philosophical perspectives. The traditional defense of cost-benefit analysis is that it maximizes a social welfare function that aggregates unweighted and unrestricted preferences. We follow many economists and philosophers who conclude that this defense is not persuasive. Cost-benefit analysis unavoidably depends on controversial distributive judgments; and the view that the government should maximize the satisfaction of unrestricted preferences is not plausible. However, we disagree with critics who argue that cost-benefit analysis produces morally irrelevant evaluations of projects and should be abandoned. On the contrary, cost-benefit analysis, suitably constrained, is consistent with a …

Law And Incommensurability: Introduction, Matthew D. Adler

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Incommensurability And Cost-Benefit Analysis, Matthew D. Adler

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Saddam Hussein: Master Air Strategist, Charles J. Dunlap Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Structure And Process, Politics And Policy: Administrative Arrangements And The Political Control Of Agencies, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Roger D. Noll, Barry R. Weingast

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Legal Education And Public Policy, Lawrence G. Baxter

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Foreword: Public And Private Barriers To Competitive Reform Of Health Care Services Delivery, Clark C. Havighurst

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Private Credentialing Of Health Care Personnel: An Antitrust Perspective, Part 1, Clark C. Havighurst, Nancy M. P. King

Faculty Scholarship

This Article explores the antitrust and other implications of private credentialing and accrediting programs in the health care industry. Although such programs are usually sponsored by powerful competitor groups, they serve the procompetitive purpose of providing useful information and authoritative advice to independent decision makers. Part One examines the risk that credentialing will sometimes be unfair to competitors and deceive consumers. Its survey of common-law, antitrust, and regulatory interventions to correct such unfairness and deception seeks to determine the degree of oversight to which credentialing and similar activities have been and should be subjected. In recommending that judicial or regulatory …

Foreword: Symposium On Hospital Law, Clark C. Havighurst

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Health Planning And Antitrust Law: The Implied Amendment Doctrine Of The Rex Hospital Case, Clark C. Havighurst

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Private Credentialing Of Health Care Personnel: An Antitrust Perspective, Part 2, Clark C. Havighurst, Nancy M. P. King

Faculty Scholarship

Having argued in Part One against extensive judicial or regulatory interference with private personnel credentialing in the health care field, this Article now shifts its focus to emphasize the anticompetitive hazards inherent in credentialing as practiced by professional interests. Competitor-sponsored credentialing is shown to be a vital part of a larger cartel strategy to curb competition by standardizing personnel and services and controlling the flow of information to health care consumers. Instead of altering the conclusions reached in Part One, however, Part Two sets forth a new and hitherto unexplored agenda for antitrust enforcement, one that the authors believe will …

More On Regulation: A Reply To Stephen Weiner, Clark C. Havighurst

Faculty Scholarship

In Volume 3, Number 3 of this journal, Professor Havighurst* wrote a brief Comment in which he observed that the function of health care cost-containment regulation is the rationing of health care resources, and argued that the fostering of health care consumers' and providers' free choice in the competitive marketplace is preferable to conventional cost-containment regulation as a mechanism for such rationing. He briefly outlined various reforms, including changes in federal tax treatment of health insurance premiums, aimed at implementing his ap- proach. Subsequently, in a Comment in Volume 4, Number 1, Stephen M.Weiner, then Chairman of the Massachusetts Rate …

Health Care Cost-Containment Regulation: Prospects And An Alternative, Clark C. Havighurst

Faculty Scholarship

Regulation of the health care system to achieve appropriate containment of overall costs is characterized by Professor Havighurst as requiring public officials to engage, directly or indirectly, in the rationing of medical services. This rationing function is seen by the author as peculiarly difficult for political institutions to perform, given the public's expectations and the symbolic importance of health care. An effort on the part of regulators to shift the rationing burden to providers is detected, as is a trend toward increasingly arbitrary regulation, designed to minimize regulators' confrontations with sensitive issues. Irrationality and ignorance are found to plague regulatory …