Law Commons^™

Predictable Punishments, Brian Galle, Murat C. Mungan

Faculty Scholarship

Economic analyses of both crime and regulation writ large suggest that the subjective cost or value of incentives is critical to their effectiveness. But reliable information about subjective valuation is scarce, as those who are punished have little reason to report honestly. Modern “big data” techniques promise to overcome this information shortfall but perhaps at the cost of individual privacy and the autonomy that privacy’s shield provides.

This Article argues that regulators can and should instead rely on methods that remain accurate even in the face of limited information. Building on a formal model we present elsewhere, we show that …

Symmetry’S Mandate: Constraining The Politicization Of American Administrative Law, Daniel E. Walters

Faculty Scholarship

Recent years have seen the rise of pointed and influential critiques of deference doctrines in administrative law. What many of these critiques have in common is a view that judges, not agencies, should resolve interpretive disputes over the meaning of statutes—disputes the critics take to be purely legal and almost always resolvable using lawyerly tools of statutory construction. In this Article, I take these critiques, and the relatively formalist assumptions behind them, seriously and show that the critics have not acknowledged or advocated the full reform vision implied by their theoretical premises. Specifically, critics have extended their critique of judicial …

The Budding Hemp Industry: The Effect Of Texas House Bill 1325 On Employment Drug Policies, Meina Heydari

Student Scholarship

Contemporary attitudes toward cannabis use in the United States have shifted from War on Drugsera prohibition toward decriminalization over the past two decades. As states that do not seek to decriminalize marijuana nonetheless enact legislation legalizing CBD, policy tensions arise. In 2019, Texas joined the ranks of states that legalized hemp and hemp-derived products with the passage of House Bill 1325. In light of this legislation, this Article discusses the implications of legalized cannabidiol (CBD) on employment drug policies in Texas. The benefits of CBD legalization must be weighed against the practical implications to effectively balance policies that aim to …