Law and Economics Commons^™

Unlocking Access To Health Care: A Federalist Approach To Reforming Occupational Licensing, Gabriel Scheffler

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Several features of the existing occupational licensing system impede access to health care without providing appreciable protections for patients. Licensing restrictions prevent health care providers from offering services to the full extent of their competency, obstruct the adoption of telehealth, and deter foreign-trained providers from practicing in the United States. Scholars and policymakers have proposed a number of reforms to this system over the years, but these proposals have had a limited impact for political and institutional reasons.

Still, there are grounds for optimism. In recent years, the federal government has taken a range of initial steps to reform licensing …

Progressive Antitrust, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

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Several American political candidates and administrations have both run and served under the “progressive” banner for more than a century, right through the 2016 election season. For the most part these have pursued interventionist antitrust policies, reflecting a belief that markets are fragile and in need of repair, that certain interest groups require greater protection, or in some cases that antitrust policy is an extended arm of regulation. This paper argues that most of this progressive antitrust policy was misconceived, including that reflected in the 2016 antitrust plank of the Democratic Party. The progressive state is best served by a …

Reinventing Copyright And Patent, Abraham Bell, Gideon Parchomovsky

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Intellectual property systems all over the world are modeled on the one-size-fits-all principle. However important or unimportant, inventions and original works of authorship receive the same scope of protection, for the same period, backed by the same variety of legal remedies. Metaphorically speaking, all intellectual property is equal under the law. This equality comes at a heavy price. The equality principle gives all creators access to the same remedies, even when those remedies create perverse incentives. Moreover, society overpays for innovation by inflicting on society more monopoly losses than are strictly necessary to incentivize production.

In this Article, we propose …

The Classical American State And The Regulation Of Morals, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

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The United States has a strong tradition of state regulation that stretches back to the Commonwealth ideal of Revolutionary times and grew steadily throughout the nineteenth century. But regulation also had more than its share of critics. A core principle of Jacksonian democracy was that too much regulation was for the benefit of special interests, mainly wealthier and propertied classes. The ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment after the Civil War provided the lever that laissez faire legal writers used to make a more coherent Constitutional case against increasing regulation. How much they actually succeeded has always been subject to dispute. …