Law and Economics Commons^™

A Bittersweet Deal For Consumers: The Unnatural Application Of Preemption To High Fructose Corn Syrup Labeling Claims, Josh Ashley

Journal of Food Law & Policy

The recent rise of consumer consciousness regarding the health qualities of foods and beverages has become something akin to common knowledge. Reflecting this rise, studies reveal that labels regarding the health qualities of a food are more likely to increase sales. And among the health labels consumers prefer, labels describing the product as natural top the list. One website reports that according to a recent study, 31.3-percent of respondents thought that "100% natural" was the best description to read on a label, compared with only 14.2-percent who thought that "100% organic" was the best description. "All natural ingredients" was the …

Cheaters Shouldn't Prosper And Consumers Shouldn't Suffer: The Need For Government Enforcement Against Economic Adulteration Of 100% Pomegranate Juice And Other Imported Food Products, Michael T. Roberts

Journal of Food Law & Policy

In the modern global food system - marked by the trade flow of a variety of food products and ingredients from multiple locations in the world - economically motivated adulteration has emerged as a growing menace that threatens the health and wellbeing of consumers, the economic livelihoods of honest purveyors of food in the global marketplace, and the integrity and viability of national food regulatory systems. Economic adulteration is a form of cheating that includes the padding, diluting, and substituting of food product. Although this cheating is rooted in past food systems, the new paradigm for economic adulteration - a …

Canadian Food Law Update, Patricia L. Farnese

Journal of Food Law & Policy

Provided below is an overview of the developments in Canadian food law and policy in 2011. This update considers the regulatory and policy developments and litigation activities by the federal government. This focus reflects the significance of federal activities in the food policy realm.

Creating Balance: Problems Within Dshea And Suggestions For Reform, Jennifer Akre Hill

Journal of Food Law & Policy

The Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 (DSHEA) was signed into law on October 25, 1994. At the signing, President Clinton endorsed the "intense efforts" of manufacturers and legislators to change the "treatment of dietary supplements under regulation and law." Further, the bill was signed with the hope that it would benefit consumers by permitting more access to dietary supplements and more choices for consumer directed healthcare. In support, politicians on both sides of the aisle claimed the DSHEA as a victory for consumer freedom, populist protection, and preventative medicine.

The History And Future Of Genetically Modified Crops: Frankenfoods, Superweeds, And The Developing World, Brooke Glass-O'Shea

Journal of Food Law & Policy

In a 1992 letter to the New York Times, a man named Paul Lewis referred to genetically modified (GM) crops as "Frankenfood," and wryly suggested it might be "time to gather the villagers, light some torches and head to the castle." Little did Lewis know that his neologism would become the rallying cry for activists around the world protesting the dangers of genetic engineering. The environmental activist group Greenpeace made great use of the "Frankenfood" epithet in their anti-GM campaigns of the 1990s, though they have since backed away from the word and the hardline stance it represents. But genetically …

How The Administrative State Got To This Challenging Place, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

Written for a dispersed agrarian population using hand tools in a local economy, our Constitution now controls an American government orders of magnitude larger that has had to respond to profound changes in transportation, communication, technology, economy, and scientific understanding. How did our government get to this place? The agencies Congress has created to meet these changes now face profound new challenges: transition from the paper to the digital age; the increasing centralization in an opaque, political presidency of decisions that Congress has assigned to diverse, relatively expert and transparent bodies; the thickening, as well, of the political layer within …

Reflections On The Effects Of Federalism On Opioid Policy, Matthew B. Lawrence

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

No abstract provided.

Occupational Licensing And The Limits Of Public Choice Theory, Gabriel Scheffler, Ryan Nunn

All Faculty Scholarship

Public choice theory has long been the dominant lens through which economists and other scholars have viewed occupational licensing. According to the public choice account, practitioners favor licensing because they want to reduce competition and drive up their own wages. This essay argues that the public choice account has been overstated, and that it ironically has served to distract from some of the most important harms of licensing, as well as from potential solutions. We emphasize three specific drawbacks of this account. First, it is more dismissive of legitimate threats to public health and safety than the research warrants. Second, …

Rehabilitating The Nuisance Injunction To Protect The Environment, Doug Rendleman

Washington and Lee Law Review

The Trump Administration has reversed the federal government’s role of protecting the environment. The reversal focuses attention on states’ environmental capacity. This Article advocates more vigorous state environmental tort remedies for nuisance and trespass. An injunction is the superior remedy in most successful environmental litigation because it orders correction and improvement. Two anachronistic barriers to an environmental injunction are the New York Court of Appeals’ decision, Boomer v. Atlantic Cement, and Calabresi and Melamed’s early and iconic law-and-economics article, One View of the Cathedral. This Article examines and criticizes both because, by subordinating the injunction to money damages, they undervalue …

The Regulatory Accountability Act Loses Steam But The Trump Executive Order On Alj Selection Upturned 71 Years Of Practice, Jeffrey Lubbers

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

Copyright Arbitrage, Kristelia A. García

Publications

Regulatory arbitrage—defined as the manipulation of regulatory treatment for the purpose of reducing regulatory costs or increasing statutory earnings—is often seen in heavily regulated industries. An increase in the regulatory nature of copyright, coupled with rapid technological advances and evolving consumer preferences, have led to an unprecedented proliferation of regulatory arbitrage in the area of copyright law. This Article offers a new scholarly account of the phenomenon herein referred to as “copyright arbitrage.”

In some cases, copyright arbitrage may work to expose and/or correct for an extant gap or inefficiency in the regulatory regime. In other cases, copyright arbitrage may …

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

All Faculty Scholarship

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 …

The Visible Hand: Coordination Functions Of The Regulatory State, Robert B. Ahdieh

Robert B. Ahdieh

We live in a coordination economy. As one surveys the myriad challenges of modern social and economic life, an ever increasing proportion is defined not by the need to reconcile competing interests, but by the challenge of getting everyone on the same page. Conflict is not absent in these settings. It is not, however, the determinative factor in shaping our behaviors and resulting interactions. That essential ingredient, instead, is coordination.

Such coordination is commonly understood as the function of the market. As it turns out, however, optimal coordination will not always emerge, as if led “by an invisible hand.” Even …

Planning For Excellence: Insights From An International Review Of Regulators' Strategic Plans, Adam M. Finkel, Daniel Walters, Angus Corbett

All Faculty Scholarship

What constitutes regulatory excellence? Answering this question is an indispensable first step for any public regulatory agency that is measuring, striving towards, and, ultimately, achieving excellence. One useful way to answer this question would be to draw on the broader literature on regulatory design, enforcement, and management. But, perhaps a more authentic way would be to look at how regulators themselves define excellence. However, we actually know remarkably little about how the regulatory officials who are immersed in the task of regulation conceive of their own success.

In this Article, we investigate regulators’ definitions of regulatory excellence by drawing on …

The Twin Demons Of The Trump-Bannon Assault On Democracy, Joseph P. Tomain

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

On January 30, 2017, President Donald Trump signed an executive order "Reducing Regulation and Controlling Regulatory Costs." Then, on February 24, he signed an executive order on “Enforcing the Regulatory Reform Agenda.” Together these two executive orders constitute a severe threat to American society and the American economy. In the words of Stephen Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, they represent a plan for “the deconstruction of the administrative state.”

The purpose of the administrative state can be most simply stated this way: Unless otherwise stated in the enabling legislation, government regulation makes sense when the benefits of regulation outweigh the costs …

Comments On Omb's Interim Guidance Implementing Section 2 Of Executive Order 13,771 Reducing Regulation And Controlling Regulatory Costs, Jeffrey Lubbers

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

Tip Of The Iceberg Ii: How The Intended-Uses Principle Produces Medical Knowledge And Protects Liberty, Christopher Robertson

Faculty Scholarship

In recent years, the Food and Drug Administration’s pre-market approval process has come under increasing scrutiny as an infringement on liberty and a regulation of speech. In the first part of this symposium contribution, we offer a case study of Seroquel XR, showing how the FDA’s premarket approval process – and the restrictions on “off-label” promotion in particular – caused the drug company to produce and disseminate knowledge about safety and efficacy for new uses. The law successfully resolved the collective action problem of producing knowledge, even while the law protected the liberty of individual doctors and patients to use …

Disruptive Platforms, Margot Kaminski

Publications

No abstract provided.

Human Survival, Risk, And Law: Considering Risk Filters To Replace Cost-Benefit Analysis, John William Draper

Librarian Scholarship at Penn Law

Selfish utilitarianism, neo-classical economics, the directive of short-term income maximization, and the decision tool of cost-benefit analysis fail to protect our species from the significant risks of too much consumption, pollution, or population. For a longer-term survival, humanity needs to employ more than cost-justified precaution.

This article argues that, at the global level, and by extension at all levels of government, we need to replace neo-classical economics with filters for safety and feasibility to regulate against significant risk. For significant risks, especially those that are irreversible, we need decision tools that will protect humanity at all scales. This article describes …

Take It To The Limit: The Illegal Regulation Prohibiting The Take Of Any Threatened Species Under The Endangered Species Act, Jonathan Wood

Jonathan Wood

The Endangered Species Act forbids the “take” – any activity that adversely affects – any member of an endangered species, but only endangered species. The statute also provides for the listing of threatened species, i.e. species that may become endangered, but protects them only by requiring agencies to consider the impacts of their projects on them. Shortly after the statute was adopted, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service reversed Congress’ policy choice by adopting a regulation that forbids the take of any threatened species. The regulation is not authorized by the Endangered Species Act, but …

Dirty Debts Sold Dirt Cheap, Dalie Jimenez

Dalie Jimenez

More than 77 million Americans have a debt in collections. Many of these debts will be sold to debt buyers for pennies, or fractions of pennies, on the dollar. This Article details the perilous path that debts travel as they move through the collection ecosystem. Using a unique dataset of 84 consumer debt purchase and sale agreement, it examines the manner in which debts are sold, oftentimes as simple data on a spreadsheet, devoid of any documentary evidence. It finds that in many contracts, sellers disclaim all warranties about the underlying debts sold or the information transferred. Sellers also sometimes …

A Framework For Understanding Property Regulation And Land Use Control From A Dynamic Perspective, Donald J. Kochan

Donald J. Kochan

The Cost Of Nothing Trumps The Value Of Everything: The Failure Of Regulatory Economics To Keep Pace With Improvements In Quantitative Risk Analysis, Adam M. Finkel

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

The entire U.S. federal regulatory apparatus, especially that part devoted to reducing (or deciding not to reduce) risks to the environment, health, and safety (EHS), relies increasingly on judgments of whether each regulation would yield benefits in excess of its costs. These judgments depend in turn upon empirical analysis of the potential increases in longevity, quality of life, and environmental quality that the regulation can confer, and also of the economic resources needed to “purchase” those benefits—analyses whose quality can range from extremely fine to disappointingly poor. The quality of a risk analysis (from which the benefits of control are …

Regulatory Institutions Of The Global South: Why Are They Different And What Can Be Done About It?, Yugank Goyal

Yugank Goyal

Developing countries suffer from underperforming regulatory agencies compared to those in the developed world. The paper attempts to theorize general reasons behind such divergence. It argues that the differences lie in developing countries’ (a) higher priorities for redistribution, (b) structurally different institutional endowments, especially at informal level, and (c) limited informational channels. The paper proposes that a multi-stakeholder (with increased emphasis on judiciary and civil society) approach has potential to address the shortcomings. It tests these claims through studying cases of telecom and electricity regulation in India.

Revenue Adequacy: The Good, The Bad And The Ugly, John W. Mayo

John W Mayo

Abstract: The concept of “revenue adequacy” made its way into the legal governance of the rail industry prior to the industry’s substantial deregulation via the Staggers Rail Act in 1980. This seemingly quiet feature of rail legislation has, however, increasingly grown central to the regulatory-deregulatory fault line in the 21st century rail industry. This paper examines the concept of revenue adequacy, a benchmark of United States railroad firms' financial performance calculated annually by regulatory oversight bodies. The paper addresses questions around the origins, measurement, informational provisions, value and policy benefits and costs of revenue adequacy. An examination of the historical …

Financial Innovation In East Asia, Ross P. Buckley, Douglas W. Arner, Michael Panton

Seattle University Law Review

Finance is important for development. However, the Asian financial crisis of 1997–1998 and the global financial crisis of 2008 highlighted the serious risks associated with financial liberalization and excessive innovation. East Asia’s strong focus on economic growth has necessitated a careful balancing of the benefits of financial liberalization and innovation against the very real risks inherent in financial sector development. This Article examines the role of regulatory, legal, and institutional infrastructure in supporting both financial development and limiting the risk of financial crises. The Article then addresses a series of issues with particular developmental significance in the region: trade finance, …

Culture Wars: Rate Manipulation, Institutional Corruption, And The Lost Normative Foundations Of Market Conduct Regulation, Justin O'Brien

Seattle University Law Review

The global investigations into the manipulation of the London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor) have raised significant questions about how conflicts of interest are managed for regulated entities contributing to benchmarks. An alternative framework, which brings the management of the rate process under direct regulatory supervision, is under consideration, coordinated by the International Organization of Securities Commissions taskforce. The articulation of global principles builds on a review commissioned by the British government that suggests rates calculated by submission can be reformed. This paper argues that this approach is predestined to fail, precisely because it ignores the lessons of history. In revisiting …

Nuevo Sistema De Amparo, Alejandro Faya Rodriguez

Alejandro Faya Rodriguez

No abstract provided.

A Negative Externality By Any Other Name: Using Emissions Caps As Models For Constraining Dead-Weight Costs Of Regulation, Scott A. Shepard

Scott A. Shepard

Emissions caps work on a simple and compelling premise. Regulated entities, in the process of creating something desirable, like energy, create and expel some problematic by-product, such as carbon. They do this because they particularly reap a significant set of benefits (e.g., profits, market share, job security) from their efforts, while only diffusely and incidentally, along with the rest of society, suffering the harms caused by their emissions. These emissions, paid for primarily by the rest of society, are called negative externalities. Emissions-cap regimes are designed to make regulated entities more directly accountable for the costs of their emissions and …

Reguladores Y Autonomía, Alejandro Faya Rodriguez

Alejandro Faya Rodriguez

No abstract provided.