Law Commons^™

Fear Assessment: Cost-Benefit Analysis And The Pricing Of Fear And Anxiety, Matthew D. Adler

Faculty Scholarship

Risk assessment is now a common feature of regulatory practice, but fear assessment is not. In particular, environmental, health and safety agencies such as EPA, FDA, OSHA, NHTSA, and CPSC, commonly count death, illness and injury as costs for purposes of cost-benefit analysis, but almost never incorporate fear, anxiety or other welfare-reducing mental states into the analysis. This is puzzling, since fear and anxiety are welfare setbacks, and since the very hazards regulated by these agencies - air or water pollutants, toxic waste dumps, food additives and contaminants, workplace toxins and safety threats, automobiles, dangerous consumer products, radiation, and so …

Isolated And Politicized: The Nlrb's Uncertain Future The National Labor Relations Board In Comparative Context: Introduction, James J. Brudney

Faculty Scholarship

The National Labor Relations Board has managed to remain unusually detached or isolated in its decision-making even as it has come to operate in an openly partisan manner. There is a certain paradoxical quality to the coexistence of these two descriptors for Board conduct: isolation in agency performance ordinarily suggests a neutral separation from the political process whereas politicization implies a close connection to the elected branches. The explanation for this odd pairing involves a number of factors: some reflect political realities beyond the agency's ability to control, others relate to the structure of the NLRA, and still others are …

Supplemental Environmental Projects Have Been Effectively Used In Citizen Suits To Deter Future Violations As Well As To Achieve Significant Additional Environmental Benefits, Edward Lloyd

Faculty Scholarship

Supplemental Environmental Projects (SUPs) are environmentally benefical projects included in settlements of environmental law enforcement cases. Courts have addressed SEPs in two contexts: where proposed by parties in consent decrees and where courts have fashioned SEPs as apart of the relief ordered in an enforcement case. SEPs have been extensively used in both government and citizen enforcement cases despite the nearly universal absence of any explicit legislative authorization by Congress. Congress has tangentially recognized the place of SEPs in the penalty and deterrence scheme by giving the Administrator of the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Attorney General …

Citizens To Preserve Overton Park V. Volpe, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

This essay is one of a series destined to appear in a Foundation Press book, Administrative Law Stories, now set for publication in the fall of 2005. The decision in Citizens to Preserve Overton Park v. Volpe represents a transition from political to judicial controls over decisions broadly affecting a wide range of community interests. Unmistakable and dramatic as it is, that transition is not universally applauded. But the transition was striking and quick. The late sixties and early seventies saw an explosion of new national legislation on social and environmental issues, that often provided explicitly or implicitly for citizen …

Marbury V. Madison As The First Great Administrative Law Decision, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

Marbury v. Madison is our foremost symbol of judicial power. Not only is the decision regarded as the root of judicial authority to strike down statutes as violating the Constitution; it is also taken to mean that "the federal judiciary is supreme in the exposition of the Constitution." In other words, Marbury has come to stand for the proposition that courts should enforce their own understanding of the meaning of the Constitution, without deferring or even paying much attention to the views of the other branches.

I will not in this essay engage in yet another analysis of Marbury's …

Constitutional And Statutory Interpretation, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

This article discusses relatively established theories with respect to statutory and constitutional interpretation. Written constitutions and statutes provide authoritative directions for officials and citizens within liberal democracies. The article mentions that descriptive and normative theories connect with each other in critical respects. Statutory interpretation involves the construction and application of provisions adopted by legislatures. The theoretical questions about interpreting statutes and constitutions suggest more general questions about the meaning of human communications; and scholars of philosophy of language, linguistics, literary theory, and religious hermeneutics discuss analogous issues. This article discusses an important issue in statutory interpretation that is the nature …