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- College of Law - Faculty Scholarship (4)
- All Faculty Scholarship (3)
- Scholarly Publications (3)
- Cornell Law Faculty Publications (2)
- David M Driesen (2)
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- ExpressO (2)
- Michigan Law Review (2)
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- St. Mary's Law Journal (2)
- The Future of Natural Resources Law and Policy (Summer Conference, June 6-8) (2)
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- Daniel A Farber (1)
- Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications (1)
- Faculty Scholarship (1)
- Felix Mormann (1)
- Gary M. Lucas Jr. (1)
- Gerald S. Dickinson (1)
- Librarian Scholarship at Penn Law (1)
- Pace Environmental Law Review (1)
- The National Forest Management Act in a Changing Society, 1976-1996: How Well Has It Worked in the Past 20 Years?: Will It Work in the 21st Century? (September 16-18) (1)
- The Promise and Peril of Oil Shale Development (February 5) (1)
- The Public Lands During the Remainder of the 20th Century: Planning, Law, and Policy in the Federal Land Agencies (Summer Conference, June 8-10) (1)
- University of Colorado Law Review (1)
- Western Water Law, Policy and Management: Ripples, Currents, and New Channels for Inquiry (Martz Summer Conference, June 3-5) (1)
- Workshop on Directional Drilling in the Rocky Mountain Region (November 13) (1)
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Articles 1 - 30 of 40
Full-Text Articles in Law
Introduction, Gabriella Mickel, Samantha Blend
Introduction, Gabriella Mickel, Samantha Blend
Pace Environmental Law Review
No abstract provided.
Betting On Climate Policy: Using Prediction Markets To Address Global Warming, Gary M. Lucas Jr, Felix Mormann
Betting On Climate Policy: Using Prediction Markets To Address Global Warming, Gary M. Lucas Jr, Felix Mormann
Felix Mormann
Global warming, sea level rise, and extreme weather events have made climate change a top priority for policymakers across the globe. But which policies are best suited to tackle the enormous challenges presented by our changing climate? This Article proposes that policymakers turn to prediction markets to answer that crucial question. Prediction markets have a strong track record of outperforming other forecasting mechanisms across a wide range of contexts — from predicting election outcomes and economic trends to guessing Oscar winners. In the context of climate change, market participants could, for example, bet on important climate outcomes conditioned on the …
Betting On Climate Policy: Using Prediction Markets To Address Global Warming, Gary M. Lucas Jr, Felix Mormann
Betting On Climate Policy: Using Prediction Markets To Address Global Warming, Gary M. Lucas Jr, Felix Mormann
Gary M. Lucas Jr.
Global warming, sea level rise, and extreme weather events have made climate change a top priority for policymakers across the globe. But which policies are best suited to tackle the enormous challenges presented by our changing climate? This Article proposes that policymakers turn to prediction markets to answer that crucial question. Prediction markets have a strong track record of outperforming other forecasting mechanisms across a wide range of contexts — from predicting election outcomes and economic trends to guessing Oscar winners. In the context of climate change, market participants could, for example, bet on important climate outcomes conditioned on the …
Betting On Climate Policy: Using Prediction Markets To Address Global Warming, Gary M. Lucas Jr, Felix Mormann
Betting On Climate Policy: Using Prediction Markets To Address Global Warming, Gary M. Lucas Jr, Felix Mormann
Faculty Scholarship
Global warming, sea level rise, and extreme weather events have made climate change a top priority for policymakers across the globe. But which policies are best suited to tackle the enormous challenges presented by our changing climate? This Article proposes that policymakers turn to prediction markets to answer that crucial question. Prediction markets have a strong track record of outperforming other forecasting mechanisms across a wide range of contexts — from predicting election outcomes and economic trends to guessing Oscar winners. In the context of climate change, market participants could, for example, bet on important climate outcomes conditioned on the …
The Missing Element Of Environmental Cost-Benefit Analysis: Compensation For The Loss Of Regulatory Benefits, Karl S. Coplan
The Missing Element Of Environmental Cost-Benefit Analysis: Compensation For The Loss Of Regulatory Benefits, Karl S. Coplan
Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications
Despite its critics, cost-benefit analysis remains a fixture of the environmental regulation calculus. Most criticisms of cost-benefit analysis focus on the impossibility of monetizing environmental and health amenities protected by regulations. Less attention has been paid to the regressive wealth-transfer effects of regulations foregone based on cost-benefit analysis. This regressive effect occurs as long as downwind communities that suffer health and harms from environmental contamination are generally less wealthy than the owners of pollution sources that avoid regulatory-compliance costs. The availability of compensation to pollution-victims has the potential to ameliorate this regressive effect. This Article recommends that the availability of …
Why Law Now Needs To Control Rather Than Follow Neo-Classical Economics, John William Draper
Why Law Now Needs To Control Rather Than Follow Neo-Classical Economics, 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 …
Agencies, Courts, And The Limits Of Balancing, Daniel A. Farber
Agencies, Courts, And The Limits Of Balancing, Daniel A. Farber
Daniel A Farber
Courts have struggled in several very different contexts to determine when a decision maker can consider costs that are not explicitly addressed in the governing statute. This issue arises when agencies decide whether to conduct a rulemaking or what rule to issue after a rulemaking. It also arises when courts decide whether to enjoin a violation of a statute or whether to vacate an administrative rule rather than simply remanding. Judicial opinions point in different directions and often ignore each other.
This Article contends that the same principles should govern judicial and agency discretion to consider costs across all these …
The Accidental Postmodernists: A New Era Of Skepticism In Environmental Law, Shi-Ling Hsu
The Accidental Postmodernists: A New Era Of Skepticism In Environmental Law, Shi-Ling Hsu
Scholarly Publications
No abstract provided.
Complexity And Simplicity In Law: A Review Essay (Cass R. Sunstein, Simpler: The Future Of Government (2003)), David M. Driesen
Complexity And Simplicity In Law: A Review Essay (Cass R. Sunstein, Simpler: The Future Of Government (2003)), David M. Driesen
David M Driesen
This essay discusses Cass Sunstein’s book, Simpler: The Future of Government, in order to advance our understanding of the concepts of complex and simple law. Many writers identify complexity with uncertainty and high cost. This essay argues that complexity bears no fixed relationship to costs or benefits. It also shows that complexity’s relationship to uncertainty is so ambiguous that it is profitable to treat complexity and uncertainty as separate concepts. It develops useful separate concepts of legal and compliance complexity that will aid efforts to simplify law, like the one Sunstein claims to have embarked upon. It also argues that …
Cost-Benefit Analysis And The Precautionary Principle: Can They Be Reconciled?, David M. Driesen
Cost-Benefit Analysis And The Precautionary Principle: Can They Be Reconciled?, David M. Driesen
David M Driesen
Conventional wisdom teaches us that cost-benefit analysis (CBA) and the precautionary principle conflict. CBA proponents consider precaution incoherent and irrational, while precautionary principle fans see CBA as a threat to environmental protection. Both sides, however, see these two concepts as conflicting. This Article questions the conventional view. It finds no conflict between the precautionary principle, properly understood, and the mere idea of taking costs and benefits into account in choosing environmental standards. The reasoning underlying this conclusion illuminates both concepts. Having revealed the theoretical possibility of precautionary CBA, it uses a case study of the climate disruption issue to begin …
Stasis And Change In Environmental Law: The Past, Present And Future Of The Fordham Environmental Law Review, Gerald S. Dickinson
Stasis And Change In Environmental Law: The Past, Present And Future Of The Fordham Environmental Law Review, Gerald S. Dickinson
Articles
The past twenty years of environmental law are marked as much by legislative stasis as by profound change in the way that lawyers, policymakers, and scholars interact with the field. Although no new federal legislation was passed over the past two decades, much has changed about the field of environmental law. This change is the result of a set of conceptual and legal challenges to the field posed by intellectual and policy movements that took root in the early 1990s. The intellectual and policy movements that have most profoundly shaped the field of environmental law in the past twenty years …
Stasis And Change In Environmental Law, Gerald S. Dickinson
Stasis And Change In Environmental Law, Gerald S. Dickinson
Gerald S. Dickinson
The past twenty years of environmental law are marked as much by legislative stasis as by profound change in the way that lawyers, policymakers, and scholars interact with the field. Although no new federal legislation was passed over the past two decades, much has changed about the field of environmental law. This change is the result of a set of conceptual and legal challenges to the field posed by intellectual and policy movements that took root in the early 1990s. The intellectual and policy movements that have most profoundly shaped the field of environmental law in the past twenty years …
The Social Value Of Mortality Risk Reduction: Vsl Vs. The Social Welfare Function Approach, Matthew D. Adler, James K. Hammitt, Nicholas Treich
The Social Value Of Mortality Risk Reduction: Vsl Vs. The Social Welfare Function Approach, Matthew D. Adler, James K. Hammitt, Nicholas Treich
All Faculty Scholarship
We examine how different welfarist frameworks evaluate the social value of mortality risk-reduction. These frameworks include classical, distributively unweighted cost-benefit analysis—i.e., the “value per statistical life” (VSL) approach—and three benchmark social welfare functions (SWF): a utilitarian SWF, an ex ante prioritarian SWF, and an ex post prioritarian SWF. We examine the conditions on individual utility and on the SWF under which these frameworks display the following five properties: i) wealth sensitivity, ii) sensitivity to baseline risk, iii) equal value of risk reduction, iv) preference for risk equity, and v) catastrophe aversion. We show that the particular manner in which VSL …
Law, Politics, And Cost-Benefit Analysis, Daniel H. Cole
Law, Politics, And Cost-Benefit Analysis, Daniel H. Cole
Articles by Maurer Faculty
This Article explores the significant role cost–benefit analysis (CBA) plays in facilitating or impeding legislative and regulatory policy decisions. The Article centers around three case studies of CBAs the EPA prepared under three different presidents: (1) Clinton Administration changes to Clean Air Act air quality standards for ozone and particulate matter; (2) President Obama’s recent decision to suspend the EPA’s reconsideration of the Bush Administration’s air quality standard for ozone; and (3) the George W. Bush Administration’s “Clear Skies” legislative initiative. The first two case studies demonstrate, between them, how well-constructed CBAs can facilitate social-welfare-enhancing and impede welfare-reducing rules, even …
A Cost-Benefit Interpretation Of The "Substantially Similar" Hurdle In The Congressional Review Act: Can Osha Ever Utter The E-Word (Ergonomics) Again?, Adam M. Finkel, Jason W. Sullivan
A Cost-Benefit Interpretation Of The "Substantially Similar" Hurdle In The Congressional Review Act: Can Osha Ever Utter The E-Word (Ergonomics) Again?, Adam M. Finkel, Jason W. Sullivan
All Faculty Scholarship
The Congressional Review Act permits Congress to veto proposed regulations via a joint resolution, and prohibits an agency from reissuing a rule “in substantially the same form” as the vetoed rule. Some scholars—and officials within the agencies themselves—have understood the “substantially the same” standard to bar an agency from regulating in the same substantive area covered by a vetoed rule. Courts have not yet provided an authoritative interpretation of the standard.
This Article examines a spectrum of possible understandings of the standard, and relates them to the legislative history (of both the Congressional Review Act itself and the congressional veto …
Rationalism In Regulation, Christopher C. Demuth, Douglas H. Ginsburg
Rationalism In Regulation, Christopher C. Demuth, Douglas H. Ginsburg
Michigan Law Review
Retaking Rationality: How Cost-Benefit Analysis Can Better Protect the Environment and Our Health, by Richard L. Revesz and Michael A. Livermore, aims to convince those who favor more government regulation-in particular environmental groups-that they should embrace cost-benefit analysis and turn it to their purposes. Coauthored by a prominent law school dean and a recent student with a background in environmental advocacy, the book is a jarring combination of roundhouse political polemics and careful academic argument. Sweeping pronouncements are followed by qualifications that leave the sweep of the pronouncements in doubt- rather like the give-and-take of the law school classroom …
Slides: Costs And Benefits Of Development: An Industry Perspective, Glenn Vawter
Slides: Costs And Benefits Of Development: An Industry Perspective, Glenn Vawter
The Promise and Peril of Oil Shale Development (February 5)
Presenter: Glenn Vawter, Executive Director, National Oil Shale Association
12 slides
Slides: Economic Incentives For Demand Reduction, Christopher Goemans
Slides: Economic Incentives For Demand Reduction, Christopher Goemans
Western Water Law, Policy and Management: Ripples, Currents, and New Channels for Inquiry (Martz Summer Conference, June 3-5)
Presenter: Christopher Goemans, Department of Agriculture & Resource Economics, Colorado State University
17 slides
Saving Lives Through Administrative Law And Economics: A Response, Shi-Ling Hsu
Saving Lives Through Administrative Law And Economics: A Response, Shi-Ling Hsu
Scholarly Publications
No abstract provided.
The Identifiability Of Bias In Environmental Law, Shi-Ling Hsu
The Identifiability Of Bias In Environmental Law, Shi-Ling Hsu
Scholarly Publications
The identifiability effect is the human propensity to have stronger emotions regarding identifiable individuals or groups than for abstract ones. The more information that is available about a person, the more likely this person’s situation will influence human decisionmaking. This human propensity has biased law and public policy against environmental and ecological protection because the putative economic victims of environmental regulation are usually easily identifiable workers that lose their jobs, while the beneficiaries—people who avoid a premature death from air or water pollution, people who would be saved by medicinal compounds available only in rare plant and animal species, and …
Amicus Brief Of Economists Ackerman Et Al. In Entergy V. Riverkeepers, Douglas A. Kysar, David M. Driesen
Amicus Brief Of Economists Ackerman Et Al. In Entergy V. Riverkeepers, Douglas A. Kysar, David M. Driesen
College of Law - Faculty Scholarship
A group of academic economists filed this amicus brief in a pending Supreme Court case, Entergy v. Riverkeepers. The amicus brief addresses questions pertaining to the nature and limits of cost-benefit analysis (CBA) and thus contributes to the ongoing scholarly debate about CBA's role in environmental law. The case raises the question of whether EPA may consider CBA in writing standards based on the "best technology available for minimizing environmental impacts" from intake of water to cool industrial facilities. This intake kills fish and disrupts eco-systems. The brief explains that cost-benefit balancing may be inappropriate for an agency implementing foundational …
Risk Equity: A New Proposal, Matthew D. Adler
Risk Equity: A New Proposal, Matthew D. Adler
All Faculty Scholarship
What does distributive justice require of risk regulators? Various executive orders enjoin health and safety regulators to take account of “distributive impacts,” “equity,” or “environmental justice,” and many scholars endorse these requirements. But concrete methodologies for evaluating the equity effects of risk regulation policies remain undeveloped. The contrast with cost-benefit analysis--now a very well developed set of techniques --is stark. Equity analysis by governmental agencies that regulate health and safety risks, at least in the United States, lacks rigor and structure. This Article proposes a rigorous framework for risk-equity analysis, which I term “probabilistic population profile analysis” (PPPA). PPPA is …
Agenda: The Future Of Natural Resources Law And Policy, University Of Colorado Boulder. Natural Resources Law Center, Rocky Mountain Mineral Law Foundation
Agenda: The Future Of Natural Resources Law And Policy, University Of Colorado Boulder. Natural Resources Law Center, Rocky Mountain Mineral Law Foundation
The Future of Natural Resources Law and Policy (Summer Conference, June 6-8)
The Natural Resources Law Center's 25th Anniversary Conference and Natural Resources Law Teachers 14th Biennial Institute provided an opportunity for some of the best natural resources lawyers to discuss future trends in the field. The conference focused on the larger, cross-cutting issues affecting natural resources policy. Initial discussions concerned the declining role of scientific resource management due to the increased inclusion of economic-cost benefit analysis and public participation in the decision-making process. The effectiveness of this approach was questioned particularly in the case of non-market goods such as the polar bear. Other participants promoted the importance of public participation and …
Slides: Meaningful Engagement: The Public's Role In Resource Decisions, Mark Squillace
Slides: Meaningful Engagement: The Public's Role In Resource Decisions, Mark Squillace
The Future of Natural Resources Law and Policy (Summer Conference, June 6-8)
Presenter: Mark Squillace, Director, Natural Resources Law Center, University of Colorado Law School
22 slides
Did Nepa Drown New Orleans? The Levees, The Blame Game, And The Hazards Of Hindsight, Thomas O. Mcgarity, Douglas A. Kysar
Did Nepa Drown New Orleans? The Levees, The Blame Game, And The Hazards Of Hindsight, Thomas O. Mcgarity, Douglas A. Kysar
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
This Article highlights the hazards of hindsight analysis of the causes of catastrophic events, focusing on theories of why the New Orleans levees failed during Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and particularly on the theory that the levee failures were "caused" by a 1977 National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) lawsuit that resulted in a temporary injunction against the Army Corps of Engineers' hurricane protection project for New Orleans. The Article provides a detailed historical reconstruction of the decision process that eventuated in the New Orleans storm surge protection system, focusing both on the political and legal factors involved and on the …
The "Benefits" Of Non-Delegation: Using The Non-Delegation Doctrine To Bring More Rigor To Benefit-Cost Analysis, Victor B. Flatt
The "Benefits" Of Non-Delegation: Using The Non-Delegation Doctrine To Bring More Rigor To Benefit-Cost Analysis, Victor B. Flatt
ExpressO
This article examines the problems of benefit-cost (or cost-benefit) analysis in our regulatory system and posits that a more nuanced version of the “non-delegation” doctrine (made famous in Schechter Poultry) could improve many of the problems associated with the use of benefit-cost analysis. In particular this article notes that many of the problems with benefit-cost analysis are its use by agencies to make large policy decisions, which could be characterized as legislative. The article also notes that though the “non-delegation” doctrine may appear to be dead or dormant, that a form of it, in separation of powers doctrine, exists in …
It Might Have Been: Risk, Precaution, And Opportunity Costs, Douglas A. Kysar
It Might Have Been: Risk, Precaution, And Opportunity Costs, Douglas A. Kysar
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
This Article, which is part of a larger project on the competing merits of cost-benefit analysis (CBA) and the precautionary principle (PP) as competing policymaking paradigms for environmental, health, and safety regulation, examines one specific plank of the case against the PP: the claim that the principle's ignorance of the opportunity costs of precaution leads to indeterminate or impoverishing policy advice. Because PP defenders emphasize the limits of human knowledge and the frequency of unpleasant surprises from technology and industrial development, they prefer an ex ante stance of precaution whenever a proposed activity meets some threshold possibility of causing severe …
Regulatory Reform: The New Lochnerism?, David M. Driesen
Regulatory Reform: The New Lochnerism?, David M. Driesen
ExpressO
This article explores the question of whether contemporary regulatory reformers’ attitudes toward government regulation have anything in common with those of the Lochner-era Court. It finds that both groups tend to favor value neutral law guided by cost-benefit analysis over legislative value choices. Their skepticism toward redistributive legislation reflects shared beliefs that regulation often proves counterproductive in terms of its own objectives, fails demanding tests for rationality, and violates the natural order. This parallelism raises fresh questions about claims of neutrality and heightened rationality that serve as important justifications modern regulatory reform.
Is Cost-Benefit Analysis Neutral?, David M. Driesen
Is Cost-Benefit Analysis Neutral?, David M. Driesen
College of Law - Faculty Scholarship
Cost-benefit analysis (CBA) owes much of its appeal to its image as a neutral principle for deciding upon the appropriate stringency of environmental, health, and safety regulation. This article examines whether CBA is neutral in effect, i.e. whether it sometimes makes regulations more stringent or regularly leads to weaker health, safety and environmental protection. It also addresses the question of whether CBA offers either an objective value-neutral method or procedural neutrality. This Article shows that CBA has almost always proven anti-environmental in practice and that, in many ways, it is anti-environmental in theory. It examines the practice of the Bush …
Is Cost-Benefit Analysis Neutral, David M. Driesen
Is Cost-Benefit Analysis Neutral, David M. Driesen
University of Colorado Law Review
Cost-benefit analysis (CBA) owes much of its appeal to its image as a neutral principle for deciding upon the appropriate stringency of environmental, health, and safety regulation. This Article examines whether CBA is neutral in effect-i.e. whether it sometimes makes regulations more stringent or regularly leads to weaker environmental, health, and safety protection. Using a representative data set from recent Office of Management and Budget (OMB) reviews, an examination of OMB prompt letters, and a literature review, this Article shows that CBA has almost always proven anti-environmental in practice. It also shows that the most common approaches to CBA are …