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Full-Text Articles in Law

The Challenge Of Regulatory Excellence, Cary Coglianese Dec 2016

The Challenge Of Regulatory Excellence, Cary Coglianese

All Faculty Scholarship

Regulation is a high-stakes enterprise marked by tremendous challenges and relentless public pressure. Regulators are expected to protect the public from harms associated with economic activity and technological change without unduly impeding economic growth or efficiency. Regulators today also face new demands, such as adapting to rapidly changing and complex financial instruments, the emergence of the sharing economy, and the potential hazards of synthetic biology and other innovations. Faced with these challenges, regulators need a lodestar for what constitutes high-quality regulation and guidance on how to improve their organizations’ performance. In the book Achieving Regulatory Excellence, leading regulatory experts …


Accounting For Rising Corporate Profits: Intangibles Or Regulatory Rents?, James Bessen Nov 2016

Accounting For Rising Corporate Profits: Intangibles Or Regulatory Rents?, James Bessen

Faculty Scholarship

Since 1980, US corporate valuations have risen relative to assets and operating margins have grown. The possibility of sustained economic rents has raised concerns about economic dynamism and inequality. But rising profits could come from political rents or, instead, from returns to investments in intangibles. Using new data on Federal regulation and data on lobbying, campaign spending, R&D, and organizational capital, this paper finds that both intangibles and political factors account for a substantial part of the increase in profits, but since 2000 political factors are more important. A difference-in-differences analysis finds that major expansions of regulation increase profits significantly.


Private Enforcement, Stephen B. Burbank, Sean Farhang, Herbert Kritzer Aug 2016

Private Enforcement, Stephen B. Burbank, Sean Farhang, Herbert Kritzer

Sean Farhang

Our aim in this Article is to advance understanding of private enforcement of statutory and administrative law in the United States and to raise questions that will be useful to those who are concerned with regulatory design in other countries. To that end, we briefly discuss aspects of American culture, history, and political institutions that reasonably can be thought to have contributed to the growth and subsequent development of private enforcement. We also set forth key elements of the general legal landscape in which decisions about private enforcement are made, aspects of which should be central to the choice of …


Administrative Law: The U.S. And Beyond, Cary Coglianese Jul 2016

Administrative Law: The U.S. And Beyond, Cary Coglianese

All Faculty Scholarship

Administrative law constrains and directs the behavior of officials in the many governmental bodies responsible for implementing legislation and handling governance responsibilities on a daily basis. This field of law consists of procedures for decision making by these administrative bodies, including rules about transparency and public participation. It also encompasses oversight practices provided by legislatures, courts, and elected executives. The way that administrative law affects the behavior of government officials holds important implications for the fulfillment of democratic principles as well as effective governance in society. This paper highlights salient political theory and legal issues fundamental to the U.S. administrative …


Equity And Feasibility Regulation, Dov Waisman May 2016

Equity And Feasibility Regulation, Dov Waisman

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.


Human Survival, Risk, And Law: Considering Risk Filters To Replace Cost-Benefit Analysis, John William Draper Apr 2016

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 …


Regulatory Entrepreneurship, Jordan M. Barry, Elizabeth Pollman Mar 2016

Regulatory Entrepreneurship, Jordan M. Barry, Elizabeth Pollman

Faculty Scholarship

Numerous corporations, ranging from Airbnb to Tesla, and from DraftKings to Uber, have built huge businesses that reside in legal gray areas. Instead of taking the law as a given, these companies have become agents of legal change, focusing major parts of their business plans on changing the law. To achieve their political goals, these companies employ conventional lobbying techniques, but also more innovative tactics. In particular, some attempt to enter markets quickly, then grow too big to ban before regulators can respond. If regulators do take aim at them, they respond by mobilizing their users for political support. This …


Agenda-Setting In The Regulatory State: Theory And Evidence, Cary Coglianese, Daniel E. Walters Jan 2016

Agenda-Setting In The Regulatory State: Theory And Evidence, Cary Coglianese, Daniel E. Walters

Faculty Scholarship

Government officials who run administrative agencies must make countless decisions every day about what issues and work to prioritize. These agenda-setting decisions hold enormous implications for the shape of law and public policy, but they have received remarkably little attention by either administrative law scholars or social scientists who study the bureaucracy. Existing research offers few insights about the institutions, norms, and inputs that shape and constrain agency discretion over their agendas or about the strategies that officials employ in choosing to elevate certain issues while putting others on the back burner. In this article, we advance the study of …


Agenda-Setting In The Regulatory State: Theory And Evidence, Cary Coglianese, Daniel E. Walters Jan 2016

Agenda-Setting In The Regulatory State: Theory And Evidence, Cary Coglianese, Daniel E. Walters

All Faculty Scholarship

Government officials who run administrative agencies must make countless decisions every day about what issues and work to prioritize. These agenda-setting decisions hold enormous implications for the shape of law and public policy, but they have received remarkably little attention by either administrative law scholars or social scientists who study the bureaucracy. Existing research offers few insights about the institutions, norms, and inputs that shape and constrain agency discretion over their agendas or about the strategies that officials employ in choosing to elevate certain issues while putting others on the back burner. In this article, we advance the study of …