Law Commons^™

Public Choice Concepts And Applications In Law, Maxwell Stearns, Todd Zywicki

Maxwell L. Stearns

This is the only course book specifically designed to instruct law students in the discipline of public choice. The book provides a comprehensive, but nontechnical, overview of interest group theory, social choice theory, and game theory (along with elementary price theory), and ties these concepts to a wide range of topics in both public and private law. The book contains chapters devoted to each set of methodological tools and to specific institutional settings: legislatures, courts, executive branch (and bureaus), and constitutions.

Commerce Games And The Individual Mandate, Leslie Henry, Maxwell Stearns

Maxwell L. Stearns

While the Supreme Court declined an early invitation to resolve challenges to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“PPACA”), a recent split between the United States Courts of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit (sustaining the PPACA’s “individual mandate”) and the Eleventh Circuit (striking it down) virtually ensures that the Court will decide the fate of this centerpiece of the Obama Administration’s regulatory agenda. Whatever the Court’s decision, it will likely affect Commerce Clause doctrine- and related doctrines - for years or even decades to come.

Litigants, judges, and academic commentators have focused on whether the Court’s “economic activity” tests, …