Law Commons^™

Economic Approaches To Global Regulation: Expanding The International Law And Economics Paradigm, Dan Danielsen

Dan Danielsen

The recent economic crisis has demonstrated with startling clarity the importance of developing a more robust framework for assessing the effects of national rules on global welfare. For more than fifty years, law and economics scholars have examined the effects of domestic legal rules on economic activity and general welfare in the United States. More recently, international law scholars have begun to use economic methods to analyze the international legal order. In this article I survey this evolving body of “international law and economics scholarship” with a view to articulating its principle methodological innovations as well as assessing its contributions …

Cloud Computing Providers And Data Security Law: Building Trust With United States Companies, Jared A. Harshbarger Esq.

Jared A. Harshbarger

Cloud computing and software-as-a-service (SaaS) models are revolutionizing the information technology industry. As these services become more prevalent, data security and privacy concerns will also rise among consumers and the companies who consider using them. Cloud computing providers must establish a sufficient level of trust with their potential customers in order to ease initial fears - and ensure certain compliance obligations will be met - at least to the extent that any such inquiring customer will feel comfortable enough to ultimately take the irreversible step of releasing their sensitive data and personal information into the cloud.

Rescuing Science From Politics: Regulation And The Distortion Of Scientific Research, Wendy Wagner, Rena Steinzor

Rena I. Steinzor

Rescuing Science from Politics debuts chapters by the nation's leading academics in law, science, and philosophy who explore ways that the law can be abused by special interests to intrude on the way scientists conduct research. The high stakes and adversarial features of regulation create the worst possible climate for the honest production and use of science especially by those who will ultimately bear the cost of the resulting regulatory standards. Yet an in-depth exploration of the ways in which dominant interest groups distort the available science to support their positions has received little attention in the academic or popular …

The Truth About Regulation In America, Rena I. Steinzor

Rena I. Steinzor

The special interests leading the accelerating crusade against regulation have re-ignited a potent coalition of industry lobbyists, traditional conservatives, and grassroots Tea Party activists. The politicians speak in generic terms for public consumption: “the nation is broke,” “big government is bad,” “regulation costs trillions.” Behind the scenes, industry lobbyists target for repeal dozens of regulations that are designed to control pollution, ensure drug, product, and food safety, and eliminate workplace hazards. In an effort to bring light and air to an often misleading and always opportunistic national debate, this essay presents five truths about the state of health, safety, and …

Regulated Into Automobile Dependence: How City Hall Mandates Sprawl And What Planners Can Do About It, Michael E. Lewyn

Michael E Lewyn

A brief (about 20-minute) speech explaining why government regulation promotes automobile-dependent development.

The Moral Hazard Problem In Global Economic Regulation, Frank J. Garcia

Frank J. Garcia

Global regulation of international business transactions presents a particular form of the moral hazard problem. Global firms use economic and political power to manipulate state and state-controlled multilateral regulation to preserve their opportunity to externalize the social costs of global economic activity with impunity. Unless other actors can effectively counter this at the national and global regulatory levels, globalization re-creates the conditions for under-regulated or “robber baron” capitalism at the global level. This model of economic activity has been rejected at the national level by the same modern democratic capitalist states which currently dominate globalization, creating a crisis of legitimacy …

Save The Economy: Break Up The Big Banks And Shape Up The Regulators, Charles W. Murdock

Charles W. Murdock

Save the Economy: Break Up the Big Banks and Shape Up the Regulators

The U.S. economy is still reeling from the financial crisis that exploded in the fall of 2008. This article asserts that the big banks were major culprits in causing the crisis, by funding the non-bank lenders that created the toxic mortgages which the big banks securitized and sold to unwary investors. Paradoxically, banks which were then too big to fail are even larger today.

The article briefly reviews the history of banking from the Founding Fathers to the deregulatory mindset that has been present since 1980. It …

The Regulation Of Climate Engineering, Jesse Reynolds

Jesse Reynolds

Conflict Of Interest That Led To The Gulf Oil Disaster, Peter J. Honigsberg

Peter J Honigsberg

On April 20, 2010, British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico exploded, killing eleven people and spilling billions of gallons of oil into the gulf. In the days and weeks that followed, the media pointed to the Minerals Management Services (MMS), the regulatory agency responsible for managing offshore drilling, as being complicit with BP. The MMS issued permits for deepwater drilling in violation of its regulations; provided hundreds of exemptions to the regulations; maintained lax monitoring and enforcement procedures; allowed the companies to draft regulations that suited their interests and objectives; and engaged in inappropriate relationships …

State And Local Regulation Of Particular Types Of Affordable Housing, Tim Iglesias

Tim Iglesias

This chapter will consider state and local regulation affecting the development of several types of affordable housing which are neither traditional single family nor multi-family. Specifically, the chapter discusses statutes, ordinances, regulations and leading case law concerning the siting of manufactured housing, farmworker housing, accessory or secondary units, single room occupancy hotels (SROs), condominium conversion regulation, and emergency shelters and transitional housing, including domestic violence shelters.

Deference To Agency Interpretations Of Regulations: A Post-Chevron Assessment, Thomas A. Schweitzer, Russell L. Weaver

Thomas A. Schweitzer

No abstract provided.

The Growing Consumer Exposure To Nanotechnology In Everyday Products: Regulating Innovative Technologies In Light Of Lessons From The Past, K Van Tassel, R Goldman

Katharine A. Van Tassel

Consumers in the United States are being exposed to steadily increasing levels of novel and untested substances as a result of their contact with consumer products containing nanoparticles. Hundreds of consumer products are being marketed for human consumption, including food, dietary supplements, cosmetics and sunscreens. This expanding market ignores the growing scientific understanding that nanoparticles can create unintended human health and environmental risks. This Article discusses the public health, regulatory, legal and ethical issues raised by the developing appreciation of the health risks associated with nanotech products and is arranged as follows. After this Introduction, this Article describes the present …

Interactive Regulation, Robert C. Bird

Robert C Bird

Small businesses shoulder significant costs in order to comply with the maze of government regulation that impacts commerce. The Regulatory Flexibility Act (RFA) was designed to alleviate that burden by making regulators more accountable in their enforcement of agency mandates. The RFA just celebrated its thirtieth birthday, and one of the most important pieces of business legislation developed during the 1970s has yet to fulfill its promise. This article examines not just the calls for statutory reform but also the motivations and perceptions of the individuals most impacted by business regulation. We propose that while legal reform can be helpful, …

Lessons From The North Sea: Should "Safety Cases" Come To America?, Rena I. Steinzor

Rena I. Steinzor

The catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico last spring and summer has triggered an intense search for more effective regulatory methods that would prevent such disasters. The new Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation, and Enforcement (BOEMRE) is under pressure to adopt the British “safety case” system, which requires the preparation of a facility-specific plan that is typically several hundred pages long. This system is supposed to inculcate a “safety culture” within companies that operate offshore in the British portion of the North Sea because it overcomes a “box-ticking” mentality and constitutes “bottom up” implementation of safety measures. …

Trade And Sustainable Development, Padideh Ala'i

Padideh Ala'i