Law Commons^™

Cost-Benefit Default Principles, Cass R. Sunstein

Michigan Law Review

Courts should be reluctant to apply the literal terms of a statute to mandate pointless expenditures of effort. . .. Unless Congress has been extraordinarily rigid, there is likely a basis for an implication of de minimis authority to provide exemption when the burdens of regulation yield a gain of trivial or no value. It seems bizarre that a statute intended to improve human health would .. . lock the agency into looking at only one half of a substance's health effects in determining the maximum level for that substance. [I]t is only where there is "clear congressional intent to …