Law Commons^™

Bounded Evaluation: Cognition, Incoherence, And Regulatory Policy, Cary Coglianese

All Faculty Scholarship

Cass Sunstein, Daniel Kahneman, David Schkade, and Ilana Ritov have recently advanced a cognitive explanation for incoherence in legal decisionmaking, showing how decision makers tend to make micro-level judgments that make little sense when viewed from a broader perspective. Among other things, they claimed to have discovered striking incoherence in regulatory policy evidenced by varied penalty levels across different statutes, with less serious violations sometimes backed up with higher penalties than more serious violations. This paper comments on Sunstein et al.'s treatment of incoherence in regulatory policy, arguing that the same cognitive limitations that Sunstein et al. argue lead to …

Reconsidering Estoppel: Patent Administration And The Failure Of Festo, R. Polk Wagner

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Last Term, in Festo Corporation v. Shoketsu Kinzoku Kogyo Kabashuki Co., the United States Supreme Court missed perhaps the most important opportunity for patent law reform in two decades. At the core of the failure to grasp the implications of "prosecution history estoppel" - a judicially-crafted principle limiting the enforceable scope of patents based on acts occurring during their application process - is the heretofore universal (but ultimately unsupportable) view of the doctrine as an arbitrary ex post limitation on patent scope. This Article demonstrates the serious flaws in this traditionalist approach, and develops a new theory of prosecution history …

Empirical Analysis And Administrative Law, Cary Coglianese

All Faculty Scholarship

Empirical research has been used to study many areas of law, including administrative law. In this article Professor Coglianese discusses the current and future role of empirical research in understanding and improving administrative rulemaking. Criticism of government regulation and calls for regulatory reform have grown in the last few decades. Empirical research is a valuable tool for designing reforms that will truly improve the effectiveness, efficiency, and legitimacy of regulatory governance. Specifically, Professor Coglianese discusses three areas of administrative law that have benefited from empirical research—economic review of new regulations, judicial review of agency rulemaking, and negotiated rulemaking.

Agencies are …