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Full-Text Articles in Law
Miscalculating Welfare, Michael B. Dorff, Kimberly Kessler Ferzan
Miscalculating Welfare, Michael B. Dorff, Kimberly Kessler Ferzan
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In their quest to maximize efficiency, law and economics scholars often produce novel, creative, and counterintuitive legal rules. Indeed, legal economists have argued for baby selling, against anti-discrimination laws in the workplace, and for insider trading. In this essay, we discuss some concerns about this form of legal scholarship that privileges the creative and counterintuitive over the fair, mundane, and intuitive. Drawing on a range of empirical evidence, this essay argues that the failure to include, and to give sufficient weight to, fairness preferences undermines legal economists' policy recommendations. Specifically, after setting forth three examples of this phenomenon, in the …
The Law And Economics Of Environmental Federalism: Europe And The United States Compared, Michael G. Faure, Jason S. Johnston
The Law And Economics Of Environmental Federalism: Europe And The United States Compared, Michael G. Faure, Jason S. Johnston
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This article describes the evolution and key features of the centralized environmental regulatory systems that emerged in the United States and Europe during the latter half of the twentieth century. It applies insights from the positive economic analysis of regulatory centralization in an attempt to explain a striking paradox found in both the European and American centralized environmental regulatory regimes: the fact that in both systems, centralized environmental regulation has been adopted not as a solution for transboundary pollution (interjursidictional externalities), but rather for pollution that is primarily local. The paper develops a positive account that explains the tendency of …
Climate Change Confusion And The Supreme Court: The Misguided Regulation Of Greenhouse Gas Emissions Under The Clean Air Act, Jason S. Johnston
Climate Change Confusion And The Supreme Court: The Misguided Regulation Of Greenhouse Gas Emissions Under The Clean Air Act, Jason S. Johnston
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In the spring of 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Massachusetts v. EPA that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) must promulgate automobile tailpipe greenhouse gas emission standards under Section 202 of the Clean Air Act (CAA). American environmentalists hailed the Supreme Court's decision as an important victory in the battle to curb global warming. This article argues to the contrary that: 1) a large body of economic work demonstrates that the likely geographic and temporal pattern of costs and benefits to the U.S. from climate change bears no resemblance to the pollution problems that Congress intended to deal …