Law Commons^™

Regulatory Theory, Matthew D. Adler

All Faculty Scholarship

This chapter reviews a range of topics connected to the justification of government regulation, including: the definition of “regulation”; welfarism, Kaldor-Hicks efficiency, and the Pareto principles; the fundamental theorems of welfare economics and the “market failure” framework for justifying regulation, which identifies different ways in which the conditions for those theorems may fail to hold true (such as externalities, public goods, monopoly power, and imperfect information); the Coase theorem; and the different forms of regulation.

Presidential Control Of The Elite "Non-Agency", Kimberly L. Wehle

All Faculty Scholarship

This article examines the constitutionality of legislation creating a new form of independent agency – in effect, a “non-agency” agency residing in the no-man’s land between Articles I and II of the Constitution. In the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, Congress established the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (“PCAOB” or “Board”) and endowed it with massive governmental powers while insulating it from traditional mechanisms for ensuring accountability. Congress deemed the PCAOB not an agency, rendered it substantially immune from judicial review, empowered Board members to set their own salaries and budget, and gave the embattled Securities and Exchange Commission – not the President …

Transparency And Public Participation In The Rulemaking Process: Recommendations For The New Administration, Cary Coglianese, Heather Kilmartin, Evan Mendelson

All Faculty Scholarship

Each year, federal regulatory agencies create thousands of new rules that affect the economy. When these agencies insulate themselves too much from the public, they are more likely to make suboptimal decisions and decrease public acceptance of their resulting rules. A nonpartisan Task Force on Transparency and Public Participation met in 2008 to identify current deficiencies in agency rulemaking procedures and develop recommendations for the next presidential administration to improve the quality of regulations and the legitimacy of regulatory proceedings. This report summarizes the Task Force's deliberations, indicating ways that federal agencies could do a better job of seeking citizen …

The Relation Between Regulation And Class Actions: Evidence From The Insurance Industry, Eric Helland, Jonathan Klick

All Faculty Scholarship

Standard law and economics models imply that regulation and litigation serve as substitutes. We test this by looking at the incidence of insurance class actions as a function of measures of regulatory enforcement. We also look specifically at whether states with clear regulatory standards regarding the use of OEM parts experience less litigation over this issue. We find no evidence of substitution between regulation and litigation. We also examine the possibility that litigation is more frequent in states where regulators are more likely to be captured by industry interests, finding no support for this hypothesis either. Instead, litigation is more …

Network Neutrality After Comcast: Toward A Case-By-Case Approach To Reasonable Network Management, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

The Federal Communications Commission’s recent Comcast decision has rejected categorical, ex ante restrictions on Internet providers’ ability to manage their networks in favor of a more flexible approach that examines each dispute on a case-by-case basis, as I have long advocated. This book chapter, written for a conference held in February 2009, discusses the considerations that a case-by-case approach should take into account. First, allowing the network to evolve will promote innovation by allowing the emergence of applications that depend on a fundamentally different network architecture. Indeed, as the universe of Internet users and applications becomes more heterogeneous, it is …

Embracing Paradox: Three Problems The Nlrb Must Confront To Resist Further Erosion Of Labor Rights In The Expanding Immigrant Workplace, Michael C. Duff

All Faculty Scholarship

This article discusses the Supreme Court's 2002 Hoffman Plastic Compounds opinion, normally considered in terms of its social justice ramifications, from the different perspective of NLRB attorneys tasked with pursuing enforcement of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) under the conceptually (and practically) odd rubric that some NLRA employees (unauthorized workers) have no remedy under the NLRA. The article focuses on three problems evincing paradox. First, NLRB attorneys prosecuting cases involving these workers will probably gain knowledge of unlawful background immigration conduct. To what extent must the attorneys disclose it, and to whom? Second, NLRB attorneys are extraordinarily reliant on …

Agency Self-Regulation, Elizabeth Magill

All Faculty Scholarship

Discretion is at the center of most accounts of bureaucracy. Legal scholars in particular have called for agency supervisors, such as Congress, the courts, or the President, to tame that agency discretion. Strangely absent from these accounts is a ubiquitous phenomenon: administrative agencies routinely limit their own discretion when no source of authority requires them to do so.

This Article aims to create a category of such "self-regulation" and argue that scholars have been mistaken to ignore it. It first defines the category of self-regulation, including the feature of administrative law that makes the category interesting, which is that courts …

Top Cop Or Regulatory Flop? The Sec At 75, Jill E. Fisch

All Faculty Scholarship

In their forthcoming article, Redesigning the SEC: Does the Treasury Have a Better Idea?, Professors John C. Coffee, Jr., and Hillary Sale offer compelling reasons to rethink the SEC’s role. This article extends that analysis, evaluating the SEC’s responsibility for the current financial crisis and its potential future role in regulation of the capital markets. In particular, the article identifies critical failures in the SEC’s performance in its core competencies of enforcement, financial transparency, and investor protection. The article argues that these failures are not the result, as suggested by the Treasury Department Blueprint, of a balkanized regulatory system. Rather, …

Consumer Protection In An Era Of Globalization, Cary Coglianese, Adam M. Finkel, David T. Zaring

All Faculty Scholarship

With expanding global trade, the challenge of protecting consumers from unsafe food, pharmaceuticals, and consumer products has grown increasingly salient, necessitating the development of new policy ideas and analysis. This chapter introduces the book, Import Safety: Regulatory Governance in the Global Economy, a multidisciplinary project analyzing import safety problems and an array of innovative solutions to these problems. The challenge of protecting the public from unsafe imports arises from the sheer volume of global trade as well as the complexity of products being traded and the vast number of inputs each product contains. It is further compounded by the …