Law Commons^™

Medicine As A Public Calling, Nicholas Bagley

Michigan Law Review

The debate over how to tame private medical spending tends to pit advocates of government-provided insurance—a single-payer scheme—against those who would prefer to harness market forces to hold down costs. When it is mentioned at all, the possibility of regulating the medical industry as a public utility is brusquely dismissed as anathema to the American regulatory tradition. This dismissiveness, however, rests on a failure to appreciate just how deeply the public utility model shaped health law in the twentieth century— and how it continues to shape health law today. Closer economic regulation of the medical industry may or may not …

Fracking And The Rural Poor: Negative Externalities, Failing Remedies, And Federal Legislation, Matthew Castelli

Indiana Journal of Law and Social Equality

This Note examines the relationship between the rural poor and the negative externalities of hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”). It asserts that the rural poor are disproportionately burdened with fracking’s negative externalities and that comprehensive, national regulation is needed because current legal methods are insufficient to internalize these costs. The argument is made in four parts: describing fracking’s externalities; assessing their impact on the rural poor; analyzing current legal regimes; and proposing an equitable regulatory framework based on cooperative federalism.

Fracking produces three main categories of negative externalities: water, air, and land contamination. Water contamination can be caused by migration of fracking …

Regulating Electricity-Market Manipulation: A Proposal For A New Regulatory Regime To Proscribe All Forms Of Manipulation, Matthew Evans

Michigan Law Review

Congress broadly authorized the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (“FERC”) to protect consumers of electricity from all forms of manipulation in the electricity markets, but the regulations that FERC passed are not nearly so expansive. As written, FERC’s Anti-Manipulation Rule covers only instances of manipulation involving fraud. This narrow scope is problematic, however, because electricity markets can also be manipulated by nonfraudulent activity. Thus, in order to reach all forms of manipulation, FERC is forced to interpret and apply its Anti-Manipulation Rule in ways that strain the plain language and accepted understanding of the rule and therefore constitute an improper extension …