Law and Economics Commons^™

Cost-Benefit Analysis: An Inadequate Basis For Health, Safety, And Environmental Regulatory Decisionmaking, Michael S. Baram

Faculty Scholarship

The use of cost-benefit analysis in agency decisionmaking has been hailed as the cure for numerous dissatisfactions with governmental regulation. Using this form of economic analysis arguably promotes rational decisionmaking and prevents health, safety, and environmental regulations from having inflationary and other adverse economic impacts. Closer analysis, however, reveals that the cost-benefit approach to regulatory decisionmaking suffers from major methodological limitations and institutional abuses. In practice, regulatory uses of cost-benefit analysis stifle and obstruct the achievement of legislated health, safety, and environmental goals.

This Article critically reviews the methodological limitations of cost-benefit analysis, current agency uses of cost-benefit analysis under …

Book Reviews, George A. Hay, H. Michael Mann, Teresa Amott

Vanderbilt Law Review

Book Reviews:

The Antitrust Penalties: A Study in Law and Economics By Kenneth G. Elzinga and William Breit

Reviewed by George A. Hay

The Antitrust Penalties was published in 1976. Its main mes-sage is that the only efficient antitrust penalty is a heavy fine and that incarceration comes out poorly by any benefit-cost standard.Later that year, in a celebrated and possibly unprecedented appearance, newly appointed Assistant Attorney General Donald I. Baker argued before a federal district judge that jail sentences were the appropriate penalty for a group of defendants who had just been convicted in one of the major price-fixing …

Law And Social Order In The United States, James W. Ely, Jr.

Vanderbilt Law Review

No student of American legal history can overlook the significant work of J. Willard Hurst, who has been described as "the foremost historian of American law."' A prolific author, Hurst has been concerned primarily with the relationship between law and the economic system. His most recent volume, Law and Social Order in the United States, is an important contribution to the rapidly growing literature in the legal history field. Based upon the Carl L.Becker Lectures that Hurst delivered at Cornell University in 1976, the book ranges broadly over America's nineteenth- and twentieth-century legal past, with emphasis upon law and social …