Public Policy Commons^™

Against Flexibility, David A. Super

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Contemporary legal thinking is in the thrall of a cult of flexibility. We obsess about avoiding decisions without all possible relevant information while ignoring the costs of postponing decisions until that information becomes available. We valorize procrastination and condemn investments of decisional resources in early decisions.

Both public and private law should be understood as a productive activity converting information, norms, and decisional and enforcement capacity into outputs of social value. Optimal timing depends on changes in these inputs’ scarcity and in the value of the decision they produce. Our legal culture tends to overestmate the value of information that …

Block Grants, Early Childhood Education, And The Reauthorization Of Head Start: From Positional Conflict To Interest-Based Agreement, Eloise Pasachoff

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In early 2003, the Bush administration proposed and Congress considered two types of highly controversial structural reform to Head Start, the federal program that since 1965 has provided early education and comprehensive health and social services to low-income preschoolers and their families. First, the proposal would begin funding Head Start through federal block grants to the states rather than through direct federal grants to local agencies. Second, the proposal would shift oversight of Head Start at the federal level from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to the Department of Education (ED). Variations on these two proposals have …