This Article seeks to develop a theory of the best timing of legal decisions that is independent of questions about which individuals or institutions should make those decisions. In doing so, it analyzes law as a productive enterprise. Like any productive enterprise, law seeks to obtain necessary inputs at the… Read More »
Introduction
In my Note, I propose an alternative to the presidential signing statement that has been hotly debated in the literature in recent years. By re-examining an often-forgotten constitutional method for enacting laws, I conclude that when the President has certain doubts about the constitutionality of a bill Congress has… Read More »
Even before President Obama took to the dance floor on the night of his inauguration, his then-Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, had already fired off a memorandum to the heads of federal agencies instructing them not to start or finish any regulations without approval of the new Administration. Emanuel also… Read More »
Introduction
Few scholars would dispute that the way in which political institutions are designed affects the way that policymakers behave or the kinds of policies that are produced. Nor can it seriously be argued that courts are somehow an exception to the basic rule that institutional design matters. It is… Read More »
David M. Driesen
[This is the third post in a three-part response to Jonathan S. Masur and Eric A. Posner, Against Feasibility Analysis, 77 U Chi L Rev 657 (2010).]
Because plant closures cause job loss, any cost-benefit analysis (CBA) that counts job loss as a consequence relevant to overall well-being… Read More »
Jonathan Masur and Eric Posner’s neglect of key normative arguments (discussed in my previous post) stems in part from a preoccupation with flaws in the agency practice of feasibility analysis. I agree with Masur and Posner’s characterization of that practice as less than wholly satisfactory and suggested as much in an… Read More »
The criminal prosecution of immigration—principally for illegal entry and reentry, alien smuggling, and document fraud—has reached an all-time high. Not since Prohibition has a single category of crime been prosecuted in such record numbers by the federal government. Immigration, which now constitutes over half of the federal criminal workload, has… Read More »
In spite of Jonathan Masur and Eric Posner’s promise to unmask the normative commitments underlying feasibility analysis, their new article, Against Feasibility Analysis, fails to confront key normative arguments about the tendency of widely distributed regulatory costs to render trivial the individual impact on consumers of even high aggregate costs or… Read More »
I.
The Need for Sustainable Agriculture
Advocates of alternative agriculture argue that conventional modes of agricultural production are problematic because they ignore natural limits. The goal of sustainable agriculture, a form of alternative agriculture, is to farm in accordance with the structure of local ecosystems. This “nature as standard”… Read More »
Security is not free. To be marginally safer from any external threat, a state often must be willing to pay billions of dollars. The full cost of security goes beyond military budgets: When military action is taken—for example, through a campaign or an embargo—national wealth is often sacrificed in opportunity… Read More »