How Does the Government Interact with Business? : From History to Controversies

The relationship between American government and American business is a vast topic of immeasurable complexity. In keeping with the timely and important theme of this Symposium, yet at the same try to focus its line of inquiry, this Article first offers a brief survey of the relationship between government and business viewed through a regulatory lens. Using this history as backdrop, it then uses three illustrative doctrinal areas as symptomatic of how this relationship has become problematic and how it might be improved. The piece is structured into two principal sections. Part I provides a historical overview of the history of regulation in America, as well as two new paradigms that have emerged in regulatory theory: the regulation of bottleneck inputs, and cooperative federalism. Part II, the core of the Article, focuses on three controversial areas where the relationship between government and business has become problematic and is ripe for reform: corporate and securities law, antitrust, and constitutional law. In each area, I point to problems in current legal arrangements, and suggest a path to reform