Antitrust enforcement in the United States has declined since the 1960s. Building on several new datasets, we argue that this decline did not reflect a popular demand for weaker enforcement or any other kind of democratic sanction. The decline was engineered by unelected regulators and judges...

The regulatory state has become a cost-benefit state, in the sense that under prevailing executive orders, agencies must catalogue the costs and benefits of regulations before issuing them, and in general, must show that their benefits justify their costs. Agencies have well-established tools...

A trope of international law scholarship is that the United States is an “exceptionalist” nation, one that takes a distinctive (frequently hostile, unilateralist, or hypocritical) stance toward international law. However, all major powers are similarly “exceptionalist,” in the sense that...

International organizations use a bewildering variety of voting rules — with different thresholds, weighting systems, veto points, and other rules that distribute influence unequally among participants. We provide a brief survey of the major voting systems, and show that all are controversial...

Calls for benefit-cost analysis in rule-making based on the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act have revealed a paucity of work on allocative efficiency in financial markets. We propose three principles to help fill this gap. First, we highlight the need to quantify the "statistical cost of a...

Exemption laws enable people who default on loans to protect certain assets from liquidation, both inside and outside bankruptcy. Every state has its own set of exemption laws, and they vary widely; the federal bankruptcy law also establishes a set of exemptions, which debtors in bankruptcy are...

Cultural property is subject to two international legal regimes, one of which protects cultural property during wartime, and the other of which regulates the international trade in cultural property. Neither legal regime has been notably successful. Cultural property is often targeted and...