Democratic governments are typically concerned with protecting the lives of their own citizens. But decisions made by domestic institutions often affect foreign as well as domestic lives. In such circumstances, domestic institutions must choose how many public resources to devote to protecting...

Health and financial decision-making literatures have chronicled how people’s numerical abilities affect their decisions. Until now, however, there has been no empirical study of whether numeracy — or people’s ability to understand and use numbers — also interacts with legal decision...

This chapter briefly describes the use and usefulness of behavioral and psychological instruments in environmental regulation. Behavioral instruments — tools for regulating behavior that build on empirical research about how people actually behave — can contribute to environmental law in at...

This book chapter presents the basics of U.S. environmental law on pollution control. It is intended for non-specialists interested in environmental law, and for foreign lawyers curious about how the U.S. uses environmental law to address environmental problems. It addresses the essentials of...

This symposium on Foreign Life Valuation brings together perspectives from philosophy, psychology, and various legal sub-disciplines to address this question: How many — if any — scarce domestic resources should be allocated to the prevention of foreign harms? An earlier article "Valuing...

The COVID-19 pandemic is a seismically disruptive event. This commentary explores some of the key ways this seismic shift will interact with environmental law. It explores four types of change triggered by the pandemic: (1) behavioral changes (including of behaviors with environmental impacts);...

This paper deconstructs the relationship between harm and pollution, and argues that understanding this relationship creates valuable opportunities for improving environmental policy by minimizing or even eliminating the harm from some pollutants, even when reducing the total amount of pollution...

When performing cost-benefit analyses, regulators typically use willingness-to-pay studies to determine how much to spend to avert risks. Because money has a time-value, when a risk is valued is inextricable from how much it is valued. Unfortunately, the studies on which regulators rely are...

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is considering promulgating a rule to increase rearview visibility in vehicles—a rule intended to reduce backover crashes, which occur when a vehicle moving in reverse strikes a pedestrian or a cyclist, and which kill hundreds and...

Where is the environment in environmental law? People often subconsciously assume that “the environment” exists outdoors. Although it may seem benign, this assumption can affect when, how, and how effectively environmental law and policy addresses indoor and even outdoor environmental...