The Trump administration’s efforts to weaken regulations are in tension with cost-benefit analysis, which in many cases supports those regulations or otherwise fails to support the administration’s deregulatory objectives. Rather than attempting to justify its actions as a matter of policy...

Regulatory agencies are required to perform cost-benefit analysis of major rules. However, in many cases regulators refuse to report a monetized value for the benefits of a rule that they issue. Sometimes, they report no monetized value; at other times, they report a monetized value but also...

Most economists believe that the government should impose Pigouvian taxes on firms that produce negative externalities like pollution, yet regulatory agencies hardly ever use their authority to create Pigouvian taxes. Instead, they issue command-and-control regulations. Our major point is that,...

Over the past two years U.S. regulatory agencies have issued fourteen regulations that take into account the effect of industrial activities and products on the global climate. The regulatory activity so far has already set precedents on which future regulation will rest. Yet despite the...

The two most vilified cases in administrative law are Business Roundtable v. SEC and Corrosion Proof Fittings v. EPA. In Business Roundtable, the D.C. Circuit struck down the SEC's proxy access rule because the agency's cost-benefit analysis of the regulation, in the court's view, was defective....

In an earlier article, Regulation, Unemployment, and Cost-Benefit Analysis, we argued that regulatory agencies should incorporate the costs of unemployment into cost-benefit analyses of proposed regulations. We argued that alternatives to including unemployment costs in cost-benefit analysis —...

In Patent Inflation, I argued that the asymmetry in Federal Circuit review of Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) decisions would lead over time to inflation in the boundaries defining what inventions are patentable. In short essays, Professor Arti Rai and Lisa Ouellette have offered valuable...

Patent law’s infringement doctrines, commonly understood to be simply rules of liability, are in fact search rules as well. Patent liability rules determine not only who will be responsible for what conduct, but also when patent holders and potential infringers will benefit from locating (or...