Vulnerability drives disaster law—defining its successes and illustrating its failures. Although understanding vulnerability is critical to disaster law and scholarship, the literature lacks both an overarching analysis of the different aspects of vulnerability and a nuanced examination of the...

Regulatory nukes are regulatory tools that can prove extremely destructive to regulatory targets and have an element of political taboo surrounding their use. This Article discusses how and why Congress proliferates regulatory nukes. It explores the way regulatory nukes shape the contours of...

In modern democracies, governmental transparency is thought to have great value. When it comes to addressing administrative corruption and mismanagement, many would agree with Justice Brandeis's observation that sunlight is the best disinfectant. Beyond this, many credit transparency with...

The 1970 Clean Air Act is arguably Congress' most important environmental enactment. Since it became law fifty years ago, much could be and has been said about how it has changed both the physical environment and the contours of environmental law. Much less, however, has been written on the...

The recent passing of William D. Ruckelshaus has recalled and re-invited comparisons between the Trump and Nixon presidencies. Although Ruckelshaus might be most widely remembered for the “Saturday Night Massacre,” a review of his career in the Nixon and Reagan Administrations demonstrates a...

Bureaucratic corruption persists in many settings because responsibility for public projects is diffuse, as is responsibility for oversight. We hypothesized that the dissemination of citizen monitoring in ways that give individual authorities specific knowledge of mismanagement would improve the...

Decentralization and community-driven development intend to bring public decisions closer to the people, yet elites often capture local institutions. One way that local elites capture community-driven development is to limit information about opportunities for citizens to shape group decisions....

A fundamental but underappreciated truth is that positive and negative externalities are actually mirror reflections of each other. What we call “mirrored externalities” exist because any action with externalities associated with it can be described as a choice to do or to refrain from doing...

Scholarship on the commons focuses on a diverse set of problems, ranging from crashing fisheries to crowded court dockets. Because we find commons resources throughout our natural and cultural environments, understanding old lessons and learning new ones about the commons gives us leverage to a...

While much has been written about the U.S. Constitution, very little, if anything at all, has been said about the ways in which the Constitution shares attributes with the commons. This article examines the Constitution and the efforts to influence the shape and scope of its application through...