The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) provides tax credits and subsidies for the purchase of qualifying health insurance plans on state-run insurance exchanges. Contrary to expectations, many states are refusing or otherwise failing to create such exchanges. An Internal Revenue...

The current Supreme Court is very protective of speech, including commercial speech. Threats to commercial speech persist nonetheless. This paper, prepared for a symposium at Brooklyn Law School, examines two: 1) the use of commercial speech restrictions as a form of rent-seeking; 2) compelled...

The conventional wisdom holds that requiring compensation for environmental land-use controls would severely limit environmental protection efforts. There are increasing reasons to question this assumption. Both economic theory and recent empirical research demonstrate that failing to compensate...

Judicial review of federal agency action is systematically deferential. Such deference is arguably at its peak where agencies address scientific and highly technical matters within their area of expertise. This is what some call “super deference.” While there may be strong arguments for...

Stabilizing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases at double their pre-industrial levels (or lower) will require emission reductions far in excess of what can be achieved with current or projected levels of technology at a politically acceptable cost. Substantial technological innovation...

The surprise in Massachusetts v. EPA was not that it was a close, hotly contested case. Rather, the surprise was the facility and ease with which the Court majority dispatched opposing arguments and redefined prior precedents. Not content to widen doctrines on the margins, Justice Stevens'...

Reform is crucial if we are to achieve the Endangered Species Act's ambitious goals and conserve the world’s endangered plants and animals.

Free market environmentalism (FME) analyzes environmental problems as property rights problems. Whereas conventional analyses characterize environmental problems as examples of 'market failure,' FME diagnoses point to the lack of markets, and in particular a lack of enforceable and exchangeable...

This essay, based on remarks at the 2011 Federalist Society Student Symposium, discusses some of the benefits of federalism. Many of the benefits of federalism derive from interjurisdictional competition, as competition among jurisdictions is a powerful means to discover and promote...

Conventional environmentalist thought is suspicious of private markets and property rights. The prospect of global climate change, and consequent ecological disruptions, has fueled the call for additional limitations on private markets and property rights. This essay, written for the...