China is appraised to have the world's largest exploitable reserves of shale gas, although several legal, regulatory, environmental and investment-related issues will likely restrain its scope. China's capacity to successfully face these hurdles and produce commercial shale gas will have a...

The worst problems with the fetal homicide laws that have proliferated around the nation are quite different than the existing scholarship suggests. Critics often argue that the statutes, which criminalize the killing of a fetus by a third party other than an abortion provider, undermine a...

In vivo conversion is a process, often metabolic in nature, wherein one substance, usually a chemical compound, is altered significantly by physiological pathways in the body into one or more different substances. For example, when a patient ingests a therapeutic drug, that drug is often...

Patients in the United States are routinely undertreated for pain. This problem has been widely recognized and documented in medical literature. In a seminal medical study of end-of-life care, researchers found that 50% of all patients who died during hospitalization quot;experienced moderate or...

President Obama recently authorised federal funding for human embryonic stem cell research. The FDA approved the first trial to produce human proteins from genetically modified animals' milk. The first US clinical trial of a human stem cell treatment was deferred when an unregulated procedure in...

In modern societies, the internal relationship between politics and law constitutes the cardinal factor by which fundamental rights are institutionalized. Since functional differentiation provides a framework in which individuals can implement those rights and the legal-political coupling...

Nudge is a semantically multifarious concept that originates in Thaler and Sunstein's (2008) popular eponymous book. In one of its senses, it is a policy for redirecting an agent's choices by only slightly altering his choice conditions, in another sense, it is concerned with bounded rationality...

When the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issues national ambient air quality regulations, it should meet two requirements. First, the EPA should specify, to the extent possible in quantitative terms, the range of benefits that it believes will follow from each new rule it seeks to...

We estimate the willingness to pay (WTP) of Beijing and Shanghai residents for improving the air quality of the two cities from their levels prior to the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games to the level achieved during the Olympics. The data are obtained from a contingent valuation study conducted...