The 'nanny state' has expanded in recent years. Politicians and bureaucrats have increasingly sought to restrict what individuals are permitted to do with their own bodies on their own property. Prohibitions is a corrective to the prevailing support for such authoritarianism. This collection...

In July 2009, the Department of Housing and Urban Development issued a memorandum urging local Public Housing Authorities to implement no-smoking policies in some or all of their public housing units. To date, only an estimated 4% of PHAs have done so, despite strong public health evidence that...

This paper investigates the impact on health outcomes of the regulation prohibiting physicians from prescribing drugs without a prior physical examination. This requirement could improve health by reducing illegal access to prescription drugs. But it reduces access to health care by making it...

This paper explores the massive strides that were made in response to the COVID-19 pandemic by national drug regulatory agencies (NRAs) in order to achieve what ultimately became the fastest incidence in human history of the development, testing, approval, manufacture, and distribution of a new...

Over the past few years the debate over the economic rationality of health, safety and environmental regulation has morphed into a sustained controversy over the tests and methods by which that rationality is judged. Critics have argued that the main "regulatory scorecards" which comprise much...

This article explores the question of whether contemporary regulatory reformers' attitudes toward government regulation have anything in common with those of the Lochner-era Court. It finds that both groups tend to favor value neutral law guided by cost-benefit analysis over legislative value...

This article explores the question of whether contemporary regulatory reformers' attitudes toward government regulation have anything in common with those of the Lochner-era Court. It finds that both groups tend to favor value-neutral law guided by cost-benefit analysis over legislative value...

Operationalizing the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety will require resolving disputes about the meaning of the term 'precautionary approach' in the treaty text. Although the terms precautionary approach and precautionary principle have been referred to in the regulation of transgenic plants for...

John Stuart Mill's harm principle maintains that adult behavior cannot justifiably be subject to social coercion unless the behavior involves harm or a significant risk of harm to non-consenting others. The absence of harms to others, however, is one of the distinguishing features of many...

Federal health and safety regulations have saved or improved the lives of thousands of Americans, but protecting our citizens from risk entails significant costs. In a world of limited resources, we must spend our regulatory dollars responsibly in order to do the most we can with the money we...