A conventional wisdom within environmental law scholarship states that rational actor theories of politics cannot explain the major federal environmental laws that were enacted in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The reason: large groups of self-interested citizens, each anticipating only modest...

A conventional wisdom within environmental law scholarship states that rational actor theories of politics cannot explain the major federal environmental laws that were enacted in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The reason: large groups of self-interested citizens, each anticipating only modest...

This paper is a draft of a chapter for a forthcoming book, Research Handbook in Public Law and Public Choice, edited by Daniel Farber and Anne Joseph O'Connell, to be published by Elgar. It reviews the public choice literature on environmental policy making, first generally and then with respect...