[This testimony was delivered on December 8, 2021, to the House Committee on Ways and Means, Subcommittee on Oversight, as part of a hearing on "The Pandora Papers and Hidden Wealth."]The US is the world’s leading investment destination for offshore wealth. Our laws enable foreigners—through...

A “self-coup”—or “autogolpe”—is the sudden seizure of power by a President or other chief executive in contravention of a nation’s laws. Although the term “self-coup” is relatively new, the phenomenon was familiar to the Framers, who made references at the Constitutional...

The equality-equity dilemma in cost-benefit analysis arises when regulators seek to advance distributional objectives through lifesaving rules. The “equality” side of the equality-equity dilemma refers to the federal regulatory practice of using an equal-dollar “value of a statistical...

The Senate Finance Committee’s hearing on July 28, 2021 -- "Building on Bipartisan Retirement Legislation: How Can Congress Help?" -- spotlighted “mega-IRAs”: individual retirement accounts with balances of $5 million or more. An analysis by the Joint Committee on Taxation in advance of...

Vaccines play a crucial role in improving global public health, with the ability to stem the spread of infectious diseases and the potential to eradicate them completely. Compared with pharmaceuticals that treat disease, however, preventative vaccines for infectious diseases have received far...

Many have advocated for the expansion of peer review to improve scientific judgments in law and public policy. One such test case is the patent examination process, with numerous commentators arguing that scientific peer review can solve informational deficits in patent determinations. We...

The United States has recently — and belatedly — come to recognize opioid addiction as a public health crisis. What has gone mostly unrecognized is the degree to which this crisis is intertwined with U.S. intellectual property law and related elements of U.S. innovation policy. Innovation...

Courts often state that patents are justified by disclosure theory, the idea that patents are awarded as quid pro quo for the public disclosure of inventions. But many commentators have argued that disclosure theory should be accorded no weight in the design of the patent system because patented...

As the devastating COVID-19 pandemic first swept the globe, it posed a crucial test of biomedical innovation institutions. Containing the virus required developing new technologies including diagnostic tests, pharmaceuticals, and vaccines; manufacturing these technologies at enormous scale; and...