This paper offers a retrospective assessment of economist George Stigler's classic article, The Theory of Economic Regulation. Stigler argued that regulation is a product that, just like any other product, is produced in a market, and that it can be acquired from the governmental...

Much entrepreneurial growth in the United States today emanates from technological advances that optimize through contextualization. Innovations as varied as Airbnb and Uber, fintech firms and precision medicine, are transforming major sectors in the economy by customizing goods and services as...

Analysis is a tool for making important legislative and regulatory decisions but it is also a way of looking back to see whether decisions made in the past have been good ones. How well have legal rules actually worked in practice? Answering this question is crucial, not only for improving...

As conventionally understood, social movements, law reform, and society interact in a unidirectional fashion. Social movements seek to secure law reform; in turn, changes in the law bring about changes in society. While this conventional understanding may be helpful for some purposes, it is an...

At the center of contemporary debates over public law lies administrative agencies’ discretion to impose rules. Yet, for every one of these rules, there are also unrules nearby. Often overlooked and sometimes barely visible, unrules are the decisions that regulators make to lift or limit the...

Soft law governance relies on nongovernmental institutions that establish and implement voluntary standards. Compared with traditional hard law solutions to societal and economic problems, soft law alternatives promise to be more politically feasible to establish and then easier to adapt in the...

Interest group influence in the policy process is often assumed to occur through a mechanism of exchange, persuasion, or subsidy. Here, we explore how business groups may also exert influence by intimidating policymakers—a form of persuasion, but one based not on the provision of policy...

Around the world, regulatory institutions have assumed central roles in making and implementing public policy decisions. How well regulatory leaders manage these institutions ultimately shapes the degree to which regulation can succeed in solving social and economic problems. This chapter seeks...

Voluntary codes and standards issued by nongovernmental institutions affect many aspects of legal work and daily life. Although these codes and standards are voluntary—that is, they are not directly enforceable through civil or criminal penalties—they can and do often shape behavior. Codes...

Voluntary environmental programs (VEPs) seek to improve the environment by encouraging, rather than mandating, businesses and other organizations to adopt environmentally protective measures. Since the 1990s, VEPs established by industry, government, and nongovernmental organizations have...