Chevron, U.S.A. v. Natural Resources Defense Council lays out a two-step process that courts must follow when they review a federal agency's construction of a federal statute. We argue that Chevron, rightly understood, has only one step. The single question is whether the agency's construction...

What is collective wisdom, and how can institutions be designed to generate and exploit it? This essay argues for a reductionist conception of collective wisdom as collective epistemic accuracy, and cashes out that conception at the level of institutional design. Assuming that the social goal is...

Many millions of people hold conspiracy theories; they believe that powerful people have worked together in order to withhold the truth about some important practice or some terrible event. A recent example is the belief, widespread in some parts of the world, that the attacks of 9/11 were...

In Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency (2007), the Supreme Court held, among other things, that the EPA has statutory authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, and that the agency cannot decline to do so on political grounds. We analyze the logic of MA v. EPA...

In Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency (2007), the Supreme Court held, among other things, that the EPA has statutory authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, and that the agency cannot decline to do so on political grounds. We analyze the logic of MA v. EPA...

In a typical pattern in the literature on public law, the diagnostic sections of a paper draw upon political science, economics or other disciplines to offer deeply pessimistic accounts of the motivations of relevant actors in the legal system. The prescriptive sections of the paper, however,...

Legal and constitutional theory has focused chiefly on the risk that voters and legislators will trust an ill-motivated executive. This paper addresses the risk that voters and legislators will fail to trust a well-motivated executive. Absent some credible signal of benign motivations, voters...

Budget procedures are often adopted or changed to improve "transparency" in budgeting. This phrase can refer to two different, although related, stages of the budget process. First, transparency may refer to the outputs of budgeting; here the ideal is that the tradeoffs inherent in a budget...

In a standard analysis, the history of civil liberties is characterized by a series of security panics. A range of mechanisms - cognitive heuristics and biases, various forms of cascading and herding, conformity and preference falsification, and so on - cause periodic panics in which aroused...

This paper identifies two distinctive features of ancient constitutional design that have largely disappeared from the modern world: constitution-making by single individuals and constitution-making by foreigners. We consider the virtues and vices of these features, and argue that under...