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...

Many presidents have been interested in asserting authority over independent regulatory agencies, such as the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Federal Reserve Board. The underlying...

In the theory of the administrative state, a central thread of debate has involved the effect of increasing economic and social complexity on the form of legal instruments. Drawing upon work by Pound, Schmitt and Dworkin, I show that the first two both assumed that the administrative state would...

This essay compares crisis governance and emergency lawmaking after 9/11 and the financial meltdown of 2008. We argue that the two episodes were broadly similar in outline, but importantly different in detail, and we attempt to explain both the similarities and differences. First, broad...

Suppose that the costs of obtaining and using political information fall dramatically, in large part because of new technologies such as the Internet. What effects might this have on political accountability and social welfare? This response to a paper by Jane Schacter offers some skeptical...

Many-minds arguments claim that in some way or another, groups of decision-makers tend to make better decisions than individuals. This essay identifies five general and recurring problems with such arguments, as follows:(1) Whose minds? The group or population whose minds are at issue is often...

In Chevron U.S.A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., the Supreme Court created a new framework for judicial deference to agency interpretations of law: courts should defer to an agency interpretation unless the relevant statute is clear or the agency interpretation is unreasonable....

An axiom of institutional design is known as the ally principle: all else equal, voters, legislators or other principals will rationally delegate more authority to agents who share their preferences (“allies”). The ally principle is a conventional starting point for large literatures on...

Theorists of transitional justice study the transition measures used, or eschewed, by new democracies that succeed communist or authoritarian regimes - measures including trials, purges, lustration, reparations, and truth commissions. The theorists tend to oppose transitional measures,...

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...