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CPR Member Scholar Sidney Shapiro will be on the Leslie Marshall Show at 7:20ET this evening discussing regulatory failures, from the BP oil spill to the Katrina disaster of five years ago, and the lessons learned. The program is syndicated on TalkUSA and streams live.

Cross-posted from the Huffington Post. Eager to blame the state of the economy on the Administration, House Minority Leader John Boehner recently tried to argue that the Administration’s regulatory agenda is standing in the way of recovery. Sadly for Boehner, he tried to make that case shortly before the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and […]

In November 2008, with Riegel v. Medtronic recently decided, bills introduced into Congress to overturn its effect, and Wyeth v. Levine about to be argued in the Supreme Court, the President of the American Bar Association created a task force to review ABA policies regarding preemption of state tort law. The composition of the task force […]

Cross-posted from Legal Planet. Administrative agencies sometimes issue regulations that have the effect of overruling state law — and sometimes that is the sole effect of the regulation.  This proved quite controversial during the Bush Administration, which used agency rulemaking efforts to cut back on state tort law.  The ABA has a adopted a new […]

It turns out there’s more than one way an offshore oil rig can kill a fish. Even when they’re not spewing oil into the ocean, oil rigs kill vast numbers of fish and other aquatic organisms in their daily operations by sucking them up into their cooling water intake systems, where they get squashed against screens […]

The Minerals Managements Service’s coziness with an industry it was supposed to be monitoring has brought attention back to an all-too-pervasive problem: regulatory agencies becoming “captured” by the regulated industries. This morning the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Administrative Oversight and the Courts is holding a hearing on “Protecting the Public Interest: Understanding the Threat […]

Now that Congress has passed legislation creating a new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in the Treasury Department, attention has shifted to how the Obama Administration will implement the new law. The issue of who President Obama should appoint to head the new agency is now front and center. Consumer groups and many members of Congress […]

The EPA released a guidance document on Monday that promises to integrate environmental justice considerations into the fabric of its rulemaking efforts. Titled the Interim Guidance on Considering Environmental Justice During the Development of an Action, EPA’s Guidance sets forth concrete steps meant to flag those instances in which its rules or similar actions raise environmental […]

Cross-posted from Legal Planet. A key figure in behavioral economics recently issued a warning about over-reliance on its findings.  In a NY Times op. ed, Dr. George Lowenstein raised questions about some uses of behavioral economics by government policymakers: As policymakers use it to devise programs, it’s becoming clear that behavioral economics is being asked […]