Blog

Today Jacob Lew heads to the hill for two Senate hearings on his nomination to be the new director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget. He is expected to be confirmed. The hearings will likely focus on budgetary issues, but no less important is another division of OMB: the Office of Information […]

Five years after Hurricane Katrina, the BP oil spill offers a chance to learn a lesson that we should have learned five years ago.  Certainly, the two events differ in important ways – the hurricane itself was a force of nature, and the oil well blowout although powered by nature, was clearly the result of […]

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 […]