Law search is fundamental to legal reasoning and its articulation is an important challenge and open problem in the ongoing efforts to investigate legal reasoning as a formal process. This Article formulates a mathematical model that frames the behavioral and cognitive framework of law search as a sequential decision process . . .
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The Perils of Experimentation
More than eighty years after Justice Brandeis coined the phrase “laboratories of democracy,” the concept of policy experimentation retains its currency as a leading justification for decentralized governance. This Article examines the downsides of experimentation, and in particular the potential for decentralization to lead to the production of information that exacerbates public choice failures . . .
The Measurement of Subjective Value and Its Relation to Contingent Valuation and Environmental Public Goods
Environmental public goods—including national parks, clean air/water, and ecosystem services—provide substantial benefits on a global scale. In this study, we test the hypothesis that neural signals in areas correlated with subjective valuations for essentially all other previously studied categories of goods also correlate with environmental valuations . . .
Rethinking Health-Based Environmental Standards
This Article argues that health-based standards, which are one of the principal approaches to setting the stringency of environmental requirements in the United States, exhibit two serious pathologies: the stopping-point problem and the inadequacy paradox . . .
Cost-Benefit Analysis and Agency Independence
There is a prevailing view that the role of cost-benefit analysis in the executive branch is to help facilitate control of agencies by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). This Article challenges that view, arguing that cost-benefit analysis in fact helps preserve agency autonomy in the face of oversight . . .
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