Administrative agencies have long proceeded on the assumption that individuals respond to regulations in ways that are consistent with traditional rational-actor theory, but that is beginning to change. Agencies are now relying on behavioral economics to develop regulations that account for responses that depart from common sense and common wisdom, reflecting predictable cognitive anomalies. Furthermore, [...]

In an effort to strengthen private enforcement of federal law, Congress regularly employs plaintiff-side attorneys’ fee shifts, damage enhancements, and other mechanisms that promote litigation. Standard economic theory predicts that these devices will increase the volume of suits by private actors, which in turn will bolster enforcement and encourage more voluntary compliance with the law. [...]

Americans seem convinced that corporate executives are paid too much. So far, however, attempts to rein in executive compensation have met with little success. In the Article we propose a new approach to monitoring executive compensation, one that turns to an unlikely institution to oversee pay: the courts. Enemies of high executive compensation have generally [...]

Tax policy and scholarship generally assume that income has declining marginal utility (that is, that the next dollar is worth less to a wealthier person than to a poorer person). This assumption provides an easy justification for redistributive taxation. But the legal literature provides no firm grounding for the assumption of declining marginal utility. The [...]

The Article challenges the central premise of our campaign finance law, namely that restrictions on giving and spending money constitute restrictions on speech, and thus can only be justified by compelling governmental interests. This claim has become so embedded in constitutional doctrine that in the most recent Supreme Court case in this area, Citizens United [...]

Dubbed by the Washington Post as “undemocratic,” the caucus system for selecting delegates to national party presidential nominating conventions tends to disenfranchise identifiable factions of voters, including deployed service members, religious observers, persons with disabilities or in poor health, students who attend school away from home, and shift workers unable to leave work during caucus [...]

A dramatic sequence of events starting in the summer of 2007 caused the United States’ banking and financial systems to collapse and thrust the country into the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. It was not just one thing, but a confluence of factors that led to the collapse and the resultant crisis. Of [...]

To ensure the perpetuation of balanced budgets, which are legal and practical requirements in forty-nine states, many state legislatures bestow upon the executive branch broad powers to reduce appropriations through unallotment statutes. The Note accentuates two dire legal inefficiencies plaguing an ample number of these laws. First, many statutes fail to discernibly limit the proper [...]