Preemption and Prescription Drugs
I've been reading a lengthy history of the FDA by Harvard political scientist Dan Carpenter. I'm planning to post later about some his observations regarding the political dynamics of drug regulation. But I was also struck by the implications of his description of drug regulation with regard to preemption of state torts claims. At first impression, the argument for preemption seems very plausible. The FDA has much more expertise than any jury. If the FDA consi...
CONTINUE READINGAnother regulatory success story
A few days ago, Dan posted about some positive EPA achievements. In the same spirit, and since the natural resource agencies get bashed for supposedly over-zealous and ineffective regulation close to as much as EPA does, I wanted to highlight another regulatory success story: turtle excluder devices, often referred to by their acronym, TEDs. The National Marine Fisheries Service developed TEDs in the early 1980s to reduce the bycatch of threatened and endangered sea t...
CONTINUE READINGThe Insanity Behind Urban Parking Requirements
Los Angeles Magazine ran a nice profile of UCLA Professor Don Shoup, pioneer of the parking reform movement to eliminate off-street parking requirements and modernize parking meters to charge performance-based prices. In Shoup's vision, local governments would dedicate any parking revenue increases to improving the neighborhood from which they came. Few other reforms could do more to enhance the sustainability and convenience of urban design and discourage unnecessar...
CONTINUE READINGEnvironmentalists versus Economists: Time for a Truce?
Environmentalists and economists have always had a troubled relationship. In the 1970s, some notable economists described environmentalism as a quasi-religious, irrational approach to policy. Environmentalists reciprocated by dismissing economists as narrow-minded bean-counters who ignored environmental values, ecological realities, and distributional issues. Of course, I'm oversimplifying a bit, but you get the idea about the general attitudes. Environmentalists ...
CONTINUE READINGRedevelopment and the Future of Infill in California
As Rick blogged, the California Redevelopment Association inadvertently committed suicide at the state Supreme Court last week. Convinced by their lawyers that they would ultimately win in court, the Association's leaders had played hardball last year at the legislature in the face of attempts to end redevelopment. But the California Supreme Court ended up immolating the very compromise measure that would have salvaged some redevelopment, using the same voter-approved ...
CONTINUE READINGMigration and Natural Disasters: Evidence from the Past
This is my first post at Legal Planet and I'm happy to be here. I'm an environmental economist at UCLA and I'm proud to hold a courtesy appointment at UCLA Law School. In this brief post, I want to advertise a new paper of mine. Leah Boustan, Paul Rhode and I look at young men's migration patterns within the United States during the time period 1920 to 1930 and from 1935 to 1940. This is a time period when natural disasters were taking place in specific geo...
CONTINUE READINGThe Privatization of State Parks & Ocean Management in California–And Why That’s a Good Thing
California boasts the nation's largest state park system--over 1.5 million acres of natural, historical and cultural resources contained in 278 separate, state-owned parks that attract over 80 million visitors annually. But California's extensive system of state-owned parks, beaches and marine reserves is in crisis--a victim of draconian budget cuts, chronic under-staffing and over $1 billion in deferred maintenance. Recently, an unlikely, potential solution has emerg...
CONTINUE READINGWhy Critics Should Stop Bashing EPA (And What They Should Talk About Instead)
Bashing EPA is apparently a good political tactic, at least if you're in a red state, but it's also a smokescreen -- what is presented as an attack on the agency is actually an attack on the mission assigned by Congress. In terms of carrying out the mission, EPA is no different than the Defense Department or the FBI -- it more or less does what it has been told to do, sometimes brilliantly, sometimes less so, occasionally ineptly. But blaming EPA because you don't like...
CONTINUE READINGFederal Court Halts Implementation of Important Air Pollution Program
The Obama Administration's cap-and-trade program to control air pollution that crosses state lines (explained in detail here) will not go into effect this month as planned. Instead, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has halted the program's implementation temporarily until it decides on its legality. The program, known as the cross state air pollution rule, caps nitrous oxide and sulfur dioxide pollution in 23 states in the eastern half of the country. ...
CONTINUE READINGEPA’s Achievements
You're going to be hearing a lot from certain quarters about EPA and what a terrible agency it is. Despite shortcomings in the statutes, repeated assaults on its budgets, and political harassment, the agency's accomplishments have been quite remarkable. As this chart shows, the volume of air pollutants has gone done very substantially in the past thirty years, even though everything else (population, energy use, GDP, etc.) has gone up: The decline is pretty remark...
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