Government agencies and the limits on their power.
10 topics · 10 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects
Christopher D. Stone · 1972
Argues American law should grant natural objects like rivers and forests legal standing to sue in their own right through appointed guardians, rather…
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Banking Act of 1933
United States Congress · 1933
Separates commercial from investment banking and creates federal deposit insurance, responding to the Depression's bank runs by walling…
+5 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Theories of Economic Regulation
Richard A. Posner · 1974
Weighs the public-interest and capture accounts of why industries get regulated against each other, and argues neither alone explains which…
+2 more at this level
10 works
Christopher D. Stone
Argues American law should grant natural objects like rivers and forests legal standing to sue in their own right through appointed guardians, rather than only through the human interests attached to them.
link checked 17 Sept 2026United States Congress
Separates commercial from investment banking and creates federal deposit insurance, responding to the Depression's bank runs by walling deposit-taking off from securities speculation.
link checked 17 Sept 2026United States Congress
Establishes notice-and-comment rulemaking as the default procedure for US federal agencies, requiring published notice, a public comment period and a reasoned response before a binding rule can take effect.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Supreme Court of the United States
Holds that punitive damages recovered in a lawsuit count as taxable 'gross income' under the Internal Revenue Code, defining income broadly as any clearly realised accession to wealth.
link checked 17 Sept 2026United States Congress
Creates a general federal duty for employers to keep a workplace free of recognised hazards, and establishes OSHA to write and enforce specific safety standards.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Morris M. Kleiner
Argues occupational licensing in the United States restricts entry and raises consumer prices well beyond what the health-and-safety rationale used to justify it can support.
link checked 17 Sept 2026John Wargo (YaleCourses)
Argues that environmental law has repeatedly failed because statutes regulate substances one at a time while exposure is cumulative, and traces that mismatch through specific cases.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Richard A. Posner
Weighs the public-interest and capture accounts of why industries get regulated against each other, and argues neither alone explains which industries are regulated and which are not.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Richard A. Epstein
Argues American at-will employment, rather than just-cause protection, is usually efficient and benefits workers on net — a claim that remains sharply contested in US labour law scholarship.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Antonin Scalia
Defends the Chevron doctrine of US judicial deference to reasonable agency interpretations of ambiguous statutes as more principled and predictable than case-by-case judicial second-guessing.
link checked 17 Sept 2026