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Law 932: Selected Problems in
Administrative Law: Regulatory Reform
3 Credits
Time-1:20-3:20pm Mondays
Instructors: David M. Trubek and
Louise G. Trubek
This seminar explores new approaches to regulation and their
implications for law, policy, and public administration. Critics of
government regulation and the administrative state from the left
and right have called for alternatives to conventional top-down,
command and control regulatory systems. New approaches involving
devolution, public-private partnerships, negotiated regulation,
network creation, coordinated data collection, benchmarking,
monitoring, feedback, and revisable standards are being tried out.
This type of "new governance" changes the way law is created and
administered. It restructures relationships among markets,
government and the professions and re-opens the age-old issue of
how best to maintain social and environmental values in a market
economy.
The new governance movement has led to regulatory reform in the
US and elsewhere. In the US there have been experiments at federal,
state, and country levels. In Europe, reform has occured at the
level of sub-national regions, individual nation-states, and the
European Union.
The seminar will examine selected reform experiences. We will
ask what is "new governance", whether it is really new, how these
approaches work in practice, why they are getting attention today,
and what critics have said about the risks involved in these
changes. The seminar will pay special attention to the relationship
between new governance and traditional legal tools, asking whether
the new approaches are complimentary to traditional regulation or
in competition with them. We will also look at what these changes
mean for the role of lawyers.
The seminar will be linked to a workshop to be organized by the
Wisconsin Project on Governance and Regulation (WISGAR) (http://www.law.wisc.edu/ils/wisgar/
). The workshop will bring practitioners and regulators together to
explore recent developments in regulatory reform in the area of
environmental protection.
Students will be expected to select an area of regulatory reform
for detailed study and will be expected to present their findings
at the end of the semester. Students may study reforms in
Wisconsin, other US states, the federal government, or Europe and
may work individually or in teams.
The seminar is open to law students and graduate students in
other schools and colleges. In addition to writing papers of 20
pages or longer, students will be expected to write several short
response papers dealing with the readings assigned for class
sessions and attend the workshop.
David M. Trubek is Voss-Bascom Professor of Law and Senior Fellow of the UW Center for World Affairs and the Global Economy. Louise G. Trubek is Clinical Professor of Law and directs the Health Law Project. They are co-directors of WISGAR.