Course Section | Columbia Law School

Section Description Provided by Instructor

By far the bulk of contemporary law affecting today's regulatory state is made, not in common law courts, but by legislatures (e.g., Congress) enacting legislation, and regulatory agencies (e.g. the Environmental Protection Agency or the Securities and Exchange Commission) adopting regulations (rulemaking). This course will study these foundational institutions and their procedures, and also the ways in which other government officials engage their work-products -- statutory interpretation, in the case of Congress, and both judicial and political controls of agency rulemaking. The course, like the first-year courses increasingly being required at our peer law schools, deals with issues also studied in the upperclass courses in Legislation and in Administrative Law; students wishing an intensive exposure to these courses would be better advised to take them separately. The casebook used provides extensive examples of primary material other than cases, and focuses much of its attention on the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration and its lengthy development of the regulatory requirement that cars contain airbags. A new (second) edition is anticipated.

If class size permits, required papers exploring the secondary literature on statutory interpretation will be a substantial element of evaluation in the course.

Class size permitting, half of the evaluation of the course will be based on class participation and written exercises.

Materials: Bressman, Rubin and Stack, The Regulatory State (2010)

Enrollment of upperclass and graduate students is subject to four constraints: the student has neither taken nor is also seeking enrollment in the courses in Legislation or Administrative Law; absolute first-year priority; an overall class size limit of 60; and, should fewer than 40 first year students elect the course, a limit on upperclass enrollment to 1/3 of total enrollment.