Course | Columbia Law School

This is a course on public law transactional practice modeled on the Law School's business-oriented Deals course. The focus is the structure of frameworks for implementing public law and solving public problems. Students are divided into teams to develop and present aspects of particular deals, and the practitioners involved in the deals will appear to answer questions and respond to student analyses and critiques.

Among the general themes addressed are the comparative advantages and limits of 1) highly specified regulation command-and-control, 2) market simulation (e.g., emissions permits, school vouchers), and 3) regimes that combine local autonomy with centrally coordinated measurement and accountability (a new governance or a democratic experimentalism); reporting and disclosure policy; the role of private standard setting and monitoring in the enforcement of public law; the role of the courts in supervising the performance of public institutions; the design of sanctions; and monitoring regimes and indicators. The course also examines the design of intergovernmental and multilevel governmental regimes, whether of a sub-national or international nature. Substantive areas covered include air and water pollution, food safety, compensation for catastrophic injury, protection of abused and neglected children, school reform, protection of endangered species, and financial institutions regulation.