Regulation/Deregulation: Concepts and Skills

This course is offered every other year and is only open to students who have already taken Administrative Law. Substantively, this course studies such substantive types of economic regulation (and deregulation) as those found in the regulation of energy and electricity, telecommunications and the internet, food and pharmaceuticals, and consumer and financial affairs. In addition to sampling from different areas of regulation, the course also covers such overarching topics as the natural monopoly-, externality-, and excessive competition rationales for regulation, and relevant constitutional principles such as those found in the Commerce and Takings Clauses. NOTE: this course is a writing and skills course in which students will learn skills especially useful in regulatory legal practice, such as the use of the Freedom of Information Act, critiquing a cost-benefit analysis of a proposed regulation, participating in a regulatory hearing, and drafting and negotiating regulatory language. The course involves both short written papers and graded participation in skills-related simulations.