Just about a year ago, WLF hosted a Web Seminar program entitled “Nudging Bureaucracts and Business: Regulatory Review in the Obama Administration,” where our panelists, Susan Dudley of George Washington University and former head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), and David Hill of Sidley Austin LLP and former Energy Department General Counsel, assessed how the executive branch, and mainly the Office of Management and Budget through OIRA and its new Administrator (and author of the book “Nudge”), Professor Cass Sunstein, would address business regulation.
Dudley and Hill devoted a portion of their presentations to the concept of “behavioral law and economics,” and how it might fit into the administration’s regulatory philosophy. Our friends over at the Truth on the Market blog today kicked off an innovative online symposium, “Free to Choose: A Symposium on Behavioral Law and Economics,” which, in addition to the involvement of TOTM’s four bloggers, will feature the diverse written views of scholars such as Stephen Bainbridge, Judge Doug Ginsburg, Richard Epstein, and Todd Henderson. As the welcome post explains:
Truth on the Market Free to Choose Symposium is designed to begin a intellectual dialogue on these and related topics, bringing together legal scholars and economists with a variety of perspectives on these issues in terms of both methodology and subject-matter expertise. We are hopeful that the discussion is a starting point in identifying areas of agreement, causes for concern, and open questions for future research agendas.