Document Type
Article
Publication Title
Wyoming Law Review
Publication Date
2002
Page Number
253
Disciplines
Law
Abstract
Notwithstanding the tremendous amount of attention environmental agencies, policy analysts, and scholars have paid to "regulatory reinvention," it has been pitched primarily as a refinement of the sanction and facilitation models, and thus intended to be channeled through the firm-specific behavioral responses predicted under the rational polluter and good-apple models. Little attention has been paid to the systems level question. The relevant question under the systems model is whether there is a component of noncompliance that does not respond to sanction and facilitation policies that are intended to illicit firm-specific behavioral responses. To answer this will require (1) identifying instances when sanction and facilitation policies do not lead to improvements in compliance performance, (2) doing so on a statistically meaningful basis across industrial sectors and regulatory programs, and (3) testing the effect alternative policy responses have on this identified component of noncompliance. Of course, regulatory agencies will have a disincentive to undertake either task: The first suggests flaws in current policy, the second is a daunting undertaking, the third ventures into the unknown and risks failure.
Recommended Citation
J.B. Ruhl, James Salzman, and Kai-Sheng Song,
Regulatory Traffic Jams, 2 Wyoming Law Review. 253
(2002)
Available at: https://scholarship.law.vanderbilt.edu/faculty-publications/502