Skip to main content

Faculty Working Papers

Bound print copies of George Mason School of Law’s working paper series on law and economics are available in the Law Library. The bound set often includes initial drafts of papers. Search Mason’s Catalog to locate a working paper.

Research Paper Series

Working Papers

Recent Working Papers:

Political Debanking

Todd J. Zywicki
This article examines the escalating practice of “political debanking”—the involuntary termination of banking services to individuals and organizations based on their political or religious views—and its profound implications for free speech and democratic participation. Drawing on Milton Friedman’s insights about the interdependence of economic systems and free expression, the article argues that access to financial services is a prerequisite for exercising constitutional rights. It traces the rise of political debanking from the Obama Administration’s Operation Choke Point, which targeted disfavored industries under the guise of “reputation risk,” to its expansion under the Biden Administration, where individuals like Melania Trump and Michael Flynn faced account closures for their political stances. High-profile cases, including the cancellation of accounts tied to Donald Trump Jr.’s events and the National Committee for Religious Freedom, illustrate a growing weaponization of the financial system to suppress dissent.
The article distinguishes political debanking from other account closures (e.g., cryptocurrency or financial mismanagement) and critiques the regulatory framework that enables it, marked by opacity, discretion, and a lack of accountability. Despite Supreme Court rulings in NRA v. Vullo and Murthy v. Missouri, judicial remedies remain inadequate against subtle coercion in the modern regulatory state. With banks functioning as quasi-public entities due to extensive government privileges, the article proposes treating them as common carriers, mandating non-discriminatory access to services. It advocates for legislative and regulatory reforms, including reviving the Trump-era “Fair Access to Financial Services” rule, to safeguard free speech against future abuses, warning that without action, debanking will persist as a tool for silencing dissent.

The Economic Structure of Trade Secret Law

Tun-Jen Chiang

The standard economic account of trade secret law focuses on providing incentives for creating new inventions. The incentive-to-invent theory, however, provides little explanation for why the key doctrinal features of trade secret law are structured the way that they are. For example, providing ex ante incentives to invent does not easily explain the requirement that an inventor must take measures to preserve secrecy even after the invention has been created. Nor does it explain why trade secret misappropriation, unlike patent and copyright infringement, requires "improper" conduct by the defendant for liability. In this Article, I give a different theory of trade secret law. In this account, the primary economic purpose of trade secret law is not to preserve the incentive to invent, but to dissuade the possessor of a secret idea from using unreasonable and inefficient self-help countermeasures to protect the secret. As the Article will explain, this anti-countermeasure principle provides an overarching theory to explain the key structural features of trade secret law, in a manner that the incentive-to-invent theory does not.

The Supreme Court’s Mysterious 1920s Due Process Education Trilogy

David E. Bernstein

The Supreme Court's 1920s Education Trilogy cases-Meyer v. Nebraska, Pierce v. Society of Sisters, and Farrington v. Tokushige-were important milestones in American constitutional history.
These decisions protected private schools, religious and otherwise, from the threat of closure in many states. This preserved educational freedom for parents who preferred private education for their children.
As a constitutional matter, the Trilogy became the foundation of a due process jurisprudence that moved beyond liberty of contract, property rights, and police power considerations to a broader protection of fundamental rights.
This Article describes external forces that may have motivated this shift-revulsion at the Ku Klux Klan, backlash against Progressive statism of the sort that demanded the closure of private schools, and the Justices' need to cultivate political allies among ethnic and religious minority populations.
This Article also reviews the idiosyncratic biographical factors that may have led Justice Brandeis to join the majority in Meyer. Brandeis' vote with the majority helped preserve the Education Trilogy cases as precedents that later generations of liberal Justices felt comfortable relying upon.

Racial “Box-Checking” and the Administrative State

David E. Bernstein

This article examines the origins, impact, and consequences of the racial and ethnic classification system established by the U.S. government through Statistical Directive No. 15 in 1978. Originally intended as a bureaucratic tool to assure uniform standards for data collection, these classifications have since profoundly shaped American identity, affirmative action policies, and even scientific research. This article critiques the arbitrary and historically contingent nature of these categories, arguing that they fail to reflect the complexity of racial and ethnic identities; distort research; encourage racial essentialism; and produce misleading data. The article calls for a fundamental overhaul of the classification system, advocating for a more nuanced approach to racial and ethnic categorization, if such government-mandated classifications are to persist at all.

46th Annual Donald A. Giannella Memorial Lecture: Religious Liberty and Nondiscrimination Law

Helen M. Alvaré

Some state and lower federal courts hold that religious vendors refusing to cooperate with the conduct of persons in protected classes are instead engaged in status discrimination in violation of nondiscrimination laws. These opinions often assert that a string of United States Supreme Court decisions requires them to conflate status and conduct. This problem arises with regularity in cases involving religious objections to cohabitation and same-sex weddings. But such conflating not only misreads the texts and legislative histories of the relevant nondiscrimination statutes; it also misreads the Supreme Court opinions upon which it relies, and neglects the only guidelines the Court has articulated regarding conflating status and conduct. It furthermore violates the religious freedom of the defendants for three reasons. It engages in an unconstitutional analysis of whether believers' distinguishing between status and conduct is implausible, impossible, or untrue. It systematically treats the class of religious persons worse than other protected classes. And it refuses to recognize religious institutions' autonomy to pursue their missions by means of personnel choices.
Ordinarily, religious freedom claims in nondiscrimination cases are considered only after a state has found a believer liable for status discrimination, and the objector then raises a right of free exercise. But this Article claims that religious freedom problems arise before this stage of the litigation, when courts are weighing whether to conflate status and conduct to determine if a status nondiscrimination law is possibly violated.

Defining the Human Right Against Cruel Punishment

Craig Lerner

Over the past decade, there have been mounting criticisms of human rights both as an ideology and as a banner for a crusade. Many political conservatives have lambasted the human rights movement as partisan, and some observers have expressed doubts about rights-based activism altogether. Although scholars and lawyers have been roused to a defense, the human rights movement is plainly in the throes of a crisis of self-confidence. This Article argues that some of the most acute challenges to the human rights movement arise from overconfidence and parochialism on the part of human rights advocates. It is today commonplace to make "rights" claims that are unmoored from the philosophical progenitors of the modern liberal tradition. The extravagance of those claims inspires doubts about the viability of human rights as a universal criterion to judge political actors throughout the world, given the vast differences in wealth and culture.
The Article sketches a possible road map to recasting human rights in a way that might garner broader support. It begins by distinguishing between those rights that have a counterpart in American constitutional law and those that do not. The latter rights, which have an aspirational character, are the ones that most often excite criticism. Yet even the more modest rights, which have a counterpart in American constitutional documents, have proven difficult to operationalize as universal human rights. One difficulty is that the rights embodied in American constitutional law are rooted in a history and tradition that span several centuries and channel the scope of those rights. Can human rights, even cast simply as limits on state power, be removed from a particular tradition?
The Article explores this question in the context of the human right to be free from cruel punishment. This right is codified in the U.S. Constitution's Eighth Amendment and the Fifth Article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It captures an intuition that human beings possess an intrinsic dignity that state actors, when inflicting judicial punishment, cannot violate. But even here, where the moral claim is compelling, it proves difficult to define cruelty in a way that does not draw upon a particular tradition. The Article concludes with the suggestion that the human rights movement should be more cautious in its demands of other nations and more tolerant of practices that have been rejected in Western Europe. If the human rights movement allowed for greater experimentation and was less dismissive of approaches that depart from those common in Western Europe today, it might revive as a salutary force.

Takings and Choice of Law After Tyler v. Hennepin County

Eric R. Claeys

This Essay contributes to a symposium on the future of regulatory takings. It focuses on choice of law in eminent domain disputes. When claimants bring eminent domain claims in federal courts, the courts must determine whether the claimants have constitutional "private property" in the entitlements allegedly taken. Should that determination be made with federal law, with the law of the state allegedly taking property, or law from some other source?
The 2023 Supreme Court decision Tyler v. Hennepin County addressed that issue. Under Tyler, it is a federal question whether an eminent domain claimant has constitutional private property. To answer the question, federal courts usually consult the law of the state where the alleged taking took place. But that presumption applies only if state law seems to secure and not to circumvent the federal right. And if that reservation is not satisfied, federal courts may consult a wider pattern of legal sources-Anglo-American history, the general law of the several United States, federal court precedents, and a broader cross-section of law from the state allegedly taking property. That approach resembles the approach taken generally for federal constitutional rights-especially in Indiana ex rel. Anderson v. Brand (1938)-but varies from the general approach in the sources it makes relevant to settle what counts as private property under the Fifth Amendment. This Essay interprets Tyler, and it offers a normative justification for Tyler's approach to choice of law in eminent domain.

Freeing State Courts from SCOTUS

Nelson Lund

Congress is authorized to establish what the Constitution calls "inferior courts." Those courts are required to follow the Supreme Court's interpretations of federal law, at least when the interpretations are issued as holdings rather than dicta. It is almost always taken for granted that state courts have the same duty to accept the Supreme Court's interpretive decisions. This short essay argues that this assumption is misplaced. Under the Supremacy Clause of Article VI, state courts are bound by the supreme law of the land, which includes the Constitution, federal laws made in pursuance of the Constitution, and treaties. The Constitution nowhere characterizes federal judicial opinions as the supreme law of the land and it nowhere characterizes state judicial tribunals as "inferior courts."
Like everyone else, judges are certainly bound by Supreme Court judgments, even seriously mistaken judgments like the one in Dred Scott. But the Supremacy Clause does not say or imply that state judges are bound by that Court's interpretations of federal law. The Constitution leaves them free, and perhaps even obliged, to disregard Supreme Court precedent when it conflicts with what is actually the supreme law of the land.
State court judges can and should exercise their freedom to follow what they believe is the supreme law of the land. This form of judicial independence could have a number of healthy effects on our dual legal systems. And if it had unhealthy effects, Congress could provide a remedy through the writ of habeas corpus and through its control over grants of jurisdiction to the state courts.

Assessing FHFA’s Pilot Program on Automated Title Decisioning: Promoting Competition and Reducing Housing Prices

Andrew Nigrinis, Todd J. Zywicki

Housing affordability remains a critical economic, political, and social issue in the United States. High closing costs, including title insurance, significantly contributes to the problem. The title insurance industry is characterized by limited competition, high consumer search costs, and market structures favoring a few large incumbents. To address these challenges, in 2024 the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) introduced a pilot program that permits use of automated title insurance underwriting systems to replace traditional title insurance for low-risk refinance transactions.
This study evaluates the economic and consumer benefits of the Title Acceptance Program, focusing on cost savings, enhanced competition, and improved market efficiency. The findings indicate that the program can generate substantial consumer benefits, with estimated annual savings of $96 million and projected lifetime savings between $1.38 billion and $2.19 billion. These savings derive from direct cost reductions, competitive pressure on incumbent pricing, and increased consumer adoption of lower-cost alternatives. Preliminary evidence suggests that automated underwriting maintains loss rates comparable to traditional methods, ensuring financial risk remains low. The program also provides particular benefits to underserved populations, including low-income, rural, and minority consumers. By fostering innovation, enhancing transparency, and reducing costs, the Title Acceptance Program represents a significant step toward addressing housing affordability and advancing competition in the title insurance industry.

Of Sinners & Scapegoats: The Economics of Collective Punishment

J. Shahar Dillbary, Thomas Miceli

"[I]t is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer." 4 WILLIAM BLACKSTONE, COMMENTARIES *358.
"[I]t is better that ten innocent men suffer than that one guilty man escape." Otto von Bismarck, Germany's first chancellor, quoted in John W. Wade, Uniform Comparative Fault Act, 14 FORUM 379, 385 (1979).
Punishing the innocent is considered an "error" that the legal system must minimize. In reality, it is a choice. When evidence points to one of a few suspects as the victim's assailant, society must decide whether to punish all, some, or none. Despite the stated distaste, in many cases lawmakers, regulators, and enforcers elect to sanction a large group of innocent actors. Mass arrests, sobriety checkpoints, profiling, even increasing the number of searches and seizures, and using excessive police force-are all forms of collective punishments. They allow the targeting and sanctioning of an entire population in the name of finding the culprit. The decision is often masked by confusing terms but its effect is the same. The freedoms of many are sacrificed to punish the one. These methods have been widely criticized, but what can economics say on the subject? Are these methods even effective? Under what conditions?
The standard economic model of crime has not offered a clear answer to these questions because it typically focuses on the apprehension and punishment of a single actor-the offender. It therefore does not consider the possibility of punishing a group of innocent actors as a policy tool.
This Article seeks to fill this gap. First, in deviation from previous models, it develops a realistic framework in which the enforcer can choose not only the probability of detection and the nature and severity of the punishment but also the size of the "punishment group." Our model then analyzes the welfare implications of collective punishment and the menu of choices available to enforcers and regulators. To be clear, our intention is not to argue for group punishment as an enforcement strategy. Rather, our goal is to explain the logic of collective liability regimes and unravel the way detection of offenders is currently carried out. Our analysis also shows that in many cases enforcers applying collective sanctions are motivated by self-interest and bigotry. Concerningly, even when the enforcer's goal is to enhance deterrence, the cost on members of the punishment group is discounted or ignored, resulting in a substantial loss of freedoms and welfare. The silver lining is that many of these concerns can be addressed by appropriate reforms.

The Conservative Version of The Rule of Law

Todd J. Zywicki

Establishing the rule of law requires two elements. First, an articulation of the concept that there is a higher law above the government from which the government derives its legitimate authority but which also constrains the exercise of that power. Second, there must be an effective institutional structure for actually enforcing the rule of law's limits on the government in practice.

Three theories have been articulated that can meet these challenges of the rule of law: natural law, social contract theory, and a "conservative" version of the rule of law. This essay focuses on the last. Under the conservative version of the rule of law, both the legitimate authority of the government and constraints upon it are derived from history, tradition, and the particular character of a political community. Rather than the concept of the rule of law emerging as a pre-political concept which is then implemented in practice, under the conservative version of the rule of law, limits are first imposed on the government in practice and only later theorized into principles of constitutionalism. The logic of the conservative version of the rule of law is illustrated through a focus on the ideas of three thinkers: David Hume, Edmund Burke, and Russell Kirk.

Presumptive or Presumptuous? The Global Antitrust Institute’s Comment on the EC’s Draft Guidelines on Exclusionary Abuse

Alexander Raskovich, Douglas H. Ginsburg, Tad Lipsky, John M. Yun, Dario da Silva Oliveira Neto

We identify several flaws in the European Commission's Draft Guidelines on exclusionary abuse. The Commission's choice to ground the Draft Guidelines in EU case law on Article 102- spanning both early case law that followed a formalistic approach to the enforcement of exclusionary abuse and modern case law that follows an effects-based approach-has resulted in internal inconsistencies and confusion. We recommend that more recent CJEU judgments predominate over earlier case law in the interpretation of Article 102. The most egregious flaw in the Draft Guidelines is the presumptuous introduction of presumptions of exclusionary abuse, which would relieve the Commission of its duty to determine whether conduct has anticompetitive effects. This flies in the face of not only modern EU case law but also a standard interpretation of the very text of Article 102. We urge the Commission to return to the spirit of the effects-based approach it articulated in the 2008 Guidance Paper, which has been influential in shaping modern EU case law. In particular, we propose that the Commission explicitly accept responsibility for showing anticompetitive effects, adopt the consumer welfare standard as the unifying principle for discerning competition on the merits, and adopt the As-Efficient-Competitor standard as the unifying principle for discerning whether exclusionary conduct by a dominant undertaking is likely to be abusive.

Comment of the Global Antitrust Institute on the Australian Digital Platform Services Inquiry 2020-2025 – Final Report

Tad Lipsky, Douglas H. Ginsburg, Alexander Raskovich, Dario da Silva Oliveira Neto

The Global Antitrust Institute ("GAI") submits this Comment to the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) in response to its request for public views regarding the 10th and final report of the ACCC's Digital Platform Services Inquiry 2020-2025. This Comment is based on our extensive experience and expertise in competition law and economics. As an organization committed to promoting sound economic analysis as the foundation of antitrust enforcement and competition policy, the GAI commends the ACCC for inviting public submissions regarding competition in the rapidly changing digital platform sector.
The ACCC's request for public input (hereinafter "Inquiry") follows a lengthy market studies examination of digital platforms that the Australian Competition Authority has been producing since 2017. The GAI has submitted two previous comments to the ACCC's Inquiries projects on Digital Platforms: GAI Comment on the ACCC' Digital Platforms Inquiry (2017-2019), Preliminary Report; and GAI Comment on the ACCC's Digital Platform Services Inquiry's Discussion Paper for Interim Report No. 5: updating competition and consumer law for digital platform services, (December 2018); and one comment to the Australian Treasury regarding the recommendations of the ACCC's Digital Platform Services Inquiry, Interim Report No. 5: regulatory reform (September 2022).
Regarding the current final report, and according to the Issue Paper released by the ACCC, the agency is focusing the Inquiry on three different topics: (i) recent international legislative and regulatory developments in markets for digital platform services and their impact on competition and consumers; (ii) major developments and key trends in certain markets for digital platform services (for example, those explored in earlier reports of the Inquiry), and (iii) potential and emerging competition and consumer issues which relate to digital platform services. Apparently, the ACCC report tends to advocate legislative and regulatory developments in Australia to adopt an ex ante digital markets regulation in accordance with Recommendations 3 (Additional Competition Measures for Digital Platforms) and 4 (Targeted Competition Obligations) of the ACCC's Digital Platform Services Inquiry, Interim Report No. 5, Regulatory Reform.
This Comment identifies several economic considerations that suggest caution regarding adoption of novel limitations on competitive conduct by digital platforms - especially ex ante regulation - before greater experience can be obtained with the application of existing antitrust law to digital platforms. That experience will provide a better understanding of the reasons for the success or failure of particular antitrust approaches. This Comment describes economic methodologies that support these suggestions.

Conflict or Continuity? An Analysis of the 2023 Merger Guidelines

Alexander Raskovich

This Article addresses some key issues important to a prospective assessment of the possible effects on merger formation and enforcement of the DOJ and FTC's 2023 Merger Guidelines (MGs) . The MGs differ from previous guidelines in several respects. First, rather than a single encompassing set of guidelines, eleven individual guidelines are called out. Some have argued that delineating separate sets of circumstances that can give rise to a violation provides the Agencies with greater analytic flexibility than the Agencies previously had. This claim is questionable. Second, the new market share thresholds in the MGs would ensnare many competitively benign mergers as presumptively anticompetitive, and this would suffice for a challenge, regardless of the absence of any reasonable finding of likely anticompetitive effect. Third, in contrast with earlier merger guidelines, the MGs emphasize how a merger "could," rather than "would," violate the antitrust laws. This weakening of the proof standard conflicts with case law precedent. Fourth, the MGs cite to a large number of legal precedents, many of them many decades old. Earlier merger guidelines had no such references to case law precedent, noting instead that guidelines may be revised from time to time to "reflect the ongoing accumulation of experience at the Agencies" and "new learning." Finally, the treatment of efficiencies in the MGs appears to be more dismissive and hostile than in recent guidelines. The MGs discussion of efficiencies begins with the peremptory statement that "possible economies [from a merger] cannot be used as a defense to illegality." But when efficiencies have affected enforcement outcomes by the Agencies, typically they have not been used as a defense against a finding of anticompetitive effect, but rather as an integral part of determining whether there is any anticompetitive effect in the first place. The 2010 Horizontal Merger Guidelines state that "a primary benefit of mergers to the economy is their potential to generate significant efficiencies and thus enhance the merged firm's ability and incentive to compete." Further, "[t]he Agencies seek to identify and challenge competitively harmful mergers while avoiding unnecessary interference with mergers that are either competitively beneficial or neutral." The MGs offer no indication that mergers can have an upside. The foregoing innovations in the MGs are not only contrary to rational antitrust as a matter of economics and error-cost analysis, but are likely to have a chilly reception by the judiciary.

The Dark Side of Codifying U.S. Trust Law

Thomas P. Gallanis

For most of Anglo-American history, trust law was case law. The law of trusts was born and molded in the English Court of Chancery and then re-shaped by the courts of the U.S. states. The U.S. law of trusts primarily was to be found in the decisions of state courts and in respected secondary sources digesting and refining the rules from those decisions, such as the American Law Institute's Restatements and the multi-volume treatises on trust law originally authored by Austin Wakeman Scott or George Gleason Bogert.

U.S. trust law no longer is primarily case law. In 2000, the Uniform Law Commission published the Uniform Trust Code. Thirty-five U.S. states and the District of Columbia have enacted enough of the Code to be counted by the Uniform Law Commission as enacting jurisdictions. The Commission also has enacted other statutes in or allied to trust law, such as the Uniform Powers of Appointment Act and the Uniform Statutory Rule Against Perpetuities.

This Article examines some of the consequences of this shift in the U.S. law of trusts from case law to statute law. For convenience, this shift is termed "codification" because we have no word in English for "statutification."

Perversely, the codification itself of trust law sometimes has opened the door to outcomes diametrically opposed to the goals of the Uniform Law Commission and the American Law Institute. The perverse outcomes were not intended but should have been foreseen.

This Article analyzes the dark side of the codification of U.S. trust law and offers a path for future law reform.

Second Amendment Originalism, the “General Law,” and Rahimi’s Two-Fold Failure

Nelson Lund

New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022), set out a bold new standard of review for Second Amendment cases. The Court rightly repudiated the intermediate-scrutiny approach adopted by a strong consensus of the circuit courts after District of Columbia v. Heller (2008). Bruen purported to require that any gun regulation falling within the plain text of the Amendment be upheld only if the government can demonstrate that the regulation is consistent with America's historical tradition of firearm regulation. United States v. Rahimi (2024) confirmed what was already clear in Bruen: that a majority of the Justices are not prepared to take this seemingly rigorous historical test seriously.
This article considers and rejects an innovative interpretation of Bruen, offered by William Baude and Robert Leider, under which Second Amendment jurisprudence would become a form of common-law constitutionalism. It then argues that a better alternative to Bruen is the more traditional application of means-end scrutiny to advance the primary purpose of the Second Amendment, which is to protect the fundamental natural right of self-defense.
In addition to showing that Rahimi did not apply Bruen faithfully, the article explains why a sound constitutional analysis does not support Rahimi's decision to uphold the statute at issue in the case.

COVID-19 Exclusion, Policy Contagion, and Colonial Hangover in Africa

Olufunmilayo B. Arewa

African countries have experienced multiple consequences from the COVID-19 pandemic that extend beyond its immediate impact on human health. In Africa, much like elsewhere in the world, the pandemic has had a significant economic impact, leading to profound global economic distress. African countries have also experienced consequences that are unlike those of much of the rest of the world. The pandemic has contributed to a surge in sovereign debt defaults, including in Zambia in late 2020, Mali in early 2022, Ghana in late 2022, and Ethiopia in 2023. Travel bans and COVID-19 vaccine exclusion have also had a particular impact in Africa. The experiences of African countries during the COVID-19 pandemic highlight key consequences of colonial hangover and fundamental structural impediments and inequalities evident in global and local contexts.

The Folly of AI Regulation

John M. Yun

The explosive growth of AI related technology has drawn the attention of government authorities around the globe. As these authorities consider various regulatory proposals, this chapter advocates a model similar to the one used when the internet first emerged, that is, a relatively restrained approach to regulation. This position is founded on several core tenets. First, there can be trade-offs between technological growth rates and addressing specific harms. Thus, even if a regulation is ultimately successful in addressing a specific harm, if it dampens the rate of innovation, then this could lead to a net welfare loss. Second, premature regulatory solutions can crowd out market-based solutions, which may offer more efficient solutions to emergent harms. Finally, premature regulations can have the consequence of entrenching incumbents and raising barriers to entry, which, perversely, harms the competitive process rather than promoting it. Importantly, this proposal is not a call to ignore the dangers that AI generated output can pose - nor is it a call for a "more permissive" treatment of AI under existing laws or existing regulatory schemes of general application.

The Presumptive Case for Organ Markets

Ilya Somin

The debate over legalizing organ markets has gone on for years, and the basic arguments are well-known. This chapter recasts the issue by emphasizing not just the nature, but the enormous magnitude of the considerations weighing in favor of legalization: saving tens of thousands of innocent lives, preventing prolonged suffering for many thousands more people, and enhancing bodily autonomy. That magnitude creates a strong presumption in favor of legalization, at least in some substantial form. Any countervailing argument must not only be valid in and of itself, but also sufficiently weighty to overcome the presumption. Standard arguments based on the risks of kidney donation, concerns about the "exploitation" of the poor, and dangers of "commodification" and moral corruption, fall short of that standard. Recent evidence on the number of lives that can be saved by legalizing organ markets and the diminishing risks of donating kidneys further accentuate the enormous magnitude of the gap between the benefits and costs of legalization

Part I provides an overview of the kidney shortage in the United States and the immense potential gains of legalizing organ sales. Doing so would save tens of thousands of lives every year, and also save many thousands more kidney failure patients from the pain and suffering of enduring many months or years of kidney dialysis. It would also enhance rights of bodily autonomy for both sellers and users of kidneys put on the market. These enormous benefits create a strong presumption in favor of legalization. Part II goes over several standard objections and explains why they fail to meet that demanding standard. These include claims that organ markets would lead to "exploitation" of the poor, arguments that they would lead to the commodification of the body, and concerns that they impose too great a risk on sellers. Each of these arguments lacks the necessary weight. In addition, to the extent objections are valid, they can be addressed by steps short of banning organ sales entirely.

Land Use Regulation

Ilya Somin

Land use regulation is a major function of every government in the world. It raises many issues for classical liberalism. This chapter provides an overview of three of the most important areas of land-use policy: the use of eminent domain to forcibly take property for government-approved projects, regulations that restrict property owners' use of their land, and the relationship between property rights in land and migration restrictions.
Part I covers the use of eminent domain to take private property, and arguments for its limitation to genuinely "public" projects, as opposed to coerced transfers between private owners. Advocates of the latter argue they are needed to overcome "holdout" problems. But unconstrained use of eminent domain is a serious threat to property rights and hampers economic development.
Part II considers regulatory restrictions on land use that do not involve physical occupation of property. There is a longstanding debate about the value of such restrictions and whether the government should pay owners compensation. The most significant regulatory restrictions of this type in many nations are zoning rules restricting housing construction.
Finally, Part III provides a critical overview of property-rights rationales for restricting mobility, particularly in the form of international migration. Such theories justify severely constraining the liberty and property rights of both migrants and natives.
View More Faculty Working Papers