Monday, September 24, 2007

Public Regulation and Private Lawsuits in the American Separation of Powers System

"I investigate causes of the legislative choice to mobilize private litigants to enforce statutes. I specify the statutory mechanism, grounded in economic incentives, that Congress uses to do so, and I present a theoretical framework for understanding how certain characteristics of separation of powers structures, particularly conflict between Congress and the president over control of the bureaucracy, drive legislative production of this mechanism. Using new and original historical data, I present the first empirical model of the legislative choice to mobilize private litigants, covering the years 1887 to 2004. In addition to testing separation of powers hypotheses, this new data allows me to evaluate four additional hypotheses concerning legislative mobilization of private litigants that have long appeared in the scholarly literature but have never been tested due to lack of appropriate data. The findings provide robust support for the proposition that interbranch conflict between Congress and the president is a powerful cause of congressional enactment of incentives to mobilize private litigants." Author: Sean Farhang Source: Center for the Study of Law and Society Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program. U.C. Berkeley [via eScholarship Repository]

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