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Abstract:
Each year the government sells or leases assets worth billions of dollars. The impact on the economy is staggering. FCC auctions to allocate rights to electromagnetic spectrum generated well over twenty billion dollars in the last three years. Proceeds from mineral leases, timber sales, and disposition of real estate from defaulting thrifts have generated another several billion dollars
annually.

From the taxpayer's perspective, however, government disposition schemes have failed miserably. The government has donated valuable resources to preferred claimants, allocated scarce broadcast and oil rights resources by lottery, and sold both public land and rights to minerals beneath to private parties at a fraction of the market price. The government has also sold timber without any apparent cost-benefit justification, and awarded rights to use electromagnetic spectrum worth billions of dollars to communications giants at a substantial discount.

In the article, we analyze the different causes for regulatory failure -- historical, conceptual, and political -- and argue that reforms at both the congressional and administrative level are need to minimize the inefficiency and graft.

Abstract:
Each year the government sells or leases assets worth billions of dollars. The impact on the economy is staggering. FCC auctions to allocate rights to electromagnetic spectrum generated well over twenty billion dollars in the last three years. Proceeds from mineral leases, timber sales, and disposition of real estate from defaulting thrifts have generated another several billion dollars annually.

From the taxpayer's perspective, however, government disposition schemes have failed miserably. The government has donated valuable resources to preferred claimants, allocated scarce broadcast and oil rights resources by lottery, and sold both public land and rights to minerals beneath to private parties at a fraction of the market price. The government has also sold timber without any apparent cost-benefit justification, and awarded rights to use electromagnetic spectrum worth billions of dollars to communications giants at a substantial discount.

In the article, we analyze the different causes for regulatory failure -- historical, conceptual, and political -- and argue that reforms at both the congressional and administrative level are need to minimize the inefficiency and graft.

Abstract:
Professor Zeppos' paper examines the relationship between the legal profession and the development of administrative law. The paper describes traditional accounts of the legal profes sion's efforts to secure its power and status in society and applies the traditional account to the rise of the administrative state. The paper then offers a critique of the traditional account. While the traditional account offers a convincing version of the profession's resistance to administrative government, it fails to address certain questions or addresses them incompletely. Moreover, missing from the literature is a fuller description for the profession's eventual acceptance of administrative law and assertion of jurisdiction over large parts of the field. This shift cannot be explained solely by the successful imposition of an adjudicative model on administrative government. Rather, the shift from a predominantly common law regime to a legal system controlled by statute and administrative law required a broader re-conceptualization of the functions that lawyers perform.