Hannah Jacobs Wiseman (FSU): Regulatory Islands. Julien Daubanes (ETH Zurich) and Jean-Charles Rochet (Zurich): Activists versus Captured Regulators. David Freeman Engstrom (Stanford): Corralling Capture. Cass R. Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule (Harvard): The Law of “Not Now”: When Agencies Defer Decisions. Cass R. Sunstein (Harvard): The Regulatory Lookback. Brian Christopher Jones (IIAS): Don't Be Silly: Lawmakers “Rarely” Read Legislation and Oftentimes Don't Understand it, But That's Okay. Advocates against gobbledygook are trying to shame federal agencies into keeping it simple. Far-sighted policymaking is hard — Alan Jacobs and Scott Matthews on how to make it easier. Want honest public servants? Pay them better. Tim Murphy on the fastest-growing Washington industry you've never heard of: Wall Street firms can make fortunes with the right bits of Washington insider information — enter the booming political-intelligence business. The introduction to Lobbying America: The Politics of Business from Nixon to NAFTA by Benjamin C. Waterhouse. 2013 was a bad year for Wall St. lobbyists: Everyone assumed the banks would prevail — they didn't. The corporate “free speech” racket: Haley Sweetland Edwards on how corporations are using the First Amendment to destroy government regulation. Funding Fathers: Chris Lehmann on campaign finance and the shutdown debacle. “Why do you hate democracy so much?”: Jim Newell on how “institute” may just be America’s greatest word — you might say it grants legitimacy to charlatans.
