An audited self-regulation framework has been relied on to govern highly complex, evolving industries, such as securities. The concept is now attracting interest from those exploring how to govern frontier AI models. Notably, AI developers—including Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic—are among those interested in this route. Their policy recommendations include variants of a self-regulatory approach with […]
Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) is an umbrella term for a loose family of considerations bearing on corporate conduct, investment decisions, and financial risk. But no uniform body of ESG law corresponds to the label. Instead, the regulatory environment surrounding ESG is fragmented across distinct statutory and regulatory regimes. Such fragmentation has become harder to […]
This post is part of Notice & Comment’s symposium on psychedelics and the law. For other posts in the series, click here. On April 18, 2026, President Trump issued Executive Order 14401, “Accelerating Medical Treatments for Serious Mental Illness,” with the purpose of “increase[ing] access to psychedelic drugs that could save lives and reverse the crisis of […]
This post is part of Notice & Comment’s symposium on psychedelics and the law. For other posts in the series, click here. The expansion of psychedelic medicine has brought neuropsychiatry and pharmaceutical law to a structural, methodological, and institutional crossroads. Federal law requires “substantial evidence of efficacy” (FDA Act §505(d)) and regulations (21 CFR 314.126) mandate that […]
This post is part of Notice & Comment’s symposium on psychedelics and the law. For other posts in the series, click here. Imagine two competent adult patients, each of whom is living with treatment-resistant major depressive disorder (MDD) and struggling with suicidal ideation. Patient A asks her doctor about Pretendazine®, an (imaginary) injectable drug FDA-approved exclusively for […]
This post is part of Notice & Comment’s symposium on psychedelics and the law. For other posts in the series, click here. Dr. Sunil Aggarwal runs an “integrative oncology clinic” in Seattle, Washington, where he treats patients with late-stage cancer. Some of those patients suffer from the anxiety and depression that often accompany a terminal diagnosis. Aggarwal […]
Going back nearly 130 years, presidential appointees to an array of multimember federal administrative agencies have been given statutory for-cause protections against dismissal. And for more than ninety of those years these protections had the constitutional imprimatur of Humphrey’s Executor v. U. S. Last January I warned in these pages that if, as then expected, […]
Over forty years after the Hatch-Waxman Act created a patent-based framework for balancing pharmaceutical innovation with competition, the system it established needs reform. We use data on pharmaceutical research and development over this four-decade period to argue that the current equilibrium is accurately characterized as an arms race of strategic legal activity. Brand-name firms amass […]
“The curious task of economics,” Hayek once wrote in The Fatal Conceit, “is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design” (76).That line could just as easily serve as an epigraph for administrative law. Agencies are routinely tasked with designing solutions to problems—market failures, externalities, the consequences […]
We all know old cranks who obsess about their pet peeves. Once triggered, they drive directly into the pothole of their obsession and insist there was no other way to move forward. Well, I have a pet peeve that you may dismiss as a rant from just another aging crank, but it has been with […]
Over the last several months, attorneys who practice before and litigate against the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (“CFIUS”) have been paying close attention to United States v. Suirui, a CFIUS enforcement action in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. In Suirui, the government seeks to enforce a presidential […]
Concurring in Trump v. Slaughter, Justice Gorsuch rightly observes that by concentrating power in the President, the Supreme Court’s decision creates new opportunities for that power to be abused. Emphasizing that the “whole of the President’s authority” might be “greater than the sum of its parts,” Justice Gorsuch asks how “a business out of favor […]
On April 7, 2026, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell convened the chief executives of five systemically important banks to brief them privately on Claude Mythos Preview, a frontier AI model that Anthropic declined to release to the public. Anthropic made this decision upon finding in its internal testing that the […]
It has been a big summer for the unitary executive theory. The Supreme Court just handed down Trump v. Slaughter: a decisive step that continues the trend of previous decisions in consolidating control of the administrative state in the hands of the President. Here I want to explain how, for all the warranted attention it […]
The FTC’s most recent case against a data broker for illegal practices should encourage more consumer protection agencies to follow suit; but important omissions in the FTCs settlement should be considered by states. A Notable Advance in FTC Unfairness and Privacy Jurisprudence: Banning Sale of Location Data The Federal Trade Commission’s (“the Commission” or “FTC”) […]