Legal cycles and stabilization rules

Frank Fagan

Chapter 1 in The Timing of Lawmaking, 2017, pp 11-33 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: A legal cycle is legislation that takes effect contingently, where contingent factors are ex ante known to fluctuate with some level of predictable regularity. Apart from broad constitutional mandate, lawmakers have historically and suboptimally responded to legal cycles with general and patchwork patterns of legislation involving repeal, amendment, and new enactment. This is true across nearly all domains of codified law. This chapter develops a normative theory of how lawmakers should respond to legal cycles by setting forth the optimal architecture of stabilization rules. Under a general set of conditions, stabilization rules work toward smoothing fluctuations in rulemaking and exert downward pressure on short-term legislative pathologies that result from cognitive bias and interest group politics. The potential of welfare-enhancing stabilization rules is discussed across banking law, budget law, environmental law, health law, national security law, and criminal sentencing. Keywords: timing rules, contingent law, legal cycles, stabilization rules, climate change, budget law, availability bias

Keywords: Economics and Finance; Law - Academic (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/view/9781785364327.00007.xml (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:16931_1

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().