Norming in Administrative Law

How do regulatory agencies decide how strictly to regulate an industry? They sometimes use cost-benefit analysis or claim to, but more often the standards they invoke are so vague as to be meaningless. This raises the question whether the agencies use an implicit standard or instead regulate in an ad hoc fashion. We argue that agencies frequently use an approach that we call “norming.” They survey the practices of firms in a regulated industry and choose a standard somewhere within the distribution of existing practices, often no higher than the median. Such a standard burdens only the firms whose practices lag the industry. We then evaluate this approach. While a case can be made that norming is appropriate when a regulatory agency operates in an environment of extreme uncertainty, we argue that on balance norming is an unwise form of regulation. Its major attraction for agencies is that it minimizes political opposition to regulation. Norming does not serve the public interest as well as a more robust standard like cost-benefit analysis

Should Regulation Be Countercyclical?

Politicians and commentators have from time to time proposed that regulations be suspended or delayed during recessions because of their adverse impact on employment. We evaluate this argument from within a macroeconomic framework. When the business cycle is taken into account, it is possible that regulations should be weakened during downturns and strengthened during upturns, along the lines of stimulus policy, which normally takes the form of countercyclical adjustments to taxes or the money supply. However, countercyclical regulation will normally be a less efficient means of stimulus. For that reason, it should be used in relative narrow conditions, and when the other stimulus instruments are either ineffective on their own terms or politically infeasible

Cost-Benefit Analysis and the Judicial Role

The two most vilified cases in administrative law are Business Roundtable v Securities and Exchange Commission and Corrosion Proof Fittings v Environmental Protection Agency. In Business Roundtable, the DC Circuit struck down the SEC’s proxy access rule because the agency’s cost-benefit analysis of the regulation, in the court’s view, was defective. In Corrosion Proof Fittings, the Fifth Circuit struck down an EPA regulation of asbestos products on the same grounds. Nearly all scholars who have written about these cases have condemned them. We argue that the courts acted properly. The regulators’ cost-benefit analyses were defective, seriously so; and the courts were right to require the agencies to show that their regulations passed an adequate cost-benefit analysis. We further argue that the trajectory of law and policy is consistent with our view. Corrosion Proof Fittings and Business Roundtable are harbingers rather than errors—harbingers of an era of enhanced judicial review of cost-benefit analysis

Sex differences in eye gaze and symbolic cueing of attention

Observing a face with averted eyes results in a reflexive shift of attention to the gazed-at location. Here we present results that show that this effect is weaker in males than in females (Experiment 1). This result is predicted by the ‘extreme male brain’ theory of autism (Baron-Cohen, 2003), which suggests that males in the normal population should display more autism-like traits than females (e.g., poor joint attention). Indeed, participants′ scores on the Autism-Spectrum Quotient (Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Stott, Bolton, & Goodyear, 2001) negatively correlated with cueing magnitude. Furthermore, exogenous orienting did not differ between the sexes in two peripheral cueing experiments (Experiments 2a and 2b). However, a final experiment showed that using non-predictive arrows instead of eyes as a central cue also revealed a large gender difference. This demonstrates that reduced orienting from central cues in males generalizes beyond gaze cues. These results show that while peripheral cueing is equivalent in the male and female brains, the attention systems of the two sexes treat noninformative symbolic cues very differently

Active Exploration for Robust Object Detection

Today, mobile robots are increasingly expected to operate in ever more complex and dynamic environments. In order to carry out many of the higher-level tasks envisioned a semantic understanding of a workspace is pivotal. Here our field has benefited significantly from successes in machine learning and vision: applications in robotics of off-the-shelf object detectors are plentiful. This paper outlines an online, any-time planning framework enabling the active exploration of such detections. Our approach exploits the ability to move to different vantage points and implicitly weighs the benefits of gaining more certainty about the existence of an object against the physical cost of the exploration required. The result is a robot which plans trajectories specifically to decrease the entropy of putative detections. Our system is demonstrated to significantly improve detection performance and trajectory length in simulated and real robot experiments.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (IIS grant 0546467)United States. Office of Naval Research (MURI N1141207-236214

Planning to Perceive: Exploiting Mobility for Robust Object Detection

Consider the task of a mobile robot autonomously navigating through an environment while detecting and mapping objects of interest using a noisy object detector. The robot must reach its destination in a timely manner, but is rewarded for correctly detecting recognizable objects to be added to the map, and penalized for false alarms. However, detector performance typically varies with vantage point, so the robot benefits from planning trajectories which maximize the efficacy of the recognition system. This work describes an online, any-time planning framework enabling the active exploration of possible detections provided by an off-the-shelf object detector. We present a probabilistic approach where vantage points are identified which provide a more informative view of a potential object. The agent then weighs the benefit of increasing its confidence against the cost of taking a detour to reach each identified vantage point. The system is demonstrated to significantly improve detection and trajectory length in both simulated and real robot experiments

Interpretation and the Constraints on International Courts

This paper argues that methodologies of interpretation do not do what they promise – they do not constrain interpretation by providing neutral steps that one can follow in finding out a meaning of a text – but nevertheless do their constraining work by being part of what can be described as the legal practice