A passive vibration-cancelling isolation mount

An analysis of an idealized passive vibration-cancelling two-terminal mount with one degree of freedom at each mechanical terminal isolating a nonrigid machine from a nonrigid foundation is presented. To evaluate a vibration-cancelling (VC) mount, its effectiveness as a function of frequency is compared with the effectiveness of both conventional and compound mounts isolating a rigid machine from a nonrigid foundation. The comparisons indicate that a carefully designed and manufactured VC mount should provide substantially greater vibration reduction at its cancellation frequency than either a conventional or compound mount having the same low frequency stiffness, i.e., stiffness at the natural frequency of the machine mount system

Domestic Regulation, Sovereignty, and Scientific Evidence Requirements: A Pessimistic View

My thesis in this essay, however, is that such an accommodation is exceedingly difficult if not impossible. Meaningful scientific evidence requirements fundamentally conflict with regulatory sovereignty in all cases of serious scientific uncertainty. WTO law must then choose between an interpretation of scientific evidence requirements that essentially eviscerates them and defers to national judgments about science, or an interpretation that gives them real bite at the expense of the capacity of national regulators to choose the level of risk that they will tolerate. The only middle ground lies in the rare cases where scientific uncertainty is remediable quickly at low cost. I further argue that consistency requirements cannot likely supplant scientific evidence requirements in a way that satisfactorily accommodates the tension between the desire to weed out protectionism on the one hand, and the desire to respect regulatory sovereignty on the other. A close examination of pertinent WTO decisions to date, most importantly the decision in the beef hormones dispute and its unsuccessful effort to accommodate scientific evidence requirements with deference to domestic regulators, will provide the bulk of the argument. Section I provides some general background on WTO law, while section II considers the cases. [CONT

The Persistent Puzzles of Safeguards: Lessons from the Steel Dispute

The recent WTO dispute between the United States and eight complainant nations over protective measures for the steel industry brought widespread attention to a little known area of WTO law—the rules governing safeguard measures, the temporary protection of troubled industries against import surges. The use of safeguard measures is normatively controversial, although their welfare implications are much less clear than their critics sometimes suggest. This paper makes the point that WTO rules, as interpreted by recent Appellate Body decisions and applied by the dispute panel in the steel case, pose nearly insurmountable hurdles to the legal use of safeguard measures by WTO members. Among other things, the current interpretation of the nonattribution requirement for the use of safeguard measures in the WTO Safeguards Agreement obliges members to make a demonstration that is logically impossible as an economic matter. Those who believe that safeguard measures are merely wasteful protectionism may welcome such impediments to their use, but it is not obvious that the trading system will benefit in the long run, and there can be little doubt that one key objective of the Uruguay Round negotiators—to revive the use of disciplined, temporary safeguard actions—is being frustrated

United States Courts and the Optimal Deterrence of International Cartels: A Welfarist Perspective on Empagran

E. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd. v. Empagran S.A. concerned a private antitrust suit for damages against a global vitamins cartel. The central issue in the litigation was whether foreign plaintiffs injured by the cartel’s conduct abroad could bring suit in U.S. court, an issue that was ultimately resolved in the negative. We take a welfarist perspective on this issue and inquire whether optimal deterrence requires U.S. courts to take subject matter jurisdiction under U.S. law for claims such as those in Empagran. Our analysis considers, in particular, the arguments of various economist amici in favor of jurisdiction and arguments of the U.S. and foreign government amici against jurisdiction. We explain why the issue is difficult to resolve, and identify several economic concerns, which the amici did not address, that may counsel against jurisdiction. We also analyze the legal standard enunciated by the Supreme Court and applied on remand by the DC Circuit, and we argue that its focus on “independent” harms and “proximate” causation is problematic and does not provide an adequate economic foundation for resolving the underlying legal issues. A revised version of this paper is forthcoming in ANTITRUST STORIES from Foundation Press, edited by Daniel Crane and Eleanor Fox

The (Limited) Role of Regulatory Harmonization in International Goods and Services Markets

With the conclusion of the Uruguay Round and its agreements relating to technical barriers, much attention has been devoted to the possibility of harmonizing international regulatory policies to reduce the impediments to commerce that result from regulatory heterogeneity. This paper argues that, as a normative matter, harmonization is inferior to a legal system that tolerates regulatory differences subject to legal constraints, and that relies on mutual recognition where appropriate (the exception to this claim being matters of technical compatibility between products). Related, as a positive matter, harmonization will often lack any political constituency and thus instances of true harmonization will be rare. To develop these claims, the paper carefully elucidates the unnecessary trade impediments that may result from regulatory heterogeneity, and shows how measures short of harmonization can usually address them adequately