Efficiency is a slippery term, and legal scholars frequently shift between distinct and even incompatible meanings as is convenient. This lack of clarity can inhibit students from challenging certain claims. To ask “but what do you mean by ‘efficiency’?” can make one appear unsophisticated or pedantic. But that’s precisely the question we should be asking. Because there are good reasons to reject the notions of “efficiency” usually taught in 1L classes, even if — in fact, precisely because — we have good reason to value other forms of efficiency.

Louise Seamster, Blake Emerson, Marshall Steinbaum, Ryann Liebenthal, Jonathan Glater, Persis Yu, and Luke Herrine offer their initial reactions to the Supreme Court's invalidation of the Biden administration’s student debt cancellation program.

As Sabeel Rahman highlighted last week, OIRA's proposed update to its notorious Circular A-4 incorporates a long list of improvements. But let's not get too caught up in the moment. There is at least as much continuity in the new A-4 as there is change. The overall logic is still one that commensurates costs and benefits in terms of additive individual willingness to pay, that holds up market competition between capitalist firms as the presumptively optimal form of social organization, and that treats regulation as a presumptively unwarranted intrusion into the freedom of the market. A recalibration, rather than a rejection or rethinking, of that basic framework.

Seven friends of the blog offer their initial reactions to the FTC's recent policy statement on unfair methods of competition.

Even as the Supreme Court seeks to squelch legal creativity in support of progressive causes, their power to do so only extends so far. We cannot let them define the terms of the debate.

If one spends too much time around mainstream economists, one might be inclined to think the whole idea of a state enforcing norms of fair price is either redundant or perverse. But we know better than that.