Roger E. Meiners – författare

The past several decades have witnessed a growing recognition that environmental concerns are essentially property rights issues. Despite agreement that an absence of well-defined and consistently enforced property rights results in the exploitation of air, water, and other natural resources, there is still widespread disagreement about many aspects of America's property rights paradigm. The prominent contributors to Who Owns the Environment? explore numerous theoretical and empirical possibilities for remedying these problems. An important book for environmental economists and those interested in environmental policy.

Since 1970, when the Clean Air Act was passed and the Environmental Protection Agency was created, the primary means for addressing environmental problems in the U.S. has been through comprehensive federal statutes and detailed regulations. Evaluating almost three decades of experience with the Clean Air Act, Superfund, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and other major federal environmental statutes, the contributors to this volume question the effectiveness and impact of the legal regime that created these regulations.While most studies of environmental policy paint a picture of improvement through government initiatives, these essays argue the contrary. Pointing to Cleveland's burning river, the death of Lake Erie, smog in Los Angeles, and Love Canal, the contributors demonstrate that command-and-control regulation of the environment has not delivered the great improvements in environmental quality as promised. The Common Law and the Environment offers principles for a new approach to protecting the environment and looks to evidence of the successes of alternative legal systems to address significant problems.

Written by specialists in law and economics, this book studies the role of liability rules in an effort to illustrate the possible consequences of statutory tampering with them. The contributors explain how statutory and common law liability rules evolved, how they work in current practice, and how changes in rules can alter economic outcomes in significant and unintended ways. Although price theory is the primary analytical tool employed in the study, the contributors also provide a wealth of institutional detail intended to illuminate the structure and operation of forces at work when questions of product or service liability arise.Throughout, the contributors focus on the effects of individual decision making: how incentives faced by individuals are affected by liability rules and how the collective actions of purposeful individuals working in private markets and through the political process affect social outcomes. Among the specific topics addressed are using liability rules to deter government takings, the impact of government liability on private risk avoidance, the allocation of product liability by market share, liability and environmental quality, the effects of the flammability rule, deposit insurance and the savings and loan fiasco, and the political debate over automobile air bags. The contributors conclude that attempts to remedy alleged defects in the common law by legislative edict are not well grounded. Ideal as supplemental reading for courses in business and government, this volume will also be of significant interest to students of law and economics.

Examine the practical structure and function of today's legal system from the perspective of the business practitioner with Meiners/Ringleb/Edwards' popular "The Legal Environment of Business," 15th Edition. The text highlights law and regulatory areas of the legal environment that are most relevant. Court cases summarize background facts and then give case decisions in the words of the courts. The authors focus on key issues to understand the legal reasoning. You examine a range of legal topics with business-specific examples and meaningful cases that direct attention to key points of law.