Administrative Law | Environmental Law | Land Use Planning | Law
Goals based on absolute targets, risk, technology, or cost are
found throughout the administrative state. “Historic baselines,”
a point in the past used to ground a policy goal, are just as
commonplace, yet remain unexamined. Whether in budgeting or tax,
criminal sentencing or environmental protection, historic
baselines direct a wide range of agency activities. Their
ubiquity begs some important questions. What makes baselines
more attractive than other approaches for implementing
regulatory goals? Conversely, when are other standard setting
methods such as absolute targets and risk-based, technology-
based, and cost-based standards more useful to policy makers
than historic baselines? Unless one believes that policy makers
choose between the alternative approaches randomly, or that it
simply does not matter which they choose, each approach requires
a clear theoretical understanding in order to make better
choices and predict the comparative pot