David, if you haven’t already seen it, you might want to check out Randomizing Law, a bold article written by several prominent law professors, recently published in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review.
More generally, the value of trial-and-error seems like one of the major benefits of a federal system, rather than a wholly national system—the classic “laboratories of democracy” argument. Of course, composite states themselves probably wouldn’t be any more open to direct “testing” than nation states themselves, so you wouldn’t exactly be able to run experiments. But just being able to compare natural results across states could likely achieve at least some of the benefits of true trial and error.
Cheers, I’ll check out the article. The talk I went to explored both formal and informal trials. I think laboratories of democracy are great, if the uncontrolled tests are nevertheless properly and clearly assessed. The problem is that when governments have policies inspired by other countries, there is often confused data on whether it’s worked in those cultures!
David, if you haven’t already seen it, you might want to check out Randomizing Law, a bold article written by several prominent law professors, recently published in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review.
More generally, the value of trial-and-error seems like one of the major benefits of a federal system, rather than a wholly national system—the classic “laboratories of democracy” argument. Of course, composite states themselves probably wouldn’t be any more open to direct “testing” than nation states themselves, so you wouldn’t exactly be able to run experiments. But just being able to compare natural results across states could likely achieve at least some of the benefits of true trial and error.
Cheers, I’ll check out the article. The talk I went to explored both formal and informal trials. I think laboratories of democracy are great, if the uncontrolled tests are nevertheless properly and clearly assessed. The problem is that when governments have policies inspired by other countries, there is often confused data on whether it’s worked in those cultures!