About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline
LOG IN
LOG IN

1 Regul. Rev. Depth 1 (2012)

handle is hein.journals/rgyrvidh1 and id is 1 raw text is: THE REGULATORY PRACTITIONER John F. Cooneyt I want to describe for you what it is like to be a regulatory practitioner. I understand that some of you are not law students or lawyers, so I will describe the regulatory process broadly both for those who are lawyers and those who are humans. At the outset, I think about the regulatory process from three broad perspectives that have ramifications for anyone working as a regulatory practitioner. First, the United States government is the most complicated social organism ever developed by human beings. The job of regulatory practitioners is to study how this organism functions and work with it to try to reach intelligent policy decisions. Second, I think of the regulatory practice as the Queen of the Social Sciences. It is the discipline that gets to put all the other social sciences to work, and it is the discipline that draws most heavily on all the areas you have studied and loved in school. Society regulates many complicated phenomena-the air we breathe, how financial institutions operate, what stem cell lines can be used in medical research. To do the job well, a regulatory practitioner has to be proficient in all the social sciences: law, economics, political science, sociology, psychology, journalism and media; and has to be able to learn something about the physical sciences, especially chemistry and physics, to develop persuasive arguments. The job of the regulatory practitioner is to take the insights from these other disciplines and figure out how to develop the best arguments and explain the matter to both experts and laymen alike. Third, the regulatory practice is the field where law, policy, politics, and media/public relations come crashing together. I say crashing together because the outcome of the process is about power and money, and the people in the process are well-educated, highly experienced, and fight very t Partner at Venable, a Washington, D.C.-based law firm. Previously Assistant to the Solicitor General in the Department of Justice, Deputy General Counsel for Litigation and Regulatory Affairs in the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and counsel for OMB's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. This essay is an edited version of the inaugural Distinguished Lecture on Regulation at the University of Pennsylvania Law School delivered by the author in 2012.

What Is HeinOnline?

HeinOnline is a subscription-based resource containing thousands of academic and legal journals from inception; complete coverage of government documents such as U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and much more. Documents are image-based, fully searchable PDFs with the authority of print combined with the accessibility of a user-friendly and powerful database. For more information, request a quote or trial for your organization below.



Short-term subscription options include 24 hours, 48 hours, or 1 week to HeinOnline.

Purchase Access

Contact us for annual subscription options:

Contact Us

Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?

Log In

profiles profiles most