With the enactment of the Clean Air Act amendments in 1970, the federal government, essentially an interested bystander as recently as 1960, became the dominant presence in air pollution control. The current statute provides for federal research, financial support of state control programs, and interstate compacts (secs. 101-106). It retains, in vestigial form, a cumbersome conference procedure (sec. 115) copied from the earlier water-pollution statute and never much used in air pollution. irect federal regulatory authority was substantially increased by the 1970 amendments: the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) may now adopt emission standards not only for new vehicles (sec. 202) but also for all aircraft (sec. 231), for new stationary sources of any type that “may contribute significantly to air pollution” (sec. 111), and for any source of a “hazardous” air pollutant, that is, one that “may cause, or contribute to, an increase in mortality or … in serious irreversible, or incapacitating reversible, illness” (sec. 1 12); it may also regulate the contents of motor-vehicle fuels (sec. 211). An emergency provision authorizes the federal agency, absent adequate state or local action, to sue to enjoin any emissions contributing to “an imminent and substantial endangerment to the health of persons” (sec. 303). Yet everyday control of most existing stationary sources remains subject to an awkward joint federal-state system of air-quality standards. That system is the subject of the present article.

Serious questions have been raised of late both within and outside the legal profession about the adequacy of the bar's organization for the delivery of legal services. It is thought that business enterprises and affluent individuals get the service they need-although perhaps at excessive cost and with less than optimal efficiency-but that most of the population are underserved and have serious difficulty in finding legal assistance at all or at an affordable cost.

The sharp increase that occurred in 1975 in premiums charged doctors and hospitals for medical malpractice insurance raises a number of issues of concern to economists. This paper attempts to survey some of the more important. At first glance the various sections may appear unrelated to each other and without a unifying theme. However, this disunity is superficial. Sections III-V, the bulk of the paper, are repeated applications of a central proposition of economic theory: purposive behavior is to be explained as the rational pursuit of a set of competing objectives by individuals who are constrained by limited resources and must therefore allocate these resources among alternative uses. This proposition is used in section 111 to explain differences in malpractice claim payments among states and changes over time; in section IV, to analyze the effect of different legal arrangements for distributing the cost of iatrogenic injuries on the behavior of patients and doctors; in section V, to show the effect of different methods of compensating lawyers upon their fees and the volume of litigation they undertake; and in section VI, to consider the unresolved question of “who bears the cost of malpractice claim settlements?” As will be seen, the nature of the argument reflects an economist's outlook; its viewpoint is different from that of doctors, lawyers, or “concerned citizens.”

Although the Truth in Lending Act (TIL) was actively considered by Congress for the better part of a decade questions of coverage rarely arose, and debate on the scope of the coverage provisions was almost nonexistent. The reasons appear to be twofold. First, as Justice Frankfurter observed, every statute has a “core of indisputable application” about which there is little question, and there was general agreement that certain types of transactions constituting the majority of consumer credit transactions would clearly be covered. Thus the undisputed coverage of the TIL Act was very broad. Second, legislators were preoccupied with debating a number of the substantive provisions that creditors found so objectionable and consumerists thought so necessary that little attention was focused on defining the perimeter of coverage. Moreover, as this paper will show, a number of “fringe” transactions bear at least superficial resemblance to transactions that were clearly to be covered. Thus, creditors might wisely have preferred to take their chances on later interpretations of the scope of coverage by administrators and courts rather than risking a specific congressional resolution. of the coverage issues.

This bibliography of the American Bar Foundation's published research was compiled within definite limitations. The principal consideration was the provision of a historical record of the research product of the American Bar Foundation from its beginning.