| Popis: |
This book explores the interaction of courts and regulators with economic evidence in the realm of utilities regulation in two common law jurisdictions: the US and the UK. Adopting the error-correction function of judicial review as a starting point, it unveils how the increasing reliance of regulators on economic inputs affects the legal outputs of regulation and transforms administrative discretion and judicial review. After delineating how positive law has responded to the challenges posed by economic evidence, the book engages in a normative debate on the appropriate scope of judicial review of discretionary economic assessments and the optimal institutional response to the pervasiveness of economic evidence in economic regulation. Building on comparative institutional analysis, the book rejects single-factor explanations, such as that judges do not understand economics, in favour of a richer set of macro-level and micro-level factors that shape the relationship between courts and regulators in the regulatory enterprise. Mantzari argues that the ‘recipe’ for adjudicating economic evidence requires a balance to be struck, in which deference is accorded to regulatory agencies on institutional competencies grounds and a degree of epistemic diversity is introduced in courts. The book combines theoretical, doctrinal, comparative, and empirical analysis and it is written to be accessible to lawyers, economists, judges, regulators, policymakers, and political scientists. |
