Symposium: Panel I: A Fresh Look at Federal Regulatory Strategies

Richard B. Smith: Thank you, Ed. The subject of our panel will be Chapters 3 and 4 of the Commission\u27s report, which is among the material that has been given to you. Chapters 3 and 4 produce two recommendations which are reflected in the front of your book, and I hope that as we go through the panel you\u27ll look at Recommendations 1 and 2. Our panel\u27s discussion, you will find, will also relate to Recommendation 4, dealing with regulatory analyses. That recommendation will also be discussed in this afternoon\u27s program in conjunction with Recommendations 3 and 5. Those three recommendations grow out of Chapter 5, the subject of the program which Lloyd Cutler will moderate this afternoon. Let me introduce the panel quickly for you. Steve Breyer, sitting to my right, was retained by the Commission as a consultant during its work, and his work really was a basis forChapters 3 and 4 of the Commission\u27s report. Steve is a professor of law at Harvard and little did we know at the time we were working with him that he would occupy his present eminent position as Chief Counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Also on the program is Mike Baram, a lawyer in Boston. Mike did a very interesting paper for the Administrative Conference of the United States on cost-benefit analysis, a portion of which is included in the material that you have. Paul MacAvoy, who is a member of the Commission and former member of the Council of Economic Advisers in President Ford\u27s administration, is with us too. He is a professor at the School of Organization and Management at Yale. With us also is Roberta Karmel, a Commissioner of the SEC and formerly a practicing lawyer in New York, who is exhibiting the kind of independence that practitioners before that agency admire. Randy Thrower, who is a member of the Commission, former Commissioner of Internal Revenue, former chairman of the Tax Section of the ABA, and an attorney in Atlanta, is with us. And Bill Kennedy, counsel for the General Electric Company and a former member of the Council of the ABA Business Law Section, is with us. And, unrecorded on your program but very much with us, is Peter Aranson, a professor at the University of Miami, who has contributed a major critique of the Commission\u27s report. Some members of the panel will have views quite different from that reflected in the Commission\u27s report. Since those recommendations were adopted by the American Bar Association, they reflect the policy of the ABA. While you are hearing these discussions and considering the cases, I hope you will keep in mind that the 26 members of the Commission debated long and hard and through a number of meetings and years to reach the balanced judgment that they did, and which the report and the recommendations reflect