Optimal Federalism Across Institutions: Theory and Applications from Environmental and Health Care Policies

Instead of turning immediately to federal legislation, the question of “federalism” then becomes: When is federal action appropriate, and when should the problem be addressed by the states? Over the past fifteen years, courts and legal scholars have attempted to answer this question. This Article presents a framework that provides a new technique to answer this question. This framework analyzes federalism across enactment, implementation, and enforcement institutions, by examining economies and diseconomies of scale inherent in each of these institutions. This Article then applies the framework to a