Introduction
Regulation and interpretation
The anarchronistic legal culture
1. Why regulation?
A historical overview
Public and private ordering
2. The functions of regulatory statutes
Market failures
Public-interested redistribution
Collective desires and aspirations
Diverse experiences and preference formation
Social subordination
Endogenous preferences
Irreversibility, future generations, animals, and nature
Interest-group transfers and "rent-seeking"
The problem of categorization
3. How regulation fails
Failures in the original statute
Implementation failure
Linking statutory function to statutory failure
Paradoxes of the regulatory state
and reform
4. Courts, interpretation, and norms
Flawed approaches to statutory interpretation
Interpretive principles
An alternative method
5. Interpretive principles for the regulatory state
The principles
Priority and harmonization
Fissures in the interpretive community

The postcanonical legal universe
6. Applications, the new deal, and statutory construction
Particulars
The new deal and statutory construction
Conclusion
The Constitution and the Regulatory State
and its reform
Interpreting the Regulatory State
Appendix A. Interpretive principles
Appendix B. Selected regulations in terms of cost per life saved
Appendix C. The growth of administrative government
Notes
Index