Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein's column this week is about Nobel laureate economist Ronald Coase and what Professor Epstein calls a "graceless" article about Coase by John Cassidy of the New Yorker:
Cassidy's crude effort to debunk property rights advocates is oblivious to the risks of his own doctrinaire approach to environmental issues. The strongest defenders of nineteenth-century laissez-faire had no wish to run roughshod over environmental interests. Indeed, like Baron Bramwell, they developed with great sophistication the common law backdrop that is still essential for the environment's proper protection. Writers like John Cassidy seem fundamentally unable to get off their high horses to examine how various schemes of regulation actually work.