🏡 Housing: American property law now protects owners who don’t build

⚡️ Energy & Permitting: Five statutes besides NEPA need streamlining

🏛 State Capacity: Fifteen forces are driving a decades-long decline in American state capacity

💡 Innovation: Unused property rights need an expiration date

🏡 Housing

• American property law now protects owners who don’t build
  How the Gentry Won: Property Law’s Embrace of Stasis—Roderick M. Hills Jr. & David Schleicher (Texas Law Review)
  American property law used to favor building, ownership turnover, and change. Since the 1970s, it has shifted toward protecting incumbents through permanent HOA covenants, conservation easements, and property tax structures that discourage development—contributing to housing crises and reduced growth.

• Corporate ownership bans alone won't fix housing affordability
  The Big Shortage: Affordable Housing—Michael E. Hornzell (University of Baltimore Law Review)
  Institutional investors now own nearly twice as many single-family homes as nine years ago, driving up prices and rents. Proposed bans on corporate ownership of residential property face Takings Clause challenges and are easy to circumvent. A more feasible approach would gradually require institutional investors to sell holdings while giving first-time buyers and community land trusts priority purchasing rights.

• NIMBY opposition and local institutions drive insufficient permitting
  Why Cities Resist New Housing: NIMBYism, Institutions, and Permitting Relative to Need—Robert W. Wassmer & Shoshana F. Levy (Journal of Urban Affairs)
  California cities with more older and long-term residents permit less housing relative to state-set targets; cities with more young adults and higher voter turnout permit more. Charter cities with mayor-council governance outperform council-only structures, and delays in state approval of local housing plans reduce permitting across all income levels.

• People closest to new housing fight it hardest
  Missing Middle: NIMBY Reactions in Arlington, Virginia—Paulo Carvalho (Policy Perspectives)
  About 70 percent of respondents to Arlington’s public comment process on its missing middle rezoning wanted at least some housing types excluded, with opposition rising as density increased. Single-family homeowners dominated the opposition, and rezoning all districts at once amplified proximity-based sentiment over general anti-growth sentiment.

⚡️ Energy & Permitting

• Five statutes besides NEPA need streamlining
  Permitting Reform Is Back On. What Should It Include?—Nick Loris (C3 Solutions)
  The permitting system is redundant, litigation-prone, and stalls energy and infrastructure projects for years. Reform limited to NEPA alone will be insufficient—the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, Endangered Species Act, and National Historic Preservation Act all need streamlining.

• Local zoning is the main bottleneck for solar, not state or federal rules
  Municipal Zoning Challenges for Solar Energy—Patrick Seroogy (UC Law Environmental Journal)
  At least 15% of U.S. counties have zoning codes that impede or ban renewable energy development. Courts generally uphold state preemption of local solar bans—through both express and implied preemption—but collaboration between states and municipalities is more effective than litigation for clearing these barriers.

• 1960s-era nuclear rules are pricing out safer, smaller reactors
  Recent NRC Rulemakings Can Help Unlock Advanced Nuclear Energy—Nick Loris & Prasanna Pydipalli (C3 Solutions)
  Nuclear power costs have risen even as the technology improved, largely because regulations designed for 1960s-era large reactors are applied to smaller, safer designs through costly exemption processes. New NRC rules—including the technology-neutral Part 53 framework finalized in March 2026—aim to fix this mismatch.

🏛 State Capacity & Governance

• Fifteen forces are driving a decades-long decline in American state capacity
  The Secular Decline of the American State—Ganesh Sitaraman (New York University Law Review)
  Federal capacity erosion is not a Trump-specific or Republican-specific phenomenon—it is a secular trend driven by fifteen reinforcing dynamics in law, politics, and institutional design. Consequences include reduced innovation, weaker crisis resilience, and rising consumer harms. Reversing decline requires accepting that its causes span both parties and many decades.

• Digitizing government paperwork lets firms specialize
  From Red Tape to Digital Tape: Digital Government Construction and Corporate Vertical Specialization in China—Zhixuan Shen, Wanli Li, Mengmeng He & Xi Wen (Economic Modelling)
  Government digitalization in China reduces administrative costs and regulatory friction enough that firms restructure toward vertical specialization—focusing on core competencies rather than maintaining integrated operations to navigate bureaucracy.

💡 Innovation

• Unused property rights need an expiration date
  How IP Ends—David Fagundes & Aaron Perzanowski (New York University Law Review)
  Patents, copyrights, and trademarks all have mechanisms that terminate rights—through expiration, nonuse, fraud, or abandonment—but no one has analyzed these doctrines together. A unified taxonomy reveals that expanding use requirements and shortening terms could free up dormant IP. The provocative extension is why physical property lacks similar limits, given that idle land contributes to housing scarcity much as warehoused patents block innovation.

• Anti-troll laws increase patenting but shift it toward incremental work
  Legal Shields, Hidden Costs: The Dual Effects of Patent Troll Laws on Information Technology Firm Innovation—Xuewen Han, Zhitao Yin & Arun Rai (Information Systems Research)
  State anti-troll laws boost total IT patenting, but the gains are concentrated in exploitative (incremental) patents rather than exploratory ones—especially for firms previously targeted by trolls. The study measures patent output, not underlying R&D activity.

🏥 Healthcare

• Licensing laws keep new hospitals and clinics from opening
  Putting the CON in Con Law: Women’s Surgical Center v. Berry and How a Unique State Constitutional Provision on Contracts Intersects with Certificate of Need Laws—John R. Oates (Emory Law Journal Online)
  Georgia’s certificate-of-need laws restrict entry for new healthcare providers. The state supreme court rejected an antitrust-based constitutional challenge in Berry, but the court’s own reasoning leaves openings for future attacks on these anticompetitive licensing regimes.

⛏️ Industrial Policy

• Domestic mining can’t compete on cost, workers, or permits
  Onshoring the Mineral Supply Chain: Structural Constraints, Policy Tools, and Research Gaps—Beia Spiller, Zach Whitlock, Ambarish Kota, Emma DeAngeli & Nafisa Lohawala (Resources for the Future)
  U.S. critical mineral production has declined for a century as cheaper foreign supply—especially Chinese-dominated. Domestic onshoring faces high costs, workforce gaps, lengthy permitting timelines, and community opposition, and current policy tools (tariffs, subsidies, stockpiling) each address only part of the problem.

⚡️ Energy: Utilities are gaming the system to avoid building needed transmission lines

🏡 Housing: Metros that built more housing saw larger drops in Black-White segregation

🏛 State Capacity: Election pressure makes public officials throw good money after bad

🏗 Public Infrastructure: Fairness perceptions, not information campaigns, drive wind project acceptance

⚡️ Energy & Transmission

• Utilities are gaming the system to avoid building the transmission lines America needs
  Towards a National Transmission Planning Authority—Joshua Macey and Elias van Emmerick (Harvard Environmental Law Review)
  Incumbent utilities channel investment toward small, local transmission projects that dodge competitive bidding, regional planning, and regulatory review—in PJM, 73% of transmission spending went to such projects between 2014 and 2021. The result is chronic underinvestment in high-voltage interregional lines that would cut congestion costs (up 220% since 2016), improve reliability, and connect renewables to demand centers. Proposed fixes include a new National Transmission Planning Authority, aggressive use of FERC’s existing siting and cost allocation powers, and governance reforms to reduce utility control over planning processes.

• Grid governance, not technology, is the main barrier to U.S. transmission buildout
  Governance Challenges Preventing Better Integration of the Electrical Grid in the USA—Shelley Welton and Joshua Macey (Nature Energy)
  The U.S. electricity grid remains fragmented because its governance structure—split across FERC, regional transmission organizations, states, and incumbent utilities—systematically underinvests in interregional transmission. Reforms to cost allocation, planning authority, and siting jurisdiction are preconditions for the grid expansion needed for reliability, affordability, and decarbonization.

  Thanks for reading Enabling Acts! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

🏡 Housing

• Metros that built more housing saw larger drops in Black-White segregation
  Housing Supply and Racial Integration: Evidence from Building Permits in U.S. Metropolitan Areas—Aaron Fernandez; (SocArXiv preprint)
  Panel data from 1990 to 2020 show that U.S. metros issuing more building permits experienced greater declines in Black-White residential segregation—a finding that holds using an instrumental variable strategy based on geologic constraints and at the town level within metros. No single mechanism (costs, mobility, location of new units) fully explains the link, suggesting housing supply functions as a structural condition shaping racial sorting rather than operating through one causal channel.

• Parks and community input matter more to neighbors than who moves in
  From Opposition to Acceptance: How Development Characteristics Shape Local Support for Housing Projects—Britt Voesten (Eindhoven University of Technology)
  A choice experiment with 407 Dutch residents found that adding public amenities—especially parks—and offering participation in the design process were the strongest drivers of support for nearby housing projects. Affordable housing shares up to 60% did not reduce acceptance, and apartment height mattered more than project size.

• Nuisance law should protect the activities that make neighborhoods grow
  Urbanizing Nuisance—George F. K. Werner (Brooklyn Law Review)
  Courts struggle to decide nuisance claims when newcomers to gentrifying neighborhoods sue over the very sights, sounds, and smells that drew them there. An activity should only count as an unreasonable interference based on local fit when it falls outside established land-use patterns and is more likely to deter neighbors than attract them. Reorienting nuisance around this “urban growth principle” would make the doctrine more administrable while removing a legal obstacle to dense, mixed-use city life.

• New Jersey’s Mount Laurel mandate has produced 75,000 affordable homes
  Federalism and Fair Housing: State Innovation Amidst Federal Retrenchment—Paula A. Franzese (Fordham Urban Law Journal)
  As HUD’s budget and workforce shrink, New Jersey’s court-enforced Mount Laurel doctrine offers a model: state constitutional mandates requiring municipalities to zone for affordable housing have outperformed federal enforcement, with 94% of towns filing compliance plans under a 2024 reform law.

🏛 State Capacity

• Election pressure makes public officials throw good money after bad
  Escalation of Commitment in the Public Sector: The Impacts of Electoral Effects and Visualization Aids on Blame Avoiding Behavior—Philipp Herrmann, Bernhard Hirsch, and David Lindermüller (Public Management)
  Public officials facing electoral accountability are more likely to escalate commitment to failing projects as a blame-avoidance strategy — continuing to invest rather than admitting a sunk cost. Data visualization tools that make performance shortfalls more salient can counteract this tendency by making it harder to obscure poor outcomes from oversight bodies and voters.

• Simplifying rules helped administrators distribute rent relief faster—but tenants didn’t notice
  Lessons from California’s Emergency Rental Assistance Program: The Experience of Administrative Burden in Policy Implementation—Katharine Lee Nelson, Cypress Marrs, and Vincent J. Reina (Social Service Review)
  California legislation that simplified paperwork, fully funded arrears, and enabled direct-to-tenant payments increased the rent relief program’s reach, especially for women, Hispanics, and those in low-density housing. But applicants still faced long waits and poor communication, suggesting burden reduction helped administrators more than it improved tenants’ experience.

• NYC’s affordable housing lottery is too slow and opaque to serve applicants well
  The House Doesn’t Always Win: Understanding NYC’s Housing Connect Lottery System and How to Improve It—Vicki Been, Jacob Waggoner, Brad Greenburg, Christine Wendell, Dan Waldinger, and Nick Arnosti (NYU Furman Center)
  Housing Connect’s complex verification and approval processes create long delays in filling income-restricted units, raising costs for developers and frustrating the millions of applicants in the pool. The report recommends streamlining eligibility checks, leveraging applicant data to drive pipeline planning, and using the new mayoral task force on administrative reform to make the lottery faster and more transparent.

🏗 Permitting & Infrastructure

• Parametric bonds could replace NEPA litigation with automatic environmental payouts
  Utilization of Parametric Insurance Bonds as Part of NEPA Permitting Reform—Paul E. Traynor (Oil and Gas, Natural Resources, and Energy Journal)
  NEPA review delays infrastructure projects that would improve the human environment, while third-party liability litigation over environmental failures is slow and uncertain. Parametric insurance bonds — which trigger automatic payouts when predefined environmental thresholds are breached — could streamline permitting by replacing adversarial litigation with guaranteed remediation funding, letting projects proceed while protecting the natural environment.

• Fairness perceptions, not information campaigns, drive wind project acceptance
  Getting to Yes: What It Really Takes to Build Social Acceptance of Wind and Transmission Projects—Louise Comeau (Re.Climate)
  A national survey of 4,232 Canadians finds that support for wind and transmission projects depends on whether residents believe the process is fair, benefits are tangible (lower power bills, property tax reductions), and institutions are trustworthy. Dismissing opponents as NIMBYs backfires; the “decide-announce-defend” model should give way to early co-development, real community benefit commitments, and trust-building before siting decisions are made.

• Permitting obstacles to Texas’s looming water crisis
  Dammed if You Do, Dammed if You Don’t: Texas’s Water Crisis and the Need for Reform—Crafton Deal (Texas A&M Law Review)
  Texas’s population is projected to grow over 70% in 50 years while existing water supplies decline by nearly 18%. Two proposed North Texas reservoirs—Lake Ringgold and Marvin Nichols—illustrate the legal, environmental, and financial obstacles to large-scale water infrastructure, including eminent domain conflicts and massive capital costs.

Share

🚗 Autonomous Vehicles

• Private safety standards can fill the AV liability gap courts face today
  Swords and Shields: Impact of Private Standards for Liability Determinations of Autonomous Vehicles—Gary Marchant (Journal of Tort Law)
  Federal regulation of autonomous vehicles lags the technology, leaving private standards from SAE, ISO, and IEEE as the primary safety governance tools. Courts should treat manufacturer conformance with these standards as a partial shield against liability — especially punitive damages — while non-conformance should serve as a partial sword for plaintiffs to argue lack of due care.

• Robotaxi benefits depend on regulation, not just technology
  Regulating Robotaxis—Bryant Walker Smith and Matthew Wansley (Southern California Law Review)
  Commercial robotaxi service is scaling fast, but whether it reduces congestion and expands access or entrenches a private monopoly depends on regulatory choices. Externality pricing for congestion and pollution, open-entry rules to prevent platform lock-in, and fare transparency mandates can capture the upside while reclaiming parking land, refocusing transit on high-throughput routes, and expanding mobility for low-income and disabled riders.

®️ Intellectual Property

• Geographical indication laws manufacture scarcity by legal designation, not nature
  The Protection of Geographical Indications Under Comparative Lens: Whether Law Artificially Creates Scarcity of Goods—Domenico di Micco (FIU Law Review)
  Champagne is not scarce because grapes are rare — it is scarce because law restricts the name to one region. Geographical indications create artificial scarcity by attaching legal denominations to geographic, physical, or cultural particularities regardless of actual availability, engineering higher prices through supply restriction. A comparative study of major GI regimes reveals both the consumer-protection benefits and the market-distortion costs of this legal construction.

📮 Request for Abundance Policy Proposals

Inclusive Abundance sent out a call for policy proposals to address causes of artificial scarcity in eight domains (or more), including housing, energy, workforce, and government effectiveness. Proposals are due June 5.

⚡️Energy: The Defense Production Act could accelerate clean energy over state objections

🏠 Housing: Unauthorized immigration explains 30% of the 2021–2024 rent surge

🏠 Housing: Zoning allowed mixed-use density until federal slum clearance programs discouraged it

🏛 State Capacity: Public-sector unions held Patent Office output steady during DOGE cuts

⚡️Energy

• The Defense Production Act could accelerate clean energy over state objections
  Trump Wields the Defense Production Act to Promote Fossil Fuels. It Could Instead Be Used to Promote All-of-the-Above Energy Abundance—Joel Dodge and Todd N. Tucker (Roosevelt Institute)
  Trump’s DOE used DPA Title I to override California regulators and force a donor-connected oil company to resume production—establishing that priorities and allocations authority can compel new production and preempt state environmental law. That same playbook could unlock nuclear, geothermal, offshore wind, and green hydrogen past state permitting bottlenecks.

🏠 Housing

• Unauthorized immigration explains 30% of the 2021–2024 rent surge
  The Impacts of Unauthorized Immigration on U.S. Labor and Housing Markets: New Evidence from Administrative Microdata—Daniel J. Wilson and Xiaoqing Zhou (Dallas Fed)
  Individual-level immigration court microdata indicates that the 2021–2024 unauthorized immigration boom raised house prices 2.2% and rents 1.4% per one-percentage-point employment-share inflow, explaining roughly 30% of average metro area price growth. Housing supply didn’t respond—unauthorized immigrant inflows acted as a pure demand shock against inelastic short-run supply.

• Zoning allowed mixed-use density until federal slum clearance programs discouraged it
  Reform and Consequence: The Mid-Century Roots of Twenty-First-Century Zoning—Christine Quattro (Journal of Planning History)
  Archival and spatial analysis of Philadelphia and San Antonio shows that early zoning codes permitted walkable, mixed-use development by default—single-family exclusivity emerged from 1960s overhauls funded by Urban Renewal grants. Mid-century reformers used federal money and eminent domain to demolish mixed-use neighborhoods and replace them with auto-oriented, single-use codes that persist today.

• NIMBY-proof tactics quietly deliver affordable housing to wealthy suburbs
  From persuasion to evasion: anti-collective action and the making of affordable housing in suburban Chicago—John N. Robinson III, Lillian Leung (Social Forces)
  Interviews with 68 developers who built Low-Income Housing Tax Credit units in suburban Chicago’s lowest-poverty areas show that where persuasion fails, developers use “anti-collective action”—exploiting by-right zoning, converting foreclosed properties, and cultivating municipal officials while sidelining hostile homeowners. Most suburbs still have none of this housing.

🏛 State Capacity

• Public-sector unions held Patent Office output steady during DOGE cuts

  Institutional Buffers and Administrative Capacity—Christopher A. Cotropia & David L. Schwartz (draft)
  Using USPTO’s granular real-time event data and a difference-in-differences design, non-unionized patent staff suffered a 35% per-employee productivity drop after DOGE’s January 2025 launch, while union-protected examiners showed no significant change. After Trump’s August 2025 EO stripped examiner union protections, examiner output began declining too.

🧪 Innovation

• Abolishing patent injunctions could unlock 95% of dormant patents for active use
  The Compensatory Patent System: replacing injunctions with economic compensation—Juan Antonio Nuñez Triguero (Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice)

  A Compensatory Patent System that replaced patent injunctions with preset royalty rates by patent class, with infringement and validity challenges handled by the patent office rather than courts, would cuts enforcement costs from millions to roughly $60,000 per party, addressing both chronic patent underutilization and the chilling effect on implementers.

📃 Property Law: Legal incentives for landowners to create positive externalities

🗽 Immigration: Visas for high-skilled students and elder care workers

🏛 State Capacity: Decentralize the federal civil service

📃 Property Law

• Legal incentives for landowners to create positive externalities
  Property Law for Positive Externalities: Carving New Sticks for the Bundle—J.B. Ruhl & James Salzman (William & Mary Environmental Law & Policy Review)
  Property law excels at stopping harmful land uses but has no tools to reward beneficial ones. A new Natural Capital Servitude and severable Natural Capital Estate—modeled on profits à prendre and mineral estates—would let landowners capture and transfer the value of flood control, water purification, and pollination, reducing chronic underinvestment in conservation and other positive-externality land uses.

💡 Political Strategy

• The legal, policy, and political path to Abundance
  The Path to Abundance: The Legal, Policy, and Political Challenges of an Abundance Agenda—Eric Biber (William & Mary Environmental Law & Policy Review)
  Abundance reforms face real legal and political headwinds: most proposed fixes require tradeoffs with local control, environmental protection, and anti-corruption rules that voters actually support. The YIMBY movement’s success suggests the best path is low-salience, state-and-local coalition building that avoids nationalizing the issue—not broad public mobilization.

🏛 State Capacity

• Decentralize the federal civil service
  A Civil Service for the Mission—Margaret Mullins (Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator)

  Every president since Nixon has consolidated executive control over the civil service rather than fix the hiring, classification, and compensation mechanisms that actually govern federal capacity. Personnel authority should be decentralized to agencies, with a revived Civil Service Commission serving as a center of excellence and a default personnel system for agencies that lack capacity to build their own.

🗽 Immigration

• Enable visas for immigrants to meet elder-care demand
  Immigration Policies in Healthcare Work—Genesis Garay (Houston Journal of Health Law & Policy)
  Visa caps and credential barriers leave hundreds of thousands of qualified immigrant workers out of the direct care workforce as elderly population demand surges. Expanding EB-3 limits, adding healthcare-specific visa categories, and creating TPS/DACA pathways to healthcare careers could relieve both the workforce shortage and Social Security funding stress.

• Positive economic effects from work visas for high-skilled immigrants
  The Effect of Retaining High-Skilled International Graduates: Evidence from the STEM OPT Extension—Seoyoung Kwon, Jongkwan Lee & Joan Monràs (Barcelona School of Economics Working Paper)
  Extending work authorization for international STEM graduates under the 2016 OPT expansion increased local high-skilled immigrant supply, stimulated firm creation, raised demand for native high-skilled workers, and boosted startup investment—particularly in metro areas with top universities.

🏗 Public Infrastructure

• Racism caused the decline of public infrastructure investment
  White Care: The Impact of Race on American Infrastructure—Cotten Seiler (book)
  U.S. public infrastructure was built as racially exclusive state care for white citizens under the New Deal. When desegregation opened that infrastructure to all, white Americans abandoned the public compact in favor of austerity and privatization—producing the dilapidated infrastructure of today.

🌱 Environmental Policy

• A total history of US environmental policy and its self-inflicted dysfunction

  American Environmental History and Policy: A Troubled Journey to Reform—Frank T. Manheim (book)
  The 1970s environmental revolution produced landmark pollution controls but also economic drag, business backlash, and the partisan polarization that has gridlocked environmental policy ever since. Drawing on original interviews with legislators and officials who drafted the era’s landmark statutes, and a comprehensive database of U.S. environmental laws from the founding to the present, this book compares the U.S. unfavorably to more functional EU regulatory approaches and proposes reform pathways.

• Wind and solar permitting in Massachusetts is taking longer
  Permitting & Siting of Wind & Solar in Massachusetts: Process, Timelines, & Outcomes—Natalie Baillargeon, Juniper Katz, Lanbing Tao, Robi Nilson, Ben Hoen (Frontiers in Sustainable Energy Policy)
  Local permitting for wind and solar in Massachusetts averages 250 days and has grown longer over time. Larger and ultimately cancelled projects face the longest delays. The first systematic dataset on locally-permitted clean energy project timelines, released as several states including Massachusetts are actively reforming permitting policy.

🏡 Housing

• Restrictive zoning hurts declining cities too, not just expensive ones
  Rezoning the Rust Belt—Brian Connolly & Noah Kazis (Washington University Law Review)
  Restrictive zoning is harming the Rust Belt. In postindustrial Midwestern cities like Detroit, land-use regulations don’t cause housing shortages but still impose serious frictions on revitalization—documented through original data on permits, variances, and rezonings paired with developer interviews.

• NIMBY lawsuits are enabled by overly permissive standing rules
  Standing Against Housing—Brian M. Miller (Maryland Law Review)
  Permissive standing rules let neighbors block housing reforms with vague harm claims that would fail in any other context. Third-party zoning standing should be limited to nuisance-style property interference, filtering out subjective grievances better resolved through politics.

• Regulatory barriers to innovative construction methods in California
  Potential Pathways to Scale Innovative Construction Methods in California—Stephanie Hawke, Julia Aguilar, Tyler Pullen (Terner Center Report)
  California’s housing crisis persists despite land use reforms because high construction hard costs make projects financially unviable. Factory-based and other innovative construction methods could lower per-unit costs but face regulatory, financing, and labor barriers to scale—barriers the California legislature is actively studying through a Select Committee with a concrete legislative agenda.

💬 UCLA Law Symposium

UCLA Law’s Emmett Institute on Climate Change & the Environment is hosting a Symposium on April 3rd titled “Can Abundance Be Sustainable? Merging Affordability and Climate Policy”

Attendees can register here.

Submit research: Know of recent or forthcoming scholarship on these topics? Send it to enablingacts@gmail.com or reply to this email.

🏛 State Capacity: Impacts of human capital and overregulation on state water agencies

🏗 Local Deregulation: State preemption fast-tracking AI data centers’ zoning and environmental review

⚡️Energy: Solar NIMBYs are not misinformed, they have genuine adverse interests

🏛💧 State (Water) Capacity

• Employing more senior water treatment experts reduces safety and reporting violations
  Human Capital: Operator Quality and Water Utility Performance—Robin Rose Saywitz (chapter in Safe Drinking Water Act: The Next Fifty Years)
  Texas data show higher-credentialed water utility professionals significantly improve SDWA compliance. Adding one top-licensed Class A operator boosts monitoring compliance by 11 percentage points, roughly equivalent to expanding the entire workforce tenfold.

• New safety rules threaten to overwhelm water agencies
  The State of Safe Water: The Future of SDWA Implementation for Primacy Agencies—J. Alan Roberson (chapter in Safe Drinking Water Act: The Next Fifty Years)
  State water agencies face a structural capacity crisis: a $375 million annual funding gap is widening as new PFAS and lead rules add hundreds of thousands of mandatory staff hours. The Lead and Copper Rule Improvement alone would consume 71% of all currently available state staff time.

• Water Agency public engagement is not building trust; look to Australia

  Thirsty for Deliberation? Improving Public Engagement to Protect the Nation’s Drinking Water—Amber Wichowsky & Jill McNew-Birren (chapter in Safe Drinking Water Act: The Next Fifty Years)
  Existing SDWA public engagement—Consumer Confidence Reports, notice-and-comment, public hearings—is largely ineffective at building trust or mobilizing communities. Drawing on Australia’s experience with deliberative mini-publics in utility price-setting, the authors argue the U.S. drinking water sector needs genuine two-way deliberation, not one-way information transmission, to address infrastructure, pollution, and trust deficits.

⚡️Energy

• Solar NIMBYs are not misinformed, they have genuine adverse interests
  Local Opposition to Renewable Energy: Integrating Misinformation and Controversy Perspectives—David J. Hess (Society & Natural Resources)
  Local solar opponents draw on mainstream, credible sources—not fossil-fuel or conservative media echo chambers. Analyzing 437 statements from 81 opposition groups in the US and UK, 79% of cited sources were neutral or pro-renewable. Dismissing opposition as NIMBY misinformation misses legitimate policy disputes over farmland, property values, and community compensation.

• Nuclear power is the solution to rising energy demand
  Nuclear Power's Role in Meeting Energy Demand While Combating Global Warming and Climate Change—Robert M. Andersen (Iowa Law Review)
  Nuclear power can safely meet rising U.S. energy demand while cutting emissions, despite lingering post-Three Mile Island fears. Bipartisan legislation supports industry revival, and the key unresolved obstacle—nuclear waste—is best addressed through interim storage combined with reprocessing.

🚊 Transit

• California’s playbook for EV adoption
  Systemic acceleration capacity in net-zero transitions: electrifying transportation in California—Nicholas Goedeking & Karoline S. Rogge (Environmental Politics)
  California leads the US in electric vehicle adoption because of decades-old laws and institutions that let the state set its own pollution rules, delegate policy to technical experts, and earmark cap-and-trade revenue for clean energy—creating a self-reinforcing system that’s hard to replicate quickly elsewhere.

🧪 Science & Innovation

• Generative AI may render the patent system obsolete

  Creative Destruction for the Patent System? Impact of Generative AI—Henry H. Perritt, Jr. (Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology)
  Generative AI creates a paradox for patent law: it can invent anything, but by simultaneously embodying the knowledge of a hypothetical person of ordinary skill in any art, it renders all those inventions obvious. The result could be a world where everything is invented but nothing is patentable—hastening the patent system’s drift toward irrelevance as inventors turn to trade secrets and first-mover advantage instead.

🏗 Local Deregulation

• Federal cash for local deregulation opt-in
  Right to Build Zones—Adam Ozimek, Jess Remington, and Tina Lee (Economic Innovation Group Concept Paper)

  A proposed federal program pays localities $10,000 per permitted unit if they designate specific zones where by-right permitting replaces discretionary review and density restrictions are lifted. States opt in first, unlocking participation for their municipalities, which choose the zone boundaries. HUD sets model codes and selects applicants competitively.

• State preemption fast-tracking AI data centers’ zoning and environmental review
  Planning Under Preemption: State Power and Local Authority in the AI Data Center Era—Justin Kollar (Journal of the American Planning Association)
  States are stripping local governments of zoning and environmental review authority to fast-track AI data centers, using statutory overrides, utility governance, and tax incentives. Cases from West Virginia, Louisiana, Virginia, and Arizona illustrate how planning authority is shifting to state agencies and corporate actors. The author argues planners must respond by developing fluency in utility and water governance—the systems now effectively making land use decisions—rather than simply managing project impacts after the fact.

Submit research: Know of recent or forthcoming scholarship on these topics? Send it to enablingacts@gmail.com or reply to this email.

🏠 Housing: The language of state ADU preemption laws matters

🚊 Transit: Designing transportation systems for housing abundance

📑 Permitting: How to use AI in NEPA Reviews

🧪 Science & Innovation: Conflict-of-interest policies slow medical innovation

🏭 Industrial Policy: US vs. Chinese strategies for securing critical minerals

🏠 Housing

• State-level ADU preemptions succeed or fail depending on statutory language
  The Granny Flat Rebellion: Preempting Local ADU Restrictions—Andrew Welch (SMU Law Review)
  State ADU preemption laws prove effective when they eliminate poison pills like owner-occupancy requirements and parking mandates. Evidence from California, Montana, and Oregon shows that removing these restrictions correlates with ninefold increases in permitting; Texas and Austin demonstrate continued local resistance despite state protection, revealing the necessity of stringent preemption language to overcome NIMBY opposition.

• Addressing expensive or unavailable home insurance from climate catastrophes

  The Uninsurable Future: The Climate Threat to Property Insurance—Dave Jones (Yale Law Journal)
  Climate change increases catastrophe frequency and severity, causing insurers to raise rates and withdraw coverage, destabilizing mortgage markets. State deregulation (Florida) and rate increases (California) offer short-term fixes but ignore underlying drivers. Jones proposes state insurance reforms, land-use restrictions on high-risk development, federal reinsurance programs, and requiring insurers to divest from fossil fuels.

⚡️Energy

• The effect of corporate power purchase agreements on large-scale renewables projects
  Corporate Power Purchase Agreements and Their Influence on the Expansion of Large-Scale Renewable Energy Projects in the U.S.—Ebere J. Onyeka (World Journal of Advanced Research and Reviews)
  Long-term corporate power purchase agreements reduce renewable project financing risk by providing stable revenue streams, though regional adoption varies by electricity market structure and regulatory access. Key barriers include market volatility, contract complexity, and stringent credit requirements limiting smaller companies. Emerging solutions—hybrid CPPAs, energy storage integration, and aggregation models—could expand access while policy attention to permitting and grid modernization remains critical.

🚊 Transit

• How to reimagine transit to enable housing abundance
  Transportation for the Abundant Society—Gregory H. Shill and Jonathan Levine
  Transportation policy’s focus on vehicle speed rather than access creates a binding constraint on housing abundance. Reorienting toward connecting people to destinations—and reforming environmental review to use realistic counterfactuals—would unlock density in high-demand areas while advancing climate and safety goals. Legal barriers, institutional fragmentation, and path dependence reinforce this mobility-centered paradigm across federal, state, and local systems.

📑 Permitting

• How to use AI in NEPA Reviews
  Using AI in NEPA Review: Legal Challenges and Judicial Scrutiny—Tuoya Saren (Environmental Law Reporter)
  Agencies testing AI for environmental impact statements face uncertainty about regulatory authority and judicial acceptance. Explainable, auditable AI systems paired with human oversight at critical junctures could enable compliance with NEPA’s procedural requirements while managing risks of bias and inadequate public participation.

🧪 Science & Innovation

• A history of commercializing science from the Renaissance to today

  The emergence and evolution of science–industry intermediaries: An evolutionary framework—Sarah Tung & Julien Pénin (Journal of Evolutionary Economics
  Science-industry intermediaries—organizations bridging research and commercial application—emerged in the Renaissance, not post-WWII as typically assumed. They evolved across three phases: pre-industrial (reducing transaction costs), first industrial age (knowledge transfer), and second industrial age (institutional development). An evolutionary framework reveals changing intermediary functions aligned with shifting economic structures.

• Stricter conflict-of-interest policies threaten to slow medical innovation
  Balancing innovation and integrity: the biomedical research ecosystem at a crossroads—Robert G. Gourdie (Nature Biotechnology)
  Stricter conflict-of-interest rules for NIH-funded researchers risk undermining US biomedical innovation leadership. The Bayh-Dole Act’s technology transfer framework has generated $1.7–$1.9 trillion in economic output by encouraging academic commercialization. Evidence suggests researcher financial conflicts don’t drive misconduct; instead, external investor and regulatory scrutiny may strengthen reproducibility.

🏭 Industrial Policy

• US vs. Chinese strategies for securing critical minerals
  Internationalizing Industrial Policy: How China and the United States Use State Capacity to Secure Critical Minerals for Electric Vehicles—Daniel Driscoll, Max Kiefel, and Mathias Larsen
  China and the United States internationalize industrial policy differently to secure EV critical minerals. China deploys state-owned enterprises and financial institutions to control mining globally; the United States leverages currency dominance and military power. Both require combining market dominance with domestically specific capacities to project power abroad.

Submit research: Know of recent or forthcoming scholarship on these topics? Send it to enablingacts@gmail.com or reply to this email.

🏛 State Capacity: Why the government is addicted to consultants

⚡️Energy: Addressing NIMBY opposition to geothermal, mining, and more

🏠 Housing: Debates over supply vs. demand, private vs. public

💵 Economic Policy: How government can drive innovation (and shipbuilding!)

🤜 State Preemption: The downsides of constraining local experimentation

🏛 State Capacity

• Outsourcing to Big Tech is hollowing out federal capacity
  Infrastructural Capture: How Big Tech’s Dependency Loop is Reshaping American Statecraft—Johannes Späth & Giulliano Molinero Junior (Austrian Institute for International Affairs Policy Analysis)

  The US has been outsourcing critical infrastructure to Big Tech, creating a “privatization-dependency loop” that hollows out state capacity. SpaceX and government cloud contracts show how “infrastructural capture” grants private firms veto power, limiting the public sector’s ability to independently direct strategic growth.

• Complex welfare eligibility rules subsidize contractors
  The Means-Testing Industrial Complex— (Law & Political Economy Blog) @itslukefarrell
  By outsourcing income verification to private monopolies like Equifax, the government transforms the safety net into a venue for rent-seeking, wasting billions on administrative friction that could otherwise be used to expand universal service delivery.

• State capacity enables liberty through cooperation
  Freedom as Social Cooperation: A Theory of Liberal Democracy—Ezequiel Spector (book)
  The state is not a constraint on liberty but a First-Order Cooperator essential to it. “Freedom as Social Cooperation” relies on high state capacity to build the “circulation infrastructure”—law, trust, and public goods—that markets cannot supply alone. By treating governance as a productive input rather than a cost, the state is visible as the ultimate enabler of abundance and large-scale coordination.

⚡️Energy

• Defang geothermal opposition with early engagement and payoffs
  Tackling the social acceptance in deep geothermal projects: best practices and lessons learned—Dario Bonciani, Amel Barich, Marco Vichi, Loredana Torsello (European Geothermal Energy Conference)

  Social opposition frequently acts as a hard constraint on deep geothermal energy abundance. Analysis of 14 international case studies shows that unlocking capacity requires replacing “decide-announce-defend” tactics with early engagement and direct benefit-sharing to neutralize local veto points.

• NIMBYs of domestic mining for battery minerals.
  Exploring public opinions on mining governance and preferences for interventions to enhance battery mineral access—Mahelet G. Fikru, Sreeja Koppera, Nhien Nguyen (Resource and Energy Economics)
  While 54% of Americans back domestic mining nationally, only 32% accept local projects. This gap stems from specific local risk perceptions rather than ideological opposition, implying that neutralizing local costs is key to unlocking critical mineral abundance.

• Overcome NIMBY objections to renewables projects through partnership and value-sharing
  The Social Acceptance of Renewable Energy Projects—Sébastien Bourdin (editor) (book)
  Technocratic approaches to the energy transition are failing because they treat local opposition as a marketing problem rather than a democratic one. This collection argues that “NIMBYism” is often a rational response to extractive development, suggesting that the only way to accelerate renewable deployment is through “territorial value sharing”—restructuring governance to give host communities actual ownership stakes and decision-making power, thereby turning passive neighbors into active partners in production.

• There should be a legal right to sunlight for residential solar
  Shining Light on Solar Equity: Navigating Legal Barriers to Solar Energy for Low-Income Communities in Washington—Magdalena Larrain (Seattle Journal of Technology, Environmental, & Innovation Law)
  Unclear laws about who owns sunlight and unfair funding are blocking low-income families from using solar power. This study of Washington State shows that the current system treats clean energy as a luxury for the wealthy. To let everyone participate, the state needs to guarantee legal “rights to the sun” and change financial rules so that clean energy is affordable for all neighborhoods.

• Nuclear plant environmental regulations should be streamlined, not reduced
  Streamlining the licensing of nuclear power plants without compromising the core: EU environmental reviews—Bruno Garcia da Silva (Journal of Energy & Natural Resources Law)
  Analysis of the EU, France, and the US finds that while Environmental Impact Assessments for nuclear plants can cause delays, the solution isn’t deregulation that risks environmental harm. Instead, regulators should deploy “procedural efficiency”—streamlining the licensing process by integrating climate, energy, and environmental policies to accelerate construction without compromising the rigor of environmental review.

🏠 Housing

• Housing privatization harmed renters and owners in the UK
  Housing Provision and Policy in the UK—Alan Murie (book)
  The UK’s reliance on “asset-based welfare”—substituting state provision with home equity—has structurally failed. Privatization yielded not a “property-owning democracy” but a regression to precarious “private landlordism,” demonstrating that dismantling public housing inevitably generates scarcity and generational segregation.

• Residential addiction recovery sites don’t lower nearby property values
  “Not in my backyard”: The impact of recovery residences on property values—Ryan Ramphul, Sheryl A. McCurdy, Jooyeon Lee, Yanchen Liu, Yixiao Chen, Serena A. Rodriguez, Kathryn R. Gallardo, Sreelatha Akkala, Hadiza Theyra-Enias, J. Michael Wilkerson (Drug and Alcohol Dependence Vol. 279)
  Analysis of Texas census tracts finds no link between recovery residences and lower property values. This evidence dismantles a primary NIMBY argument, suggesting that zoning restrictions based on economic fears are unfounded and needlessly constrain essential care capacity.

• Increasing housing supply is an America First policy
  Rebuilding the American Dream: Homeownership for All Americans—Michael Faulkender, Jill Homan, Ethan Antonelli & Kenzo Takeda (America First Policy Institute)
  The housing crisis results from a “regulatory tax” of government fees and permitting delays and immigrant demand. Affordability requires a massive expansion of private supply, enabled by removing bureaucratic barriers, conditioning federal funds on zoning reform, allowing 529 savings to be used for down payments, and cracking down on predatory lending to promote homeownership.

• Inequality, not housing supply, drives the housing crisis.
  Inequality, not regulation, drives America’s housing affordability crisis—Maximilian Buchholz, Tom Kemeny, Gregory F. Randolph, Michael Storper (London School of Economics Working Paper)
  The deregulationist theory of the housing crisis ignores the structural reality of inequality. By simulating the effects of upzoning, this analysis finds that even massive supply-side reforms would take decades to lower costs because measured demand elasticity is very low. True affordability cannot be achieved through market-rate construction alone but requires correcting the skewed income distribution that drives uneven demand and prices out the working class.

• Judicial standards in North Carolina block housing supply and entrench exclusionary zoning
  The Legal Invincibility of Exclusionary Zoning and the Inevitability of a Housing Shortage in the Old North State—Joel E. Gillison (North Carolina Law Review)
  North Carolina’s housing shortage is a manufactured crisis, entrenched by a legal system that treats exclusionary zoning as “invincible.” By clinging to a deferential standard, state courts have abdicated their duty to check local obstruction, effectively immunizing arbitrary and capricious barriers that block growth. Instead, the judiciary must apply strict scrutiny to zoning restraints, and the legislature must strip local governments of the power to exclude.

• Federal grant conditions can overcome local zoning
  Climbing Mount Laurel: Federal Land Use and Zoning Policy as the Bipartisan Solution to the Affordable Housing Crisis—Nina Stockman (Buffalo Law Review)
  The current housing crisis is not a market failure, but a failure of local governance, where exclusionary zoning has been allowed to fester under the guise of “local control.” This analysis argues that while the federal government lacks the direct police power to override Euclid and zone land itself, it holds a powerful financial lever: the Spending Clause. To “Climb Mount Laurel” on a national scale, Congress must bypass local obstructionists by conditioning federal grants on aggressive zoning reform, effectively purchasing the “fair share” of affordable housing that municipalities refuse to build voluntarily.

Share Enabling Acts

💵 Economic Policy

• Case studies on federal and state governments driving innovation
  States of Innovation: Driving the American Economy in the 21st Century—James D. G. Wood (book)
  Challenging the myth of a purely market-driven U.S. economy, this book introduces the “Polycentric Innovation State” to explain how federal and state governments actively steer growth. Case studies of California, Texas, Michigan, and Maine reveal that regional public investment strategies—not just laissez-faire policies—are the primary drivers of American innovation and industrial renewal.

• Public shipyards to restore American shipbuilding
  Liberty Yards: The Case for Public Shipbuilding—Mary Bridges (Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator White Paper)
  Decades of “market-nudging” subsidies have failed to resuscitate US shipbuilding. Instead, the government should establish “Liberty Yards”—four publicly owned, regionally specialized shipyards—alongside a Maritime Infrastructure Bank to finance fleet modernization and a Maritime Workforce Reserve to guarantee labor supply, effectively treating shipbuilding as essential state capacity rather than a private market commodity.

• Pro-growth policies have to address inequality
  The Predistribution Solution—Sunny Malhotra and Steven K. Vogel (Roosevelt Institute Policy Brief)
  “Predistribution” policies focused on growing the economic pie should also target inequality, which functions as a structural limit on production. By rewriting market rules—empowering labor and breaking monopolies—policymakers can democratize economic power and unlock suppressed productivity.

🤜 State Preemption

• Loss of local control stymied congestion pricing experiments
  Transportation Law’s Congestion Problem—Sara C. Bronin (Yale Law Journal)
  Traffic congestion is legally entrenched. Federal and state laws actively subsidize driving while stripping cities of the power to manage demand. This regulatory architecture preempts local solutions like New York’s congestion pricing experiment, ensuring that infrastructure policy serves vehicle flow rather than efficient urban mobility.

• Cities should switch to public ownership to pursue climate policies blocked by new state preemption laws
  Navigating State Law in Local Climate Action—Vincent M. Nolette, Daniel J. Metzger, Olivia N. Guarna, Amy E. Turner (Columbia Law School Sabin Center for Climate Change Law Report)
  In nineteen states, new preemption laws block local governments from enacting climate policies, often by using state authority to override municipal “home rule.” Legal analysis suggests that local governments can bypass these restrictions by pivoting from regulation to public ownership (municipalization), allowing cities to achieve climate goals through direct service provision rather than vulnerable regulatory mandates.

Submit research: Know of recent or forthcoming scholarship on these topics? Send it to enablingacts@gmail.com or reply to this email.

In this issue:

• State Capacity: Due process of AI for state benefits administration

• State Capacity: The legal limits of other transactions

• Legal Abundance: Responding to the explosion in dispute resolution demand

• Labor: How abundance and labor movements can work together

• Housing: Aesthetically pleasing buildings pacifies NIMBYs

• Energy: Electricity regulation reforms

• Education: How Louisiana achieved educational success

• Transit: In-house expertise lowers transit project costs

State Capacity

• Due process implications of using AI for state benefits administration
  Evaluation as Due Process: Civil Service in an Automated Age—Daniel E. Ho, Olivia Martin, Amy Perez, & Kit Rodolfa (Administrative Law Review)

  Mathews v. Eldridge implicitly requires agencies evaluate AI systems to satisfy constitutional due process. Evaluations should test for accuracy, monitor for bias, and compare human versus automated error rates to check if humans or AI poses a greater risk of wrongly denying benefits to eligible people.

• Legal analysis of flexible spending authorities (Other Transactions) to enable wider adoption
  Unlocking Other Transactions—Mark Thomas

  Other Transactions bypass 2,000 pages of procurement regulations but account for only 2% of spending despite 36 agencies having authority. Understanding how other laws, like appropriations laws, constrain them will give agencies the confidence to leverage this tool.

Legal Abundance

• How to respond to the rising volume & costs of transactions and disputes
  The Transaction Explosion and the Cost of Judgment—Daniel Wilf‑Townsend

  The explosion in daily transactions—from credit card purchases to emergency room visits—has outpaced courts’ ability to handle disputes, while the cost of lawyers has grown faster than inflation for decades. Courts need cheaper ways to resolve cases beyond class actions, like simplified procedures for routine disputes and automated systems for low-stakes claims, or millions of disputes will never get resolved fairly.

Labor

• How the abundance and labor movements can complement each other
  Democratic Abundance: An Abundance that Works for Workers—Kate Andrias & Alexander Hertel-Fernandez

  Unions can help abundance succeed by training skilled workers through apprenticeships, building political coalitions for infrastructure investment, and improving government decision-making through labor participation. In return, abundance projects can expand union membership, but only if designed to ensure good jobs rather than purely deregulatory approaches that sacrifice worker protections.

Housing

• Some NIMBY objections may be addressed by more aesthetic buildings
  How Sociotropic Aesthetic Judgments Drive Opposition to Dense Housing Development—Chris Elmendorf, David Broockman, & Josh Kalla
  Voters oppose apartment buildings in single-family neighborhoods due to aesthetic judgments about visual “fit” rather than property values or resident concerns. Building design quality affects support more than demographics or amenities, suggesting aesthetic preferences—not NIMBYism—drive much housing opposition.

Energy

• Electricity regulation reforms that can create energy abundance
  Institutional Design for Electricity Abundance—Lynne Kiesling & Josh Macey

  Electricity scarcity results from regulatory structures that reward utilities for capital investment while letting them control planning and pass costs to ratepayers. Separating monopoly grid operation from competitive generation, using market-based cost allocation, and allowing faster interconnection for high-value users would enable abundance under AI-driven demand growth.

Education

• How process and cultural reforms enabled Louisiana educational success
  A Capacity Agenda for State Departments of Education—Julia Kaufman & Kunjan Narechania

  Louisiana leads the nation in post-pandemic reading gains by focusing state capacity on a clear implementation chain: defining student classroom experiences, restructuring around functional teams instead of compliance offices, and aligning all incentives toward high-quality instructional materials adoption.

Transit

• How in-house expertise can lower the costs of transit projects
  State Capacity and the High Cost of Transit Projects—Eric Goldwyn
  The US has the eighth most expensive transit construction costs ($626 million per kilometer) because agencies lack in-house expertise to manage consultants and control design bloat, as shown by Boston’s Green Line and NYC’s Second Avenue Subway.

Bonus Content

Not presented at the conference, but recommended by participants

• Benchmarking Legal RAG: The Promise and Limits of AI Statutory Surveys—Mohamed Afane, Emaan Hariri, Daniel E. Ho, and Derek Ouyang

• Evaluating Generative AI in Benefits Administration: A Demonstration Project—Varun Magesh, Olivia H. Martin, Faiz Surani, Amy Perez, Kit Rodolfa, and Daniel E. Ho

• The Symbolic Politics of Housing—David E. Broockman, Christopher S. Elmendorg, and Joshua L. Kalla

Submit research: Know of recent or forthcoming scholarship on these topics? Send it to enablingacts@gmail.com or reply to this email.

Using Data to Discern Whether NEPA Causes Delay, and What Can Be Done About It—David E. Adelman, Jamie Pleune, and John Ruple (forthcoming in the Public Land & Resources Law Review)
This article evaluates recent NEPA reforms designed to reduce permitting delays for infrastructure projects. The authors assess whether statutory amendments, regulatory revisions, and the Supreme Court’s scope decision will actually accelerate compliance or create new obstacles. Drawing on empirical evidence about delay causes, they propose alternative evidence-based reforms to streamline the environmental review process more effectively.

The Real Story of NEPA Litigation in Clean Energy Permitting—Anna Mance (SMU Dedman School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper)
This article analyzes an original dataset of over 2,000 NEPA cases from 2009-2023 to test claims that litigation delays clean energy projects. The empirical findings reveal that NEPA litigation predominantly targets fossil fuel and extraction projects, not renewable energy development. The data demonstrates that proposed reforms eliminating public participation would likely accelerate emissions rather than the clean energy transition, contradicting the rationale behind current reform efforts.

Overcoming The Economic and Legal Barriers to Local Acceptance of Renewable Energy Projects—David E. Adelman (SSRN paper)
Local opposition to renewable energy projects stems from low-salience benefits (mainly property tax increases) that create opportunities for obstruction even when costs are modest. The author argues against state preemption of local permitting, demonstrating that it eliminates negotiations producing tangible community benefits. Instead, the article proposes calibrated restrictions on local authority and greater use of development agreements, which avoid constitutional takings constraints while enabling mutually beneficial exchanges between communities and developers.

Administrative Law & Public Administration

Valuing Administrative Democracy—Brian D. Feinstein and Daniel E. Walters (Texas A&M and U. of Penn. Working Paper)
Drawing on experiments with over 5,800 participants, this research demonstrates that the public strongly values robust agency participation mechanisms, with the largest effects from structured deliberation and targeted outreach to underrepresented groups. Support for participatory tools remains strong even when they extend rulemaking by years, contradicting abundance movement claims that procedure creates unacceptable delays. The findings suggest reforms should preserve notice-and-comment, enhance representational balance, and deploy deliberative engagement rather than streamlining participation broadly.

Building Capacity in the Public Administration: Evidence from German Reunification—Nadja Dwenger and Anna Gumpert (Center for Economic Studies and Ifo Institute Working Paper)
The authors provides causal evidence on how secondments build administrative capacity, using East German tax administration after reunification. The authors find that secondments generated high short-term returns (1.5-3.1) and persistent quality improvements through tacit knowledge transfer. Three design features were especially effective: support from offices with strong administrative traditions, intermediate deployment durations, and combining task-specific with broad-based training measures.

Department of Government Efficiency: Federal workers’ views of the early stages—Geneviève Morin, Lauren B. Mullins & Étienne Charbonneau (Administrative Theory & Praxis)
Using 5,211 comments from federal workers surveyed in February and May 2025, this analysis examines how mass layoffs under the second Trump administration undermined state capacity through mechanisms including employee exit and chilling effects. The data reveals a progression from initial shock to structural collapse and disengagement. The findings document how politicization erodes public service morale, expertise, and operational capacity from the perspective of employees experiencing early Department of Government Efficiency changes.

Local Government Law

Building Social Equity Through Value Capture—Brian Connolly and Arthur C. Nelson (SSRN paper)
Legal barriers including tax and revenue limits, restrictions on development exactions, and prohibitions on legislative entrenchment prevent cities from capturing and reinvesting the increased land values and tax revenues that infrastructure projects generate. The article examines existing value-capture tools and proposes legal reforms like relaxing tax limits and creating special land-value taxing districts to enable cities to fund infrastructure while advancing social equity goals.

Framing Narratives About Policy: Character Race Impact on Welfare Support, Stereotypes, and NIMBYism—Josephina Quintana-Mori Struck (Masters Thesis)
An experiment with 541 participants tested whether narratives reduce resistance to welfare programs and affordable housing. Participants exposed to stories about individuals needing assistance showed higher welfare support, fewer negative stereotypes, and lower NIMBY attitudes than controls. Narratives featuring white characters produced significant effects, while those with Black characters did not differ from other conditions. The findings support using narrative as a policy advocacy tool to overcome opposition to government assistance.

Innovation Law & Policy

Government Research—Dan Traficonte (Yale Law Journal)
This article provides the first comprehensive innovation-law analysis of research conducted directly by the government, which accounts for nearly half the federal research budget but has been overlooked in legal scholarship. Using case studies of NIH and Lawrence Livermore, the author shows that government-performed research excels at high-risk, long-term projects requiring large scale and cross-disciplinary work, and argues for normative justifications including state capacity and equitable innovation gains.

Submit research: Know of recent or forthcoming scholarship on these topics? Send it to enablingacts@gmail.com or reply to this email.

This work is scattered across journals, working paper series, think tank reports and blogs. It is further siloed in fields as disparate as municipal zoning law and federal administrative law.

Enabling Acts will aggregate that varied scholarship into a newsletter on legal and policy research related to abundance. It will include writing on a wide range of topics including housing and land use, permitting reform, energy infrastructure, government contracting and procurement, immigration, intellectual property, and scientific innovation. If someone proposes legal reforms to enable building, growth, and innovation, then it belongs here.

The launch of this newsletter coincides with the Law of Abundance Conference at Yale in January 2025. My goal is to create a clearinghouse for this emerging field, similar to outlets like the Regulatory Review or the Law & Political Economy Blog. Over time, it may expand into hosting original content and symposia.

If you’re working on these topics, please subscribe and send me your recent or forthcoming papers at enablingacts@gmail.com or by responding to any post. I want to make this the go-to resource for anyone studying the intersection of law and abundance.