January 19, 2026

New Legal Research on Building Abundance

Environmental & Energy Law

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.

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