Benefit-Cost Analysis and the Law

SBCA Professional Development Workshop
November 18 & 21, 2025 | 11:00 am-2:00 pm ET

The law’s relationship to benefit-cost analysis in regulations has become increasingly complicated in recent years. While originating statutes, executive orders, and administrative law precedent have governed agency use of benefit-cost analysis, recent Supreme Court decisions have brought into question agency authority to interpret ambiguities in statutes. With Loper-Bright overruling the Chevron doctrine, agencies must understand how benefit-cost analysis figures into judicial review of regulations. Similarly, with the resurrection of the major questions doctrine, benefit-costs analyses indicating broad regulatory application can make a regulation more vulnerable to judicial review. Understanding the role of benefit-cost analysis within the regulatory process--from the originating statute, to guiding executive orders, to the increasing importance of the major questions doctrine in judicial review--is both increasingly important and increasingly difficult.

This workshop brings together leading scholars working on regulatory analysis and risk valuation, administrative law, and constitutional law to discuss the dynamic topic of benefit-cost analysis and the law. Upon completion of the workshop, participants will have a comprehensive understanding of how benefit-cost analysis fits within the regulatory process, the current challenges in performing these analyses, and how courts are likely to treat such analyses in a post-Loper Bright world.

Instructors

Susan Dudley is the Distinguished Professor of Practice in the Trachtenberg School of Public Policy & Public Administration at George Washington University. Dudley is a past president of the Society for Benefit-Cost Analysis, a senior fellow with the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS), and a board member of the National Federation of Independent Businesses Legal Center and Economists Incorporated. Dudley has an extensive background in government, serving as the Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), and a staff economist at OIRA, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. She also served as a consultant at Economists. 

 

 

Caroline Cecot is a Professor of Law at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University. She holds both a JD and a PhD in Law and Economics from Vanderbilt University. Her research focuses on administrative law, environmental and energy law, and the implementation of cost-benefit analyses, and has been published in both leading law reviews and peer reviewed journals. Cecot is the current president of the Society for Benefit-Cost Analysis. She has served on the U.S. Environmental Protectional Agency Science Advisory Board’s Economic Guidelines Review Panel and is currently an affiliated scholar at the Atlantic Council, the C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State, the Institute for Policy Integrity, and the Technology Policy Institute. 

 

Cary Coglianese is the Edward B. Shils Professor of Law, Professor of Political Science, and the Director of the Penn Program on Regulation at the University of Pennsylvania. An author of over 300 articles, book chapters, reports, and essays, Coglianese’s research focuses on administrative law and regulatory processes, exploring the role of public participation, technology, and business-government relations in policymaking. His work provides empirical evaluation of alternative regulatory processes, analyses of climate change and artificial intelligence policy, and discussion of the role of exemptions in regulatory law. Coglianese is a senior Fellow of the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS), the chair and co-chair of several committees of the ABA’s Section on Administrative Law and Regulatory Policy, and an elected member of the American Law Institute and the National Academy of Public Administration. He served on the independent peer review panel   providing feedback to the Office of Management and Budget on the proposed Circular A-4 revisions.

 

W. Kip Viscusi is Vanderbilt University’s first University Distinguished Professor, with tenured positions in the Department of Economics, the Owen Graduate School of Management, and the Law School. Viscusi’s work on the valuation of health and safety risks, particularly the value of a statistical life (VSL), has been used throughout the federal government, and Viscusi is the third most frequently cited US law professor. Viscusi served as the deputy director of the Council of Wage and Price Stability in the Carter administration and has served on various panels of the Science Advisory Board of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for over a decade. He is a former president of the Society for Benefit-Cost Analysis.

 

 

Jonathan B. Wiener is the William R. Perkins Distinguished Professor of Law, Professor of Environmental Policy, and Professor of Public Policy at Duke University. His research focuses on the administrative law, environmental policy, and the regulation of risk. Wiener helped to draft Executive Order 12866, helped negotiate the Framework Convention on Climate Change, and attended the Rio Earth Summit. He previously served at the White House Council of Economic Advisers, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and the US Department of Justice, and clerked for Judge (now U.S. Supreme Court Justice) Stephen G. Breyer. Wiener is a past president of the Society for Risk Analysis, a University Fellow Resources for the Future, a Public Member of the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS), and a former SBCA board member.

 

Elissa Philip Gentry is the Kevin Wood and Mary Jo Peed Professor at Florida State University College of Law, a professor by courtesy in the FSU Department of Economics, and an Associate Member at the Toulouse School of Economics. She holds a J.D. and a Ph.D. in Law and Economics from Vanderbilt University. Gentry’s research lies at the intersection of health law, risk and uncertainty, pharmaceutical regulation, and economics. Her work focuses on risk regulation in drugs and medical devices, as well as heterogeneity in the value of a statistical life (VSL) and a statistical injury (VSI).