LAW4537: Public Policy, Regulation and the Law

40% Research Assignment Essay, 10% for the corresponding speech, and 50% for the Exam.

General Comments: As law students quickly find out, core units are pretty much all about black-letter law, with usually a bit of policy tacked on at the end, or representing itself in optional assignment form. Electives, on the other hand, usually go a bit broader and have time to cover some policy issues. In this unit, as the name suggests, it's nothing but policy. There are weekly readings from academic books (e.g. on regulatory theory), from publications by regulators and government bodies, and some opinion pieces, but no cases/legislation, aside from one admin law case in the 'Law and Regulation' topic. It's a fairly light unit in terms of readings (RG is only 7 pages) and a good one to do alongside some of the tougher intensive black-letter law subjects (corps, trusts etc.). Generally I liked the unit - I think it gives a lot of context to the way in which law is made in its exploration of questions such as 'how does regulation emerge?' and 'how well is the law achieving its aims?' In that sense it could be considered quite a broad, 'artsy' unit, which may not interest some, but I found it to be a good change-up.

Course outline: The unit starts off with an overview of the role of government in public administration, the functions of law, and the general role of regulation, before introducing the policy process/ policy cycle. Each week there is basically a step in the process: 'why do we regulate?' 'who should regulate whom, what and how?', 'evaluating regulatory options' etc. The second half of the course is a bit less structured, but has some interesting topics, such as 'is regulating a science or an art?' and 'explaining regulatory failure'. The latter part of the course had three guest lecturers, all of whom were pretty good. For example, Arie Freiberg (former dean), who specialises in regulatory theory, discussed law as a form of regulation (he has a bit of that old-school 'socratic method' style of teaching where he approaches people individually and asks them questions). In another guest lecture, an employee of the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) came in to discuss how the EPA regulates in terms of monitoring and compliance for various environmental issues.

Other than the three 1 hour guest lectures, the course was taken by Eric Windholz (also takes/has taken Corps & Admin). Generally his lecture style was very good. Most lectures only had 40-50 people (60 in the unit) so they ran more like seminars. Usually they started with some discussion of the relevant policy/regulatory issues in the news that week (e.g. the 'baby gammy' issue or the problem of Australians being recruited by ISIS or increased restrictions on smoking in outdoor dining etc. After that, theory (usually drawn from the readings, which was useful for your notes if you hadn't read them or couldn't quite get the gist of them) followed by case study examples and discussion. E.g. for a typical case study example, the way in which smoking is regulated through various methods of altering behaviour - Disincentives (high tax, advertising bans), Assisting (Quit-line), Persuasion (Advertising, publishing of studies), or more subtle 'Nudging' methods (Cigarettes being hidden out of sight at shops, designated smoking points being far away, plain packaging...). At times I thought there could have been more case examples to practically illustrate the theory, but the lectures were on the whole quite good. Eric knows his stuff well, has a good sense of humour, and the classes are fairly well-paced.

Assignment/Oral Presentation: The subject has a compulsory assignment in which (this semester, at least) you had to choose a policy problem, describe its regulatory space (i.e. key players/stakeholders), explain how the problem has been framed, explain the 'regulatory regime' and outline any changes you would make to improve its performance. This is actually quite a lot of stuff, and is hard to fit into 2000 words, so you're going to want to make sure you don't define your topic too broadly (e.g. 'asylum seekers' may be too general). Topics had to be approved by the lecturer (week 5) though anyway, which ensures you'll have something doable that fits the criteria. This assignment could actually be done as a group assignment (2-4) instead of individually, although most people did their own thing, I think because people had their own ideas on topics they were interested in, and because essays aren't very conducive to group work. There were about 40 different topics covered by the individual/groups all-up, which ranged over all sorts of issues - from animal exports to religion in schools to drone privacy to cyber-bullying etc. It was therefore a pretty open assignment, and although it required a fair bit of research (you have to do a fair bit of pre-reading on the issue before you can really form an opinion on regulating it) it was my favourite law assignment yet.

For the 10% assessment, there was a speech on your assignment topic - 10 minutes for groups and 5 minutes for individuals. The time-limit was enforced fairly strictly, and like in the assignment, it was difficult to cover everything. Basically you just had to give a brief outline of your topic, before focussing on 1 or 2 of the more interesting issues at play, and then answer any questions from the lecturer/students at the end. As there were so many groups/individuals, the speeches this semester were all done outside of class hours in weeks 10-11 of semester, so you could attend as many or as little as you liked, as long as you went to the 1hr block in which you were allocated (first come, first serve). I was lazy and only went to my block of a few people, but later regretted not hearing some of the others beforehand, as it would've been useful for structuring my own presentation, and there were many interesting topics being discussed.

Exam: The Exam was open book (c.f. 2012) with 6 essay style questions of which you had to pick four, and answer them in 2hrs, i.e. 30 mins per question. They were fairly broad questions (e.g. 'Is regulation an Art or a Science; or 'Is this exam regulation') covering all parts of the course, and generally required you to integrate different weeks in your discussion. As this isn't an exam with hypotheticals, you don't need a quick step-by-step method of answering a question, but you want to have your notes concisely written out, with the relevant authors names and knowing where the definitions (regulation, policy,) and concepts are so you can quickly structure an argument (the invigilators wouldn't allow any noting during the 10mins reading time, despite the paper saying there was noting time) and plan a response.

Overall, a good unit, and one I'd recommend to anyone interested in policy & regulation, or considering a career in policy-making/politics/government.

Eric Windholz

Yes, one, the 2012 Paper (no suggested answers)

4.5 out of 5

No

None, all the readings are uploaded to Moodle.

3hrs of lectures a week

S2 2014

TBA