The Art of Policy Advocacy

I was delighted to learn that Cato has put up on the Web all the past issues of Regulaton, starting back in 1977 when it was published by the American Enterprise Institute.

For all that time, Regulation has been a source of thoughtful analysis of government policy and programs, their successes and failings, and a consistent defender of markets and liberty. This archive is a mine of gold on a topics ranging from environmental policy to the financial crisis.

From a personal viewpoint, I am happy to see available an article I wrote in 1982 entitled How to Convince an Agency: A Handbook for Policy Advocates. It analyzes the differences between legal advocacy and policy advocacy, noting that:

A legal argument is not the same thing as a policy argument, though, and as advocates become increasingly concerned with the policy arguments, a problem arises: the principles of legal advocacy are only partially applicable to policy advocacy, and in places where they are not applicable they can be misleading and downright harmful. Even so, when a problem shifts to the policy arena there is a lawyers' reflex that "advocacy is advocacy"-and this invites wholesale importation of litigation principles into that arena.

The article was well-reviewed, as they say, and was at various times used in classes at Yale Law School and at Carnegie Mellon Management School. There are a few things I would change, but it holds up pretty well. What hasn't changed is the millions of dollars that people spend making the wrong types of arguments.

I was in great company, too -- on the cover with Richard Epstein and Timothy Muris: