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Pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) save Americans billions of dollars each year by lowering both the prices that consumers pay for prescription drugs and the prices that health plans pay for drug coverage. As I explain in this Article, however, new regulatory developments in some states threaten to undercut competition in the PBM industry and disrupt the cost-savings PBMs currently generate. The regulatory scheme that was adopted by Mississippi in 2011, and that is currently under legislative consideration in several other states, shifts regulatory control of PBMs from the neutral Insurance Commissions to the states' Boards of Pharmacy. The fundamental problem with this structure is that the Boards of Pharmacy are made up of pharmacists, the direct market adversaries of PBMs. In several different areas of the prescription drug market, PBMs and pharmacists are in direct competition over profits. Thus, the pharmacist-controlled Boards of Pharmacy have both the incentive and the opportunity to exert their regulatory authority in ways that benefit pharmacies at the expense of PBMs; reductions in PBMs' profits generally lead to more profits for pharmacists. Indeed, I describe two important regulatory changes that the Board has enacted in its first two years that harm PBMs and benefit pharmacies. The power to regulate a market adversary gives pharmacists unprecedented power and will undercut competition in the prescription drug market. I explain how this regulatory scheme will not only hurt the PBM industry, but will also increase the prices that consumers and third parties pay for prescription drugs.

For decades, advocates of tort reform have argued that expansive products liability stifles economic activity by imposing excessive and unpredictable liability costs on businesses. Although politicians aspiring to create jobs, attract businesses, and improve the economy have relied on this argument to enact hundreds of reforms, it has largely gone empirically untested. No longer. Using the most comprehensive dataset to date on products liability reforms and economic activity, I find that many reforms that restrict the scope of products liability improve economic conditions. Specifically, these reforms increase the number of businesses, employment, and production in the industries that face most of the products liability claims: the manufacturing, retail, distribution, wholesale, and insurance industries. However, several other popular reforms have either a weak effect or no effect on economic activity. My results have important implications for recently enacted reforms and proposed legislation: while many of these reforms will improve economic conditions as lawmakers hope, others will have no effect. In the current economy, as business groups intensify their demands for tort reform, my findings provide critical evidence for courts and legislatures that are reassessing the appropriate scope of products liability.

"The idea that wealthy people use their money to influence things, including politics, law, and media will surprise very few people. However, as Michael S. Kang and Joanna Shepherd argue in this readable and rich study of the state judiciary, the effect of money on judicial outcomes should disturb and anger everyone. In the current system that elects state judges, the rich and powerful can spend money to elect and re-elect judges who decide cases the way they want. Free to Judge is about how and why money increasingly affects the dispensation of justice in our legal system, and what can be done to stop it. One of the barriers to action in the past has been an inability to prove that campaign donations influence state judicial decision-making. In this book, Kang and Shepherd answer that challenge for the first time, with a rigorous empirical study of campaign finance and judicial decision-making data. Pairing this with interviews of past and present judges, they create a compelling and persuasive account of people like Marsha Ternus, the first Iowa state supreme court justice to be voted out of office after an intense her and her decision in a same-sex marriage case. The threat of such an outcome, and the desire to win reelection, results in judges demonstrably leaning towards the interests and preferences of their campaign donors across all cases. Free to Judge is thus able to identify the pieces of our current system that invite bias, such as judicial reelection, and what reforms should focus on. This thoughtful and compellingly written book will be required reading for anybody who cares about creating a more just legal system"--