Double-blind studies have been the gold standard in drug and vaccine development for decades. But should they be? Is the current regulatory regime saving or costing lives? Is there a way in which free market competition might improve upon the FDA’s tight-fisted control of the pharmaceutical development process? Join us for this timely conversation with law professor Richard Epstein on drug and vaccine development, the limits of bureaucratic regulation, and the capacity of markets to share knowledge, control risk, and spur life-saving innovation.
Speakers
Richard A. Epstein is a Manhattan Institute visiting scholar and one of America’s most prolific legal thinkers. He is also the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law at New York University Law School, a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Epstein researches and writes on a broad range of constitutional, economic, historical, and philosophical subjects, and has taught administrative law, antitrust law, communications law, constitutional law, corporation criminal law, employment discrimination law, environmental law, food and drug law, health law, labor law, Roman law, real estate development and finance, and individual and corporate taxation. He is the 2011 recipient of the Bradley Prize for outstanding achievement, the author of numerous books, including The Dubious Morality of Modern Administrative Law, written originally as a report for the Manhattan Institute. He received a BA degree in philosophy summa cum laude from Columbia in 1964; a BA degree in law with first-class honors from Oxford University in 1966; and an LLB degree cum laude, from the Yale Law School in 1968. He joined the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School in 1972.
James R. Copland is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and director of Legal Policy. His latest book, The Unelected: How an Unaccountable Elite is Governing America (Encounter Books), was published in September 2020. He has testified before Congress as well as state and municipal legislatures; and has authored many policy briefs, book chapters, articles and opinion pieces in a variety of publications, including the Harvard Business Law Review and Yale Journal on Regulation, the Wall Street Journal, National Law Journal, and USA Today. Prior to joining MI, Copland was a management consultant with McKinsey and Company in New York. Earlier, he was a law clerk for Ralph K. Winter on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Copland has been a director of two privately held manufacturing companies since 1997 and has served on many public and nonprofit boards. He holds a J.D. and an M.B.A. from Yale, where he was an Olin Fellow in Law and Economics; an M.Sc. in the politics of the world economy from the London School of Economics; and a B.A. in economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was a Morehead Scholar.