Enforcement

Last updated
Enforcement is a stage in the proceedings of the SEC SEC-enforcement-flowchart.png
Enforcement is a stage in the proceedings of the SEC

Enforcement is the proper execution of the process of ensuring compliance with laws, regulations, rules, standards, and social norms. [1]

Contents

Governments attempt to effectuate successful implementation of policies by enforcing laws and regulations. [2] Enactment refers to application of a law or regulation, or carrying out of an executive or judicial order.

Theories of enforcement

Enforcement serves a number of functions; the enforcement of social norms can ensure conformity within insular communities, [3] the enforcements of laws can maximize social benefits and protect the public interest, [4] and enforcement may also serve the self-interest of the institutions that oversee enforcement. [5] Enforcement can be effectuated by both public institutions and private, non-governmental actors. [6] Enforcement is often accomplished through coercive means or by utilizing power disparities to constrain action. [7] Some scholars, such as Kate Andrias, have also argued that institutions enforce rules when deciding "when and how to apply" laws and regulations. [8]

Delegation of enforcement powers

Some governments will delegate enforcement powers to subordinate governmental entities or private parties. [9] In the United States, for example, the federal government and state governments often delegate a range of enforcement powers to administrative agencies. [10] There has been considerable debate in legal scholarship about the degree to which governments should oversee and supervise institutions to which enforcement powers have been delegated. [11]

Enforcement mechanisms

Enforcement mechanisms are a central part of various policies. Enforcement mechanisms co-determine natural resource governance outcomes [12] and pollution-related policies may require proper enforcement mechanisms (and often substitutes) to have a positive effect. [13] Enforcement may include law enforcement or combine incentive and disincentive-based policy instruments. [14] A meta-analysis of policy studies across multiple policy domains suggests enforcement mechanisms are the "only modifiable treaty design choice" with the potential to improve the mostly low effectiveness of international treaties. [15] [16]

In 2017, of 265 policies for ocean protection only 13% had specific enforcement mechanisms. [17]

Enforcement mechanisms are major component of governance structures. [18] It has been suggested that an effective global public health security convention would require a governing body (or bodies) to enforce the framework with appropriate enforcement mechanisms. [19] Similar approaches include the concept of "climate clubs" of polities for climate change mitigation. In such, "border adjustments [...] have to be introduced to target those states that do not participate [...] to avoid shifting effects with ecologically and economically detrimental consequences", with such "border adjustments or eco-tariffs" incentivizing other countries to adjust their standards and domestic production to join the climate club. [20] The Paris Agreement may lack enforcement mechanisms. [21]

On a national level, penalties for non-complying countries could include:

Benefits for countries could include:

Selective enforcement

Institutions may choose to exercise discretion, thereby enforcing laws, regulations, or norms only in selective circumstances. [22] Some scholars, such as Joseph H. Tieger, have suggested that selective enforcement is an inherent component of all enforcement regimes, because it is impossible for enforcers to observe and catch every violation. [23] Other scholars, such as Margaret H. Lemos and Alex Stein, have suggested that "strategic" enforcement is a cost-effective method of achieving social benefits; by focusing enforcement on the worst violators, other violators will "downscale" their activities so that they do not appear to be the worst offender. [24]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission</span> Government agency overseeing stock exchanges

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is an independent agency of the United States federal government, created in the aftermath of the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The primary purpose of the SEC is to enforce the law against market manipulation.

Regulation is the management of complex systems according to a set of rules and trends. In systems theory, these types of rules exist in various fields of biology and society, but the term has slightly different meanings according to context. For example:

Public policy is an institutionalized proposal or a decided set of elements like laws, regulations, guidelines, and actions to solve or address relevant and real-world problems, guided by a conception and often implemented by programs. These policies govern and include various aspects of life such as education, health care, employment, finance, economics, transportation, and all over elements of society. The implementation of public policy is known as public administration. Public policy can be considered the sum of a government's direct and indirect activities and has been conceptualized in a variety of ways.

Policy is a deliberate system of guidelines to guide decisions and achieve rational outcomes. A policy is a statement of intent and is implemented as a procedure or protocol. Policies are generally adopted by a governance body within an organization. Policies can assist in both subjective and objective decision making. Policies used in subjective decision-making usually assist senior management with decisions that must be based on the relative merits of a number of factors, and as a result, are often hard to test objectively, e.g. work–life balance policy. Moreover, governments and other institutions have policies in the form of laws, regulations, procedures, administrative actions, incentives and voluntary practices. Frequently, resource allocations mirror policy decisions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control</span> Treaty adopted by the 56th World Health Assembly

The World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control is a treaty adopted by the 56th World Health Assembly held in Geneva, Switzerland on 21 May 2003. It became the first World Health Organization treaty adopted under article 19 of the WHO constitution. The treaty came into force on 27 February 2005. It had been signed by 168 countries and is legally binding in 182 ratifying countries. There are currently 14 United Nations member states that are non-parties to the treaty.

Governance is the overall complex system or framework of processes, functions, structures, rules, laws and norms borne out of the relationships, interactions, power dynamics and communication within an organized group of individuals which not only sets the boundaries of acceptable conduct and practices of different actors of the group and controls their decision-making processes through the creation and enforcement of rules and guidelines, but also manages, allocates and mobilizes relevant resources and capacities of different members and sets the overall direction of the group in order to effectively address its specific collective needs, problems and challenges. The concept of governance can be applied to social, political or economic entities such as a state and its government, a governed territory, a society, a community, a social group, a formal or informal organization, a corporation, a non-governmental organization, a non-profit organization, a project team, a market, a network or even the global stage. Governance can also pertain to a specific sector of activities such as land, environment, health, internet, security, etc. The degree of formality in governance depends on the internal rules of a given entity and its external interactions with similar entities. As such, governance may take many forms, driven by many different motivations and with many different results.

The UNECE Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters, usually known as the Aarhus Convention, was signed on 25 June 1998 in the Danish city of Aarhus. It entered into force on 30 October 2001. As of March 2014, it had 47 parties—46 states and the European Union. All of the ratifying states are in Europe and Central Asia. The EU has begun applying Aarhus-type principles in its legislation, notably the Water Framework Directive. Liechtenstein and Monaco have signed the convention but have not ratified it.

United States federal administrative law encompasses statutes, rules, judicial precedents, and executive orders, that together form administrative laws that define the extent of powers and responsibilities held by administrative agencies of the United States government, including executive departments and independent agencies. Because Congress, the president, and the federal courts have limited resources to address all issues, specialized powers are often delegated to a board, commission, office, or other agency. These administrative agencies oversee and monitor activities in complex areas, such as commercial aviation, medical device manufacturing, and securities markets.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Forestry law</span> Field of law

Forestry laws govern activities in designated forest lands, most commonly with respect to forest management and timber harvesting. Forestry laws generally adopt management policies for public forest resources, such as multiple use and sustained yield. Forest management is split between private and public management, with public forests being sovereign property of the State. Forestry laws are now considered an international affair.

A regulatory agency or independent agency is a government authority that is responsible for exercising autonomous dominion over some area of human activity in a licensing and regulating capacity.

In economics, a common-pool resource (CPR) is a type of good consisting of a natural or human-made resource system, whose size or characteristics makes it costly, but not impossible, to exclude potential beneficiaries from obtaining benefits from its use. Unlike pure public goods, common pool resources face problems of congestion or overuse, because they are subtractable. A common-pool resource typically consists of a core resource, which defines the stock variable, while providing a limited quantity of extractable fringe units, which defines the flow variable. While the core resource is to be protected or nurtured in order to allow for its continuous exploitation, the fringe units can be harvested or consumed.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Secretariat of the Interior</span> Executive department of the Mexican government

The Mexican Secretariat of the Interior is the public department concerned with the country's domestic affairs, the presenting of the president's bills to Congress, their publication in the Official Journal of the Federation, and certain issues of national security. The country's principal intelligence agency, CISEN, is directly answerable to the Secretary of the Interior. The Secretary is a member of the president's Cabinet and is, given the constitutional implications of the post, the most important cabinet member. Additionally, in case of both temporary and absolute absences of the president, the Secretary of the Interior assumes the president's executive powers provisionally. The Office is practically equivalent to Ministries of the Interior in most other countries and is occasionally translated to English as Ministry, Secretariat or Department of the Interior.

Dr. John T. Scholz is the Francis Eppes Distinguished Professor of Political Science and a Courtesy Professor of Law at Florida State University. As the first political scientist to formulate the "regulation game," which was later extended in influential work on responsive regulation by John Braithwaite and Ian Ayres. Scholz is widely regarded as one of the leading political scientists addressing regulatory enforcement.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ryan Goodman</span> Lawyer

Ryan Goodman is an American legal scholar who is the Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Professor of Law at NYU School of Law and is the founding co-editor-in-chief of its website Just Security, which focuses on U.S. national security law and policy. Goodman joined the NYU faculty in 2009.

Climate governance is the diplomacy, mechanisms and response measures "aimed at steering social systems towards preventing, mitigating or adapting to the risks posed by climate change". A definitive interpretation is complicated by the wide range of political and social science traditions that are engaged in conceiving and analysing climate governance at different levels and across different arenas. In academia, climate governance has become the concern of geographers, anthropologists, economists and business studies scholars.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Administrative Procedure Act</span> US federal statute

The Administrative Procedure Act (APA), Pub. L.Tooltip Public Law  79–404, 60 Stat. 237, enacted June 11, 1946, is the United States federal statute that governs the way in which administrative agencies of the federal government of the United States may propose and establish regulations, and it grants U.S. federal courts oversight over all agency actions. According to Hickman & Pierce, it is one of the most important pieces of United States administrative law, and serves as a sort of "constitution" for U.S. administrative law.

There are benefits to leaving environmental regulation both to the federal government to the states.For example, wildlife conservation is much more of a concern for Alaska than for New York. New York, however, has much bigger air and light pollution issues than Alaska.

Command and Control (CAC) regulation finds common usage in academic literature and beyond. The relationship between CAC and environmental policy is considered in this article, an area that demonstrates the application of this type of regulation. However, CAC is not limited to the environmental sector and encompasses a variety of different fields.

Primary legislation and secondary legislation are two forms of law, created respectively by the legislative and executive branches of governments in representative democracies. Primary legislation generally consists of statutes, also known as 'acts', that set out broad principles and rules, but may delegate specific authority to an executive branch to make more specific laws under the aegis of the principal act. The executive branch can then issue secondary legislation, creating legally enforceable regulations and the procedures for implementing them.

The administrative state is a term used to describe the power that some government agencies have to write, judge, and enforce their own laws. Since it pertains to the structure and function of government, it is a frequent topic in political science, constitutional law, and public administration.

References

The citations in this article are written in Bluebook style. Please see the talk page for more information.

  1. See Black's Law Dictionary, Enforcement (2d ed. 1910).
  2. Kate Andrias, The President's Enforcement Power Archived 2016-11-04 at the Wayback Machine , 88 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 1031, 1034 (2013); Avlana Eisenberg, Expressive Enforcement , 61 UCLA L. Rev. 858, 901 (2014) (discussing "gaps" between the enactment and enforcement of legislation).
  3. Amalia D. Kessler, Enforcing Virtue: Social Norms and Self-Interest in an Eighteenth-Century Merchant Court, 22 L. & Hist. Rev. 71 (2011).
  4. John T. Scholz, Voluntary Compliance and Regulatory Enforcement, 6 L. & Pol'y 385-88 (1984); see also Margaret H. Lemos, State Enforcement of Federal Law , 86 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 698, 701 (2011) ("The public interest promoted by state enforcement is the interest of the state and its citizens, while federal enforcement purports to serve the broader national interest.").
  5. Margaret H. Lemos and Max Minzner, For-Profit Public Enforcement , 127 Harv. L. Rev. 853, 886 (2014).
  6. Zachary D. Clopton, Redundant Public-Private Enforcement , 69 Vand. L. Rev. 285, 288 (2016); Michael Selmi, Public vs. Private Enforcement of Civil Rights: The Case of Housing and Employment, 45 UCLA L. Rev. 1401, 1456 (1998).
  7. See Scott A. Anderson, The Enforcement Approach to Coercion , 5 J. of Ethics &Soc. Phil. 1 (2010).
  8. Kate Andrias, The President's Enforcement Power Archived 2016-11-04 at the Wayback Machine , 88 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 1031, 1040 (2013) (comparing "enforcement" with "rulemaking").
  9. Kurt T. Lash, The Sum of All Delegated Power: A Response to Richard Primus, The Limits of Enumeration, 124 Yale L. J. F. 180, 184 (2014) (discussing enforcement powers in federalist systems of government); John F. Manning, The Means of Constitutional Power , 128 Harv. L. Rev. 1, 44 (2014) (citing specific examples of delegation of enforcement powers to agencies in the United States); Kate Andrias, The President's Enforcement Power Archived 2016-11-04 at the Wayback Machine , 88 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 1031, 1040 (2013) (noting that enforcement powers can be delegated to "private parties").
  10. Robert F. Durant, The Oxford Handbook of American Bureaucracy 379 (2010) (discussing agencies' "compliance and enforcement" powers).
  11. Compare, e.g., Peter H. Aranson, Ernest Gellhorn, and Glen O. Robinson, Theory of Legislative Delegation , 68 Cornell L. Rev. 1 (1982) with Gillian E. Metzger, The Constitutional Duty To Supervise , 124 Yale L. J. 124 (2015).
  12. Yeboah-Assiamah, Emmanuel; Muller, Kobus; Domfeh, Kwame Ameyaw (1 January 2017). "Institutional assessment in natural resource governance: A conceptual overview". Forest Policy and Economics. 74: 1–12. doi:10.1016/j.forpol.2016.10.006. ISSN   1389-9341.
  13. Dhanshyam, M.; Srivastava, Samir K. (May 2021). "Effective policy mix for plastic waste mitigation in India using System Dynamics". Resources, Conservation and Recycling. 168: 105455. doi:10.1016/j.resconrec.2021.105455. ISSN   0921-3449. S2CID   233569368.
  14. Börner, J.; Wunder, S.; Wertz-Kanounnikoff, S.; Hyman, G.; Nascimento, N. (1 November 2014). "Forest law enforcement in the Brazilian Amazon: Costs and income effects". Global Environmental Change. 29: 294–305. doi:10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2014.04.021. ISSN   0959-3780.
  15. "Most international treaties are ineffective, Canadian study finds". CTVNews. 3 August 2022. Archived from the original on 15 September 2022. Retrieved 15 September 2022.
  16. Hoffman, Steven J.; Baral, Prativa; Rogers Van Katwyk, Susan; Sritharan, Lathika; Hughsam, Matthew; Randhawa, Harkanwal; Lin, Gigi; Campbell, Sophie; Campus, Brooke; Dantas, Maria; Foroughian, Neda; Groux, Gaëlle; Gunn, Elliot; Guyatt, Gordon; Habibi, Roojin; Karabit, Mina; Karir, Aneesh; Kruja, Krista; Lavis, John N.; Lee, Olivia; Li, Binxi; Nagi, Ranjana; Naicker, Kiyuri; Røttingen, John-Arne; Sahar, Nicola; Srivastava, Archita; Tejpar, Ali; Tran, Maxwell; Zhang, Yu-qing; Zhou, Qi; Poirier, Mathieu J. P. (9 August 2022). "International treaties have mostly failed to produce their intended effects". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 119 (32): e2122854119. Bibcode:2022PNAS..11922854H. doi:10.1073/pnas.2122854119. ISSN   0027-8424. PMC   9372541 . PMID   35914153.
  17. Al-Abdulrazzak, Dalal; Galland, Grantly R.; McClenachan, Loren; Hocevar, John (1 December 2017). "Opportunities for improving global marine conservation through multilateral treaties". Marine Policy. 86: 247–252. Bibcode:2017MarPo..86..247A. doi:10.1016/j.marpol.2017.09.036. ISSN   0308-597X.
  18. Aliberti, Marco; Krasner, Stephen D. (2016). "Governance in Space". Yearbook on Space Policy 2014. Springer. pp. 143–166. doi:10.1007/978-3-7091-1899-3_3. ISBN   978-3-7091-1898-6.{{cite book}}: |journal= ignored (help)
  19. 1 2 3 Duff, Johnathan H; Liu, Anicca; Saavedra, Jorge; Batycki, Jacob N; Morancy, Kendra; Stocking, Barbara; Gostin, Lawrence O; Galea, Sandro; Bertozzi, Stefano; Zuniga, Jose M; Alberto-Banatin, Carmencita; Dansua, Akua Sena; del Rio, Carlos; Kulzhanov, Maksut; Lee, Kelley; Scaglia, Gisela; Shahpar, Cyrus; Ullmann, Andrew J; Hoffman, Steven J; Weinstein, Michael; Szapocznik, José (1 June 2021). "A global public health convention for the 21st century". The Lancet Public Health. 6 (6): e428–e433. doi:10.1016/S2468-2667(21)00070-0. ISSN   2468-2667. PMC   8099565 . PMID   33964227.
  20. 1 2 Stubenrauch, Jessica; Garske, Beatrice; Ekardt, Felix; Hagemann, Katharina (January 2022). "European Forest Governance: Status Quo and Optimising Options with Regard to the Paris Climate Target". Sustainability. 14 (7): 4365. doi: 10.3390/su14074365 . ISSN   2071-1050.
  21. King, Lewis C.; van den Bergh, Jeroen C. J. M. (17 April 2021). "Potential carbon leakage under the Paris Agreement". Climatic Change. 165 (3): 52. Bibcode:2021ClCh..165...52K. doi:10.1007/s10584-021-03082-4. hdl: 1871.1/63469f15-e0ce-4899-9b7b-b95b3fe88177 . ISSN   1573-1480. S2CID   233279743.
  22. See Kenneth Culp Davis, Dialogue on Police Rulemaking: Police Rulemaking on Selective Enforcement: A Reply, 125 U. Penn. L. Rev. 1167 (1977).
  23. Joseph H. Tieger, Police Discretion and Discriminatory Enforcement , 1971 Duke L. J. 717, 743 (1971) ("The exigencies of police work are such that even the most elaborate set of statutory or regulatory directives could not succeed in removing all occasion for the exercise of judgment.").
  24. Margaret H. Lemos and Alex Stein, Strategic Enforcement , 95 Minn. L. Rev. 9, 9-10 (2010).