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Event Governance Overcriminalization

Overregulation and the States

02
Wednesday December 2015

Speakers

Scott Pruitt Attorney General, Oklahoma
James R. Copland Senior Fellow | Director, Legal Policy @JamesRCopland

Overregulation is widely considered to be a pervasive problem in the United States. Since his 2010 election as Oklahoma’s attorney general, few have done more than Scott Pruitt to stem the tide of federal overreach.

In 2012, Pruitt filed the first lawsuit challenging the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Oklahoma’s crusading attorney general is a leading opponent of the Environmental Protection Agency’s activist agenda, too: in June 2015, he filed suit challenging the EPA’s effort to redefine the “waters of the United States” under the Clean Water Act.

On principle, Pruitt has also refused to follow other state attorney generals in aggressive, state-sponsored litigation: in 2012, for instance, rather than join a national settlement against five of America’s largest mortgage servicers for alleged fraud—a settlement that Pruitt called an “attempt to create new housing policy”—Oklahoma forged its own settlement.

MI's senior fellow and legal policy director James Copland was joined by Scott Pruitt, one of America’s most courageous opponents of federal overreach to discuss federalism, regulation, and overcriminalization.

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