 So first off, welcome. Welcome to everybody. We have a great group of speakers and a great group of attendees. We also have a very busy agenda, so I'm going to be a taskmaster to try and keep us on track so we get to hear from everybody that we've invited here to speak, give you time to grab coffee and lunch, et cetera. So first off, I'd like to introduce to you the president of Roger Williams University, Ron Champaign. Thank you very much. And I want to, on behalf of Roger Williams University, welcome you to this wonderful, warm, sunny day. Now that's wishful thinking. I want to assure you that the rest of your conference is going to deal with facts. Great philosopher once said, the only difference between civilization and catastrophe is education. And there's a lot of truth to that. When human beings begin to deal with force, with energy, you had better know what you're doing. My field is mathematics and nuclear physics, so I can talk a little bit about that, but we're here talking about issues about the sea, issues about pollution. But nuclear energy has entered our vocabulary once again, hasn't it? But it's typical of what I'm saying that whenever human beings begin to deal with force, you better know what you're doing. Otherwise, there is going to be a catastrophe. And there's where education comes in. And that's what we are about here at Roger Williams University. That includes such things even as law enforcement. Yesterday, the New England Association of Police Chiefs, we are the center, in fact the only center in the United States like this. And I talked with them. And it's one thing to pass laws. But if you don't enforce them, it's rather futile. And they are the law enforcement. But that's a force. And that's a force that if you don't use it intelligently, can be extremely volatile, extremely destructive. I think they got my point. And so when we're dealing with energy, when we're dealing with petroleum, when we're dealing with the ocean, we had better know what we're talking about. And that's why Roger Williams is so proud to have a conference like this, where we bring together the experts, people from the legal profession, people from the scientific arena, to share knowledge with us. Because frankly, as we crank up the energy scale, we cannot afford to be making too many mistakes because it can do us in. And therein lies that wonderful understanding between civilization and destruction is education. So I welcome you here on behalf of Roger Williams University. It's going to be a great conference. You're inside. Don't worry about outside. We'll take care of you in here and keep you warm and dry. And it really does myself very proud to be able to welcome you here and engage this university in its great mission of education. Thank you so much. Thank you, Dr. Shea Payne. I'm David Logan of the Dean of the Law School here. And a quick little bit of legislative history, if you will. Couple strands came together. One was last April, Susan Faraday and I started changing emails and said, this sounds like a topic that could have the mix of law and public policy and marine affairs that our Marine Affairs Institute was built to respond to. And Susan reminded me we had a major program on fisheries already planned for the fall. And that we planned these programs. It's a terrific but small staff every other year to, among other things, respect the fact that these programs are not easy to put together. But about that time, I got a phone call from Senator Sheldon Whitehouse. And Senator Whitehouse, one of the things about being the dean of the only law school in a state, is you get to know that your lawyer senator is pretty well. And those of you who know Sheldon Whitehouse, though, he has a really eclectic mind. And he's so interested in so many things. And his wife happens to be a PhD marine biologist. And so we got into a conversation about something the academics called agency capture. And he says he wants to think about legislation to try and respond to that. So between Susan and Sheldon Whitehouse, I sort of agreed this was something we had to get going on. And we decided to not push to get it done in the fall in part to keep Susan and her staff from jumping off the Mount Hope Bridge. So we started to shoot for the one-year anniversary. So that's sort of where this all came from, an interest in the intersection of law and policy, and a Marine Affairs Institute, which Susan will tell you more about in a minute or two, that seemed to be the perfect convening body for a program dealing with this. And you know the statistics. It's 4.9 million gallons of oil and 1.8 million gallons of dispersants dumped into a body of water and raising all sorts of complicated questions. How did it happen? How do we evaluate what happened? How do we have both political and legal systems respond to what happened? And of course, at the end of the day, how can we move to make sure this doesn't happen again? And so you'll see four different panels that interlock around those three questions today. And I have to say it's a distinguished collection of people that we've brought here. Many of them have been leading commentators on the BPRS bill and related issues. And so I'm opening yesterday's Science Times. And there's Christopher Reddy, senior scientist at Woods Hole being quoted. So it's not a shabby collection of people we pull to get here and have traveled, in some cases, some great distance and all cases through some crappy weather. So thanks so much. I'm going to be involved in a panel after lunch. Welcome on behalf of the law school. And now I'll give you our terrific director of the Manifolds Institute, Susan Faraday. And I'll lower the microphone too. I'm tall, but I'm not that tall. So I'm going to get some housekeeping things out of the way first. So if you haven't noticed, we will try to keep the food and beverages coming all day long. You hopefully know where that is. Bathrooms are sort of across the hall over that way. There is reasonably good wireless access here, depending on your device. But I would ask that you turn your device to something that won't disturb the proceedings. I know we're all wired in all the time. I personally hate it, but we want to, as much as possible, focus on the folks that we have here speaking. So the way the day is going to go is we have video recorded comments from Senator Whitehouse and Senator Reid. They both sent their regrets. They couldn't be here today. I guess there's a couple of pesky things going on down in Washington. Fortunately, they kept the government from shutting down so our speaker from NOAA could actually attend. So that's good. So it was interesting. We had some interesting email exchanges on Friday. But buddies here, we're all here. Life's good. So we'll have some video recorded remarks from them. As Dean Logan mentioned, we're going in an order that hopefully makes sense. The challenge and opportunity of this conference is that we're covering just really an array of topics. The reason for that and the reason, especially, all you students are here and you professionals, we know this. These issues are getting more and more complicated and multidisciplinary all the time. So that's why we have this dizzying array of lawyers and scientists and economics people and media people. How does that make sense? Because this is what these issues require now. This is what we're dedicated to training our students for here at the Roger Williams University School of Law in Marine Affairs is to be prepared for that next generation of complicated issues that they're going to be confronting. Just a brief little commercial about what we do here. We offer a joint degree program with the University of Rhode Island in their Master's in Marine Affairs program. We have a diverse curriculum in both natural resources, marine resources, and maritime and admiralty law. We also offer a program through our partners at Rhode Island Sea Grant, where students can work as law fellows, which is providing research for outside organizations that have a legal question that they'd like to research. Want any more information about any of that? You can ask me. You can ask my staff attorney Julia Wyman over there. Ask Charlotte, who's running the show out at the table. We're happy to talk about our program. So looking around the room and having put this program together, I'm astounded really by the level of talent that we have here and also astounded by the diverse range of attendees that we have. So I want to give a special shout out to a program that's very near and dear to my heart, and that's the Sea Education Association. It's an undergraduate institution across the way in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, that for how many years now? 20, 40, 40. I should know that. I'm an alum. I did it. But for 40 years has been taking undergraduate students out on tall ships, teaching them about science, teaching about the ocean, teaching about how to navigate a ship, and then turning them out into the world. And a number of those students, myself included, and Julia, and a number of people in this room and in this profession, have at some point intersected with SEA. So coincidentally, when we were planning this program, I found out they were doing a special semester-long program on ocean and energy right now. The students are in Woods Hole on campus right now before they're getting ready to go on a trip down to the Gulf of Mexico in two weeks, three weeks? Three weeks. So we have a really prime group of undergraduates here getting thrown into a pretty dense program, but welcome and welcome faculty. The other great event, thing about events like this is the opportunity for networking. And those of us that go to events like this, we know this, and we chat at coffee. But I'm really encouraging all of you students here, undergraduate, graduate, law school, take advantage of the rich array of people that you have here, people that can tell you what it's like to be in law school, people that can tell you what their job is like in law or policy or in the government, and really utilize this. So I'm saying that because I'm not gonna allow you any time for networking because of the schedule, but do the best you can. So we're gonna proceed next with our comments from Senator Whitehouse. Thank you for the opportunity to speak at this important symposium on the legal legacy of the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe. Those of us from the ocean state have experienced firsthand the terrible havoc that oil spills can wreak on fragile ecosystems. The ocean is part of our Rhode Island identity. I've been working hard in Congress to create a national endowment for the oceans, to reauthorize the national estuary program, and to ensure that the true cost of taking chances with safety falls on those oil companies who take those chances. So in the context of the Gulf oil spill, today I'd like to speak about the topic of regulatory capture. Over the last 50 years, Congress has tasked an alphabet soup of regulatory agencies to administer our laws through rulemaking, adjudication, and enforcement. Protecting the proper functioning of these regulatory agencies has led me to the topic of regulatory capture. As you likely all know, this concept of regulatory capture is well-established in regulatory and economic theory. In 1913, Woodrow Wilson wrote this, if the government is to tell big businessmen how to run their business, then don't you see that big businessmen must capture the government in order not to be restrained too much by it. The first dean of the Woodrow Wilson School, Marver Bernstein, wrote that a regulatory commission will tend over time to become more concerned with the general health of the industry and try to prevent changes which will adversely affect the industry. This, he said, is a problem of ethics and morality, as well as administrative method. He called it a blow to democratic government and responsible political institutions. And ultimately, he said it leads to surrender. I quote, the commission finally becomes a captive of the regulated groups. Regulatory capture has been the subject of work by Nobel laureate George Stigler in his article, The Theory of Economic Regulation. And those of you who are lucky enough to be students or teachers of administrative law will know how well-established the doctrine of regulatory capture or agency capture is in that field. At bottom, regulatory capture is a threat to democratic government. We the people pass laws through a democratic and open process. Powerful interests then seek to capture the regulatory agencies that enforce those laws so that they can avoid their intended effect, turning laws past to protect the public interest into regulations and enforcement practices that benefit limited private interests. Last year, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute wrote in the Wall Street Journal about what he called a striking example of regulatory capture. He described the phenomenon thus, agencies tasked with protecting the public interest come to identify with the regulated industry and protect its interests against that of the public. The result, government fails to protect the public. His example was the Minerals Management Service in relation to the BP oil spill. This symposium is correct to study regulatory capture in the context of the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe. The failures of MMS in the lead-up to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the cozy relationship between MMS officials and industry executives, and the shameful behavior of some MMS employees are archetypal symptoms of regulatory capture. But the report of the President's commission on the Gulf oil spill never once mentioned regulatory capture. That's a pretty strong signal that regulatory capture isn't getting the attention it deserves. When you think about the century-long academic and policy debate about regulatory capture, and when you look at the cost of recent disasters in areas regulated by the Minerals Management Service, the Mine Safety and Health Administration, and the Securities Exchange Commission, it seems pretty evident that Congress should be concerned not only about those prior incidents, but to address the threat of future regulatory capture. As Congress takes up this issue, we should remember how much agreement exists about regulatory capture. During a hearing that I chaired on regulatory capture back in August, all of the witnesses from across the ideological spectrum agreed on all of the following seven propositions. First, regulatory capture is a real phenomenon and a threat to the integrity of government. Second, regulated entities have a concentrated incentive to gain as much influence as possible over regulators opposed by a diffuse public interest. Third, regulated industries ordinarily have organizational and resource advantages in the regulatory process when compared to public interest groups. Fourth, some regulatory processes lend themselves to gaming by regulated entities. Fifth, regulatory capture by its nature happens in the dark, done as quietly as possible. No industry puts up a flag announcing its capture of a regulatory agency. Sixth, the potential damage from regulatory capture is enormous, as we have seen. And finally, effective congressional oversight is a key to keeping regulators focused on the public interest. So let me close by mentioning two pieces of legislation I've developed in keeping with these seven premises. The first would create an office within the office of management and budget with roving authority to investigate and report on regulatory capture. The office would ensure that abuses were not overlooked and sound the alarm if a regulatory agency were overwhelmed by a more sophisticated and better resourced regulated industry. Scrutiny and publicity are powerful tools for protecting the integrity of our regulatory agencies. The second would shed a little extra sunlight into the regulatory agencies by requiring them to report to a public website. First, the name and affiliation of each party that comments on an agency regulation. Second, whether that party's comment affected the regulatory process. And finally, whether that party is an economic, a non-economic or a citizen interest. By centralizing this information for public and congressional examination, the bill would create a simple dashboard for hints of regulatory capture in agency rulemaking. I anticipate introducing these bills shortly. Administrative law may not be the most glamorous of subjects, but I hope to work with colleagues on both sides of the aisle who are committed to good government and wish to make it even better. Thank you very much for the opportunity to share my thoughts on regulatory capture. For as long as there are regulatory agencies, regulated industries, and money, there will be efforts at regulatory capture. I wish you all the best as you study the role it played in the Gulf oil spill. Thanks very much.