Food is a necessity that all people need to survive. Moreover, according to the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, there is also a legal right to food. Despite the natural and legal rights to food, today’s consumers have been faced with staggering food price inflation. American food prices are up approximately 30 percent when compared with early 2020 reports,  representing at least a forty-year high in both the food index generally and the food at home index specifically.  Consumers, in turn, are outraged.

Popular narratives about food prices share a common flaw—the absence of consumer welfare from the dialogue. Whether the food price index has increased due to consolidation or to the heavy hand of government in the market, the reality is that consumers are paying more for their groceries and meat, poultry, and egg prices are the single largest contributor to the rising cost of food people consume at home.  The most fungible part of a family’s budget is food.  The cause of the food price increases, whether due to consolidation or government overreach, is secondary to the reality that all consumers are paying more for their groceries, especially meat, poultry, and eggs, and that price increases disproportionately impact the most vulnerable sectors of society.  The emphasis going forward should thus be on how best to prioritize consumer welfare by decreasing the impact food prices have on American consumers.

The affordability and value of higher education are matters of enduring public conversation. Increased scrutiny has led to increased disclosure. And for legal education, the affordability of legal education has been publicly debated. Affordability data has even been included in the rankings of law schools, which have recently faced pushback from law schools themselves. This essay describes the conversation and debate around law school rankings and affordability data, and it offers some ways for federal policy to help improve affordability disclosures for legal education.

The opioid crisis continues to ravage communities across the United States, which has motivated policymakers to seek interventions that reduce reckless medical practices that put patients in danger of addiction. In her Yale Law & Policy Review Article, The Prescription Abuse Prevention Act: A New Federal Statute to Criminalize Overprescribing Opioids, Rebecca A. Delfino proposes novel legislation to reform how the federal government prosecutes doctors who overprescribe controlled substances. However, many of the statistics Delfino cites to justify her legislation, such as “[s]eventy percent of [opioid overdose] deaths involve an opioid that a doctor legally prescribed,” are not supported by the literature. This comment corrects the errors presented in Delfino’s Article and presents novel data describing the origins of the opioid crisis. According to the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse (NHSDA), Purdue Pharma’s OxyContin was rarely used for nonmedical purposes in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Overall, given that opioid prescribing has decreased every year over the past decade, further reductions in prescribing that follow Delfino’s proposed Prescription Abuse Prevention Act may further exacerbate opioid overdoses by orienting both pain patients and recreational users to illicit alternatives, like heroin and fentanyl.