Over the years, much scholarship surrounding regulation and regulatory decision-making has focused on problems with regulation or regulatory processes—including overregulation, unreasonably adversarial enforcement, and regulatory capture. These are real concerns. Yet might there be something to learn by thinking about regulatory success—even about regulatory excellence? A parallel question has arisen in the field of psychology in recent decades. For most of its history, the field of psychology focused almost exclusively on maladies of the human psyche. Only more recently has the field come to see the importance of also learning from those who succeed and lead stable, happy lives. This has spawned a new approach called “positive political psychology,” with “positive” here used in a manner much different than in the “positive political economy” of institutional economics. Five years ago, a group of public administration scholars signed onto a “manifesto” asking whether the study of government could take a path similar to that taken in psychology. In this lecture, Professor Coglianese will consider such an approach in the context of regulation, especially given that public choice scholars have resoundingly discredited the “public interest” theory of regulation. Is a study of regulation that learns from successes possible? With regulation, what counts as success? How can it be discerned? And how can a normatively positive approach be integrated with and informed by findings from a long line of research about failings and flaws in the world of regulation? Coglianese will build on his work on regulatory excellence and will consider, with reference to contemporary legal and policy developments in the United States, whether or how regulators might aspire toward excellence in a contemporary political landscape that seems to discount expertise, regulatory autonomy, and even the entire enterprise of regulation itself.