Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 6 of 6
Full-Text Articles in Entire DC Network
King, Chevron, And The Age Of Textualism, Abigail R. Moncrieff
King, Chevron, And The Age Of Textualism, Abigail R. Moncrieff
Law Faculty Articles and Essays
In the King v. Burwell oral arguments, Chief Justice John Roberts—usually one of the more active members of the Court—asked only one substantive question, addressed to the Solicitor General: "If you're right about Chevron [deference applying to this case], that would indicate that a subsequent administration could change [your] interpretation?" As it turns out, that question was crucial to Roberts's thinking and to the 6-3 opinion he authored, but almost all commentators either undervalued or misunderstood the question's import (myself included). The result of Roberts's actual thinking was an unfortunate outcome for Chevron—and potentially for the rule of law—despite …
The Individual Mandate As Health Care Regulation: What The Obama Administration Should Have Said In Nfib V. Sebelius, Abigail R. Moncrieff
The Individual Mandate As Health Care Regulation: What The Obama Administration Should Have Said In Nfib V. Sebelius, Abigail R. Moncrieff
Law Faculty Articles and Essays
There was an argument that the Obama Administration's lawyers could have made—but didn't—in defending Obamacare 's individual mandate against constitutional attack. That argument would have highlighted the role of comprehensive health insurance in steering individuals' healthcare savings and consumption decisions. Because consumer-directed healthcare, which reaches its apex when individuals self-insure, suffers from several known market failures and because comprehensive health insurance policies play an unusually aggressive regulatory role in attempting to correct those failures, the individual mandate could be seen as an attempt to eliminate inefficiencies in the healthcare market that arise from individual decisions to self-insure. This argument would …
Common Law Constitutionalism, The Constitutional Common Law, And The Validity Of The Individual Mandate, Abigail R. Moncrieff
Common Law Constitutionalism, The Constitutional Common Law, And The Validity Of The Individual Mandate, Abigail R. Moncrieff
Law Faculty Articles and Essays
The paper proceeds as follows. Part I describes the constitutional common law and its interactions with common-law constitutionalism. Part II uses the fight over the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) and its so-called "individual mandate" as a case study to flesh out the core differences between common-law constitutionalism and constitutional common law. Part III argues that a viable justification for a living constitution needs to embrace and defend the courts' essentially political nature, confronting head-on the (skyscraper) originalists' sense that courts should never do politics.
Safeguarding The Safeguards: The Aca Litigation And The Extension Of Structural Protection To Non-Fundamental Liberties, Abigail R. Moncrieff
Safeguarding The Safeguards: The Aca Litigation And The Extension Of Structural Protection To Non-Fundamental Liberties, Abigail R. Moncrieff
Law Faculty Articles and Essays
As the lawsuits challenging the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) have evolved, one feature of the litigation has proven especially rankling to the legal academy: the courts' incorporation of substantive libertarian concerns into their structural federalism analyses. The breadth and depth of scholarly criticism is surprising, especially given that judges frequently choose indirect methods, including the structural and processbased methods at issue in the ACA litigation, for protecting substantive constitutional values. Indeed, indirect protection of constitutional liberties is a well-known and well-theorized strategy, which one scholar recently termed "semisubstantive review" and another theorized as "judicial manipulation of legislative …
The Freedom Of Health, Abigail R. Moncrieff
The Freedom Of Health, Abigail R. Moncrieff
Law Faculty Articles and Essays
This Article first draws out the freedom of health from Supreme Court precedent and demonstrates that, like other substantive constitutional rights, the freedom of health is a negative liberty that must be balanced against legitimate and compelling regulatory projects. The Article then applies that understanding of the freedom to evaluate some proposed and actual health care regulations that have made headline news in the last decade. I consider the constitutionality of the phantom death panels, the HlNl vaccine distribution program, the FDA's restrictions on access to experimental drugs, PPACA's obesity and smoking regulations, and, of course, PPACA's individual mandate. Should …
A Closer Look At The Federalization Snowball, Abigail R. Moncrieff
A Closer Look At The Federalization Snowball, Abigail R. Moncrieff
Law Faculty Articles and Essays
While on the academic job market, I presented Federalization Snowballs to several stellar law faculties.1 My argument, in short, was that: (1) federal healthcare spending allows the states to externalize onto the federal government about 40% of the utilization costs associated with their medical malpractice policies (such as the cost of defensive medicine); (2) such an externality systematically distorts a rational state’s incentive to reform medical malpractice; and (3) federalization of medical malpractice is necessary to correct the distortion. In other words, I argued that federalization of healthcare spending through Medicare, Medicaid, and similar programs has snowballed into a need …