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Judicial review

Jud Mathews

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Minimally Democratic Administrative Law, Jud Mathews Mar 2017

Minimally Democratic Administrative Law, Jud Mathews

Jud Mathews

A persistent challenge for the American administrative state is reconciling the vast powers of unelected agencies with our commitment to government by the people. Many features of contemporary administrative law — from the right to participate in agency processes, to the reason-giving requirements on agencies, to the presidential review of rulemaking — have been justified, at least in part, as means to square the realities of agency power with our democratic commitments. At the root of any such effort there lies a theory of democracy, whether fully articulated or only implicit: some conception of what democracy is about, and what …

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Proportionality Review In Administrative Law, Jud Mathews Mar 2017

Proportionality Review In Administrative Law, Jud Mathews

Jud Mathews

At the most basic level, the principle of proportionality captures the common-sensical proposition that, when the government acts, the means it chooses should be well-adapted to achieve the ends it is pursuing. The proportionality principle is an admonition, as German administrative law scholar Fritz Fleiner famously wrote many decades ago, that “the police should not shoot at sparrows with cannons”. The use of proportionality review in constitutional and international law has received ample attention from scholars in recent years, but less has been said about proportionality’s role within administrative law. This piece suggest that we can understand the differences in …

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Presidential Administration In The Obama Era, Jud Mathews Jan 2017

Presidential Administration In The Obama Era, Jud Mathews

Jud Mathews

This essay, prepared for a conference on the Obama presidency and the Supreme Court held in Berlin in October 2016, surveys what presidential administration has looked like in the Obama era, and how the President’s leadership of the executive branch has been received in the Supreme Court. There is little that is really new in how President Obama has used the executive branch to pursue policy priorities; rather, his administration has deployed and developed techniques pioneered by previous presidents. Many of the techniques of presidential administration evade judicial review, although the Supreme Court has pushed back directly against President Obama’s …

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Deference Lotteries, Jud Mathews Aug 2015

Deference Lotteries, Jud Mathews

Jud Mathews

When should courts defer to agency interpretations of statutes, and what measure of deference should agencies receive? Administrative law recognizes two main deference doctrines — the generous Chevron standard and the stingier Skidmore standard — but Supreme Court case law has not offered a bright-line rule for when each standard applies.Many observers have concluded that courts’ deference practice is an unpredictable muddle. This Article argues that it is really a lottery, in the sense the term is used in expected utility theory. Agencies cannot predict which deference standard a court will apply or with what effect, but they have a …

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Proportionality And The Relevance Of Rights, Jud Mathews Dec 2014

Proportionality And The Relevance Of Rights, Jud Mathews

Jud Mathews

It is now well known that proportionality-based balancing has become the dominant approach to the judicial review of legislation that limits constitutional rights. But has proportionality outgrown rights? In other words, are specific constitutional rights — as opposed to, say, a general right to proportional treatment — necessary, or desirable, once courts have adopted proportionality analysis? This issue animates the debate between Professors Luc Tremblay and Matthias Klatt in the International Journal of Constitutional Law. In this comment, I weigh in on the Tremblay/Klatt debate, and make a case for the continued relevance of rights in proportionality balancing.

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Searching For Proportionality In U.S. Administrative Law, Jud Mathews Dec 2014

Searching For Proportionality In U.S. Administrative Law, Jud Mathews

Jud Mathews

There is no such thing as “proportionality review” in American administrative law, but instead, a number of doctrines that courts deploy to evaluate agency exercises of discretion. In some respects, these frameworks for review resemble proportionality in operation, but there are also notable differences. This essay surveys the doctrines governing judicial review of administrative discretion in the United States, highlighting three distinguishing features of the American approach. First, American judicial review is characterized by a high degree of unpredictability, not only with respect to outcomes, but often with respect to what framework of review is applicable. Second, while classical proportionality …

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