Law Commons^™

Regulatory Innovation And Permission To Fail: The Case Of Suptech, Hilary J. Allen

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

The recent U.S. Supreme Court decision West Virginia v. EPA has cast a pall over the discretion of administrative agencies at a very inopportune time. The private sector is currently adopting new technologies at a rapid pace, and as regulated industries become more technologically complex, administrative agencies must innovate technological tools of their own in order to keep up. Agencies will increasingly struggle to do their jobs without that innovation, but the private sector is afforded something that is both critical to the innovation process, and often denied to administrative agencies: “permission to fail.” Without some grace for the inevitable …

Affirmatively Resisting, Ezra Rosser

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This Article argues that administrative processes, in particular rulemaking’s notice-and-comment requirement, enable local institutions to fight back against federal deregulatory efforts. Federalism all the way down means that state and local officials can dissent from within when challenging federal action. Drawing upon the ways in which localities, states, public housing authorities, and fair housing nonprofits resisted the Trump Administration’s efforts to roll back federal fair housing enforcement, this Article shows how uncooperative federalism works in practice.

Despite the fact that the 1968 Fair Housing Act requires that the federal government affirmatively further fair housing (AFFH), the requirement was largely ignored …

Challenges To The Independence Of Inspectors General In Robust Congressional Oversight, Fernando R. Laguarda

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Congressional oversight of the Executive is among the chief responsibilities of the legislative branch. Inspectors General ("IGs") are among the most important tools available to Congress because they are "hard-wired" into the Executive itself. The value of IGs to Congress depends on their expertise in the workings of their host agencies and their "independence" from those agencies. But "independence" is not a statutorily defined term. As the agencies, and sometimes Congress itself, expand the role of IGs to engage in activities that parallel the regulatory programs of their host agencies, IG independence is compromised and the value IGs provide to …

Gundy And The Civil-Criminal Divide, Jenny M. Roberts

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It could have been the case that declared “most of Government ... unconstitutional,” by reviving a robust application of the doctrine that prohibits Congress from delegating its law-making power to the other branches. At least that is what many awaiting the Court’s widely-anticipated 2019 decision in Gundy v. United States believed, after the Court agreed to decide whether “Congress unconstitutionally delegated legislative power when it authorized the Attorney General to ‘specify the applicability’ of [the federal Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act]’s registration requirements to pre-Act offenders.” Gundy did not deliver on its potential to upend the administrative state. Instead, …

A Tribute To Judge Patricia Wald, Jeffrey Lubbers

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No abstract provided.

The Regulatory Accountability Act Loses Steam But The Trump Executive Order On Alj Selection Upturned 71 Years Of Practice, Jeffrey Lubbers

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No abstract provided.

Sg's Brief In Lucia Could Portend The End Of The Alj Program As We Have Known It, Jeffrey Lubbers

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No abstract provided.

Fail To Comment At Your Own Risk: Does Issue Exhaustion Have A Place In Judicial Review Of Rules, Jeffrey Lubbers

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Lubbers discusses whether issue exhaustion have a place in judicial review of rules.

Cooperative Enforcement In Immigration Law, Amanda Frost

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ABSTRACT: Immigration officials take two approaches to unauthorized immigrants: Either they seek to deport them, or they exercise prosecutorial discretion, allowing certain categories of unauthorized immigrants to remain in the United States without legal status. Neither method is working. The executive lacks the resources to remove more than a small percentage of the unauthorized population each year, and prosecutorial discretion is by definition an impermanent solution that leaves unauthorized immigrants vulnerable to exploitation at both work and home - harming not just them, but also the legal immigrants and U.S. citizens with whom they live and work.This Article: suggests a …

Tobacco, Denormalization, Anti-Healthism, And Health Justice, Lindsay Wiley

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No abstract provided.

Comments On Omb's Interim Guidance Implementing Section 2 Of Executive Order 13,771 Reducing Regulation And Controlling Regulatory Costs, Jeffrey Lubbers

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No abstract provided.

The Judgment Fund: America's Deepest Pocket & Its Susceptibility To Executive Branch Misuse, Paul F. Figley

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Over the last thirty-five years, the United States government has paid out billions of dollars in settlements that have had no fiscal consequences for the agencies whose actions caused the claims. It has done so through the Judgment Fund, a relatively unknown permanent, indefinite appropriation originally created by Congress almost half a century ago to pay certain types of judgments entered against the United States.

Congress struggled for nearly two hundred years to find a way to exercise its Appropriations Clause authority over claims payments that did not drown its members in procedural detail. The article surveys that history. Through …

Frostpaw Addresses Global Warming, William Snape

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INTRODUCTION: Climate change impacts the law on many levels and in many ways. This Article asks a threshold question: what legal structures will most effectively reduce growing levels of anthropogenic greenhouse pollution? The answer is that an existing U.S. statute-the Clean Air Act-not only possesses clear commands to ratchet down greenhouse pollutants domestically, but also provides explicit authority to negotiate concomitant air pollution reduction with countries around the planet in a fair, transparent, and reciprocal fashion. Further, application of the Clean Air Act is consistent with other legal and policy tools to address global warming. This statute-based solution, while facially …

Soft Whistleblowing, Amanda Leiter

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This Article explores the underappreciated role that agency insiders play in directing outside oversight of their employer agencies and, in turn, manipulating agency policy development. Specifically, the Article defines, documents, and evaluates the phenomenon of "soft whistleblowing"-an agency employee's deliberate, unsanctioned, substantive, and instrumental disclosure of nonpublic information about issues of policy. This phenomenon is ubiquitous but has received no systematic attention in the academic literature. As the Article demonstrates, agency employees regularly engage in soft whistleblowing to congressional staff, journalists, and agency watchdog groups, in an effort to bring outside pressure to bear on their employer agencies to shift …

The Ohio State University Dispute Resolution In Special Education Symposium Panel, Robert Dinerstein

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No abstract provided.

Should Congress Create A Special Category Of Ssa Aljs, Jeffrey Lubbers

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No abstract provided.

Reviewing The American University Law Review On Extraterritoriality: A Critical Response To Viki Economides, Note, Tianrui Group Co. V. Itc: The Dubious Status Of Extraterritoriality And The Domestic Industry Requirement Requirement Of Section 337(Link), Jonathan Stroud

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Recently, the Federal Circuit upheld the Commission’s decision to exclude goods based on a trade secret violation that largely happened abroad. The American University Law Review critiqued that decision on two grounds: First, that a presumption against extraterritorial application of U.S. law applied; and second, that licensing alone could not establish a domestic industry. The American University Law Review's critique remains incomplete, however, as the Federal Circuit correctly decided the case for at least two reasons. first, the Federal Circuit correctly applied the “extraterritorial presumption” canon of construction; and second, the recent Federal Circuit decision in InterDigital Communications LLC v. …

Natural Resource “Conflicts” In The U.S. Southwest, William Snape

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INTRODUCTION: Environmental laws and the ecosystems they support are under attack. Intermittently since the Reagan administration and increasingly since the 2008 economic collapse, certain politicians and their industry sponsors have inundated the media with angry rhetoric, blaming historic job losses on "overregulation."' Environmental laws are a frequent target of these politicians who often benefit from contributions supplied by the fossil fuel and mining industries. Ignoring the successes of these laws- cleaner air, cleaner water, and recovering imperiled wild species and habitat-they claim that environmental regulations are "job killers." Reflecting the success of these claims, the recent House Fiscal Year 2012 …

Punctuated Equilibrium: A Model For Administrative Evolution, Mark Niles

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No abstract provided.

Transparency In The Administration Of Laws: The Relationship Between Differing Justifications For Transparency And Differing Views Of Administrative Law, Robert Vaughn

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No abstract provided.

Regulatory Hide And Seek: What Agencies Can (And Can't) Do To Limit Judicial Review, Amanda Leiter

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Many authors discuss judicial oversight of agency actions. Our subject, which is less well examined, is agencies’ role in modulating that oversight. We consider cases in which the timing or form of an agency action has curtailed judicial review of the agency’s policy choices. In some such cases, the agency’s choice of form deprived the court of statutory or Article III jurisdiction. In others, the court chose to delay or deny review to avoid interfering with agency policy development. Despite these differences, though, all such “reviewability” cases pose important constitutional questions about the degree to which an agency should be …

Acus 2.0 And Its Historical Antecedents, Jeffrey Lubbers

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No abstract provided.

Paul Verkuil's Projects For The Administrative Conference Of The U.S. 1974-1992, Jeffrey Lubbers

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I am really happy to be part of this tribute to Paul Verkuil. It may surprise those in the audience to learn that I am bringing some needed diversity to today's proceedings - I am the only other Dutch American on the program! But perhaps my twenty years at the "Administrative Conference" also qualifies me to say a few words about how thrilled I am that we have it back - "ACUS 2.0" we can call it, complete with a website this time- and that Paul is at its helm. And I want to thank Paul for bringing me back …

A Survey Of Federal Agency Rulemakers’ Attitudes About E-Rulemaking, Jeffrey Lubbers

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Drawing on a survey of U.S. civil servants engaged in developing regulations across a wide variety of agencies, this chapter analyzes how bureaucrats in key positions view the impact on their work of “electronic rulemaking” – that is, the creation of online opportunities for members of the public to comment on proposed administrative regulations. There is strong evidence that rulemakers appreciate the value of new technologies for public participation purposes and for internal administration and coordination functions, but less evidence that they see the utility of e-rulemaking for improving the quality of administrative rules.

The U.S. Rulemaking Process: Has It Become Too Difficult?, Jeffrey Lubbers

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The modem process for making administrative policy-the informal, notice-and-comment rulemaking process-was developed in the U.S. when the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) was enacted in 1946. The "notice-and-comment" label derives from the fact that the APA requires: publication of a notice of proposed rulemaking, opportunity for public participation in the rulemaking by submission of written comments, publication of a final rule and accompanying explanation.

This applies to the substantive rulemaking of every agency of the federal government and provides the procedural minimum for most significant rulemakings. More elaborate public procedures such as oral hearings may be used voluntarily by agencies in …

The Merits Of ‘Merits’ Review: A Comparative Look At The Australian Administrative Appeals Tribunal, Jeffrey Lubbers, Michael Asimow

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This article compares several systems of administrative adjudication. In the U.S., adjudication is typically performed by the same agency that makes and enforces the rules. However, in Australia, almost all administrative adjudication is performed by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT), a non-specialized adjudicating agency, and several other specialized tribunals that are independent of the enforcing agency. These tribunals (which evolved out of concerns about separation of powers) have achieved great legitimacy. In the U.K., recent legislation (the Tribunals, Courts and Enforcement Act) merged numerous specialized tribunals into a single first-tier tribunal with much stronger guarantees of independence than previously existed. …

Joining The Convention On Biological Diversity, William Snape

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INTRODUCTION: Life on Earth as we know it is under siege. Significant and probably irreversible changes to the natural world are now occurring. It is an undisputed fact that we are losing wild species in nature to extinction faster than in any geologic period since the dinosaur die-off roughly sixty five million years ago. It is also undisputed that ecosystem services from land, water, and air are degraded throughout the world and threatening food supplies, economic development, scientific advancements, and global security. The rapid advent of global warming and associated climate change makes the job of saving native plants, animals, …

Achieving Policymaking Consensus: The (Unfortunate) Waning Of Negotiated Rulemaking, Jeffrey Lubbers

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Introduction: As the ADR movement made its way from the courts to the agency hearing rooms in the 1980s, negotiated rulemaking (sometimes called "regulatory negotiation" or simply "reg-neg") also emerged on a parallel track as an alternative to traditional procedures for drafting proposed regulations. This exemplar of regulatory reform was based on two insights: (1) that the usual process of written notice-and-comment rulemaking has an intrinsic weakness because stakeholders engaged in it do not interact with each other or with the agency; and (2) in certain situations, it is possible to bring together representatives of the agency and the various …

The Transformation Of The U.S. Rulemaking Process - For Better Or Worse, Jeffrey Lubbers

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No abstract provided.

Out Of Thin Air: Using First Amendment Public Forum Analysis To Redeem American Broadcasting Regulation, Anthony E. Varona

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American television and radio broadcasters are uniquely privileged among Federal Communications Commission (FCC) licensees. Exalted as public trustees by the 1934 Communications Act, broadcasters pay virtually nothing for the use of their channels of public radiofrequency spectrum, unlike many other FCC licensees who have paid billions of dollars for similar digital spectrum. Congress envisioned a social contract of sorts between broadcast licensees and the communities they served. In exchange for their free licenses, broadcast stations were charged with providing a platform for a free marketplace of ideas that would cultivate a democratically engaged and enlightened citizenry through the broadcasting of …