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Full-Text Articles in Law
If We Build It, Will They Legislate? Empirically Testing The Potential Of The Nondelegation Doctrine To Curb Congressional "Abdication", Daniel E. Walters, Elliott Ash
If We Build It, Will They Legislate? Empirically Testing The Potential Of The Nondelegation Doctrine To Curb Congressional "Abdication", Daniel E. Walters, Elliott Ash
Faculty Scholarship
A widely held view for why the Supreme Court would be right to revive the nondelegation doctrine is that Congress has perverse incentives to abdicate its legislative role and evade accountability through the use of delegations, either expressly delineated or implied through statutory imprecision, and that enforcement of the nondelegation doctrine would correct for those incentives. We call this the Field of Dreams Theory—if we build the nondelegation doctrine, Congress will legislate. Unlike originalist arguments for the revival of the nondelegation doctrine, this theory has widespread appeal and is instrumental to the Court’s project of gaining popular acceptance of a …
Decoding Nondelegation After Gundy: What The Experience In State Courts Tells Us About What To Expect When We're Expecting, Daniel E. Walters
Decoding Nondelegation After Gundy: What The Experience In State Courts Tells Us About What To Expect When We're Expecting, Daniel E. Walters
Faculty Scholarship
The nondelegation doctrine theoretically limits Congress’s ability to delegate legislative powers to the executive agencies that make up the modern administrative state. Yet, in practice, the U.S. Supreme Court has, since the New Deal, shied away from enforcing any limits on congressional delegation. That may change in the near future. In Gundy v. United States, the Court narrowly upheld a delegation, and a dissent signaled deep doubts about the Court’s longstanding “intelligible principle” standard and offered a new framework to replace it. Subsequent events strongly suggest that the Court is poised to move in the direction contemplated by the dissent …
The Deregulation Deception, Cary Coglianese, Natasha Sarin, Stuart Shapiro
The Deregulation Deception, Cary Coglianese, Natasha Sarin, Stuart Shapiro
All Faculty Scholarship
President Donald Trump and members of his Administration repeatedly asserted that they had delivered substantial deregulation that fueled positive trends in the U.S. economy prior to the COVID pandemic. Drawing on an original analysis of data on federal regulation from across the Trump Administration’s four years, we show that the Trump Administration actually accomplished much less by way of deregulation than it repeatedly claimed—and much less than many commentators and scholars have believed. In addition, and also contrary to the Administration’s claims, overall economic trends in the pre-pandemic Trump years tended simply to follow economic trends that began years earlier. …
Unrules, Cary Coglianese, Gabriel Scheffler, Daniel Walters
Unrules, Cary Coglianese, Gabriel Scheffler, Daniel Walters
All Faculty Scholarship
At the center of contemporary debates over public law lies administrative agencies’ discretion to impose rules. Yet, for every one of these rules, there are also unrules nearby. Often overlooked and sometimes barely visible, unrules are the decisions that regulators make to lift or limit the scope of a regulatory obligation, for instance through waivers, exemptions, and exceptions. In some cases, unrules enable regulators to reduce burdens on regulated entities or to conserve valuable government resources in ways that make law more efficient. However, too much discretion to create unrules can facilitate undue business influence over the law, weaken regulatory …
Strength In Numbers (Of Words): Empirical Analysis Of Preambles And Public Comments, Anthony L. Moffa
Strength In Numbers (Of Words): Empirical Analysis Of Preambles And Public Comments, Anthony L. Moffa
Faculty Publications
The empirical observation of a four-decades-long trend towards longer and longer federal agency rulemakings laid the foundation for this series of studies and associated law review articles. The second in that series, this work will add necessary data, test important hypotheses, and draw new conclusions to guide policymakers. Any serious observer of the Federal Register recognizes that different sections of a rulemaking serve different purposes. And agencies have historically utilized one section in particular to insulate their rules from judicial vacation or remand – the “concise general statement of basis and purpose.” Thus, this new study will collect and analyze …
Litigating Epa Rules: A Fifty-Year Retrospective Of Environmental Rulemaking In The Courts, Cary Coglianese, Daniel E. Walters
Litigating Epa Rules: A Fifty-Year Retrospective Of Environmental Rulemaking In The Courts, Cary Coglianese, Daniel E. Walters
All Faculty Scholarship
Over the last fifty years, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has found itself repeatedly defending its regulations before federal judges. The agency’s engagement with the federal judiciary has resulted in prominent Supreme Court decisions, such as Chevron v. NRDC and Massachusetts v. EPA, which have left a lasting imprint on federal administrative law. Such prominent litigation has also fostered, for many observers, a longstanding impression of an agency besieged by litigation. In particular, many lawyers and scholars have long believed that unhappy businesses or environmental groups challenge nearly every EPA rule in court. Although some empirical studies have …
The Self-Delegation False Alarm: Analyzing Auer Deference’S Effect On Agency Rules, Daniel E. Walters
The Self-Delegation False Alarm: Analyzing Auer Deference’S Effect On Agency Rules, Daniel E. Walters
Faculty Scholarship
Auer deference holds that reviewing courts should defer to agencies when the latter interpret their own preexisting regulations. This doctrine relieves pressure on agencies to undergo costly notice-and-comment rulemaking each time interpretation of existing regulations is necessary. But according to some leading scholars and jurists, the doctrine actually encourages agencies to promulgate vague rules in the first instance, augmenting agency power and violating core separation of powers norms in the process. The claim that Auer perversely encourages agencies to “self-delegate”—that is, to create vague rules that can later be informally interpreted by agencies with latitude due to judicial deference—has helped …
The Self-Delegation False Alarm: Analyzing Auer Deference's Effect On Agency Rules, Daniel E. Walters
The Self-Delegation False Alarm: Analyzing Auer Deference's Effect On Agency Rules, Daniel E. Walters
All Faculty Scholarship
Auer deference holds that reviewing courts should defer to agencies when the latter interpret their own preexisting regulations. This doctrine relieves pressure on agencies to undergo costly notice-and-comment rulemaking each time interpretation of existing regulations is necessary. But according to some leading scholars and jurists, the doctrine actually encourages agencies to promulgate vague rules in the first instance, augmenting agency power and violating core separation of powers norms in the process. The claim that Auer perversely encourages agencies to “self-delegate”—that is, to create vague rules that can later be informally interpreted by agencies with latitude due to judicial deference—has helped …
Performance Track’S Postmortem: Lessons From The Rise And Fall Of Epa’S “Flagship” Voluntary Program, Cary Coglianese, Jennifer Nash
Performance Track’S Postmortem: Lessons From The Rise And Fall Of Epa’S “Flagship” Voluntary Program, Cary Coglianese, Jennifer Nash
All Faculty Scholarship
For nearly a decade, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) considered its National Environmental Performance Track to be its “flagship” voluntary program — even a model for transforming the conventional system of environmental regulation. Since Performance Track’s founding during the Clinton Administration, EPA officials repeatedly claimed that the program’s rewards attracted hundreds of the nation’s “top” environmental performers and induced these businesses to make significant environmental gains beyond legal requirements. Although EPA eventually disbanded Performance Track early in the Obama Administration, the program has been subsequently emulated by a variety of state and federal regulatory authorities. To discern lessons …
The "Hidden Judiciary": An Empirical Examination Of Executive Branch Justice, Chris Guthrie, Jeffrey J. Rachlinski, Andrew J. Wistrich
The "Hidden Judiciary": An Empirical Examination Of Executive Branch Justice, Chris Guthrie, Jeffrey J. Rachlinski, Andrew J. Wistrich
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
Administrative law judges attract little scholarly attention, yet they decide a large fraction of all civil disputes. In this Article, we demonstrate that these executive branch judges, like their counterparts in the judicial branch, tend to make predominantly intuitive rather than predominantly deliberative decisions. This finding sheds new light on executive branch justice by suggesting that judicial intuition, not judicial independence, is the most significant challenge facing these important judicial officers.