Law Commons^™

Purposivism In The Executive Branch: How Agencies Interpret Statutes, Kevin M. Stack

Northwestern University Law Review

After decades of debate, the lines of distinction between textualism and purposivism have been carefully drawn with respect to the judicial task of statutory interpretation. Far less attention has been devoted to the question of how executive branch officials approach statutory interpretation. While scholars have contrasted agencies’ interpretive practices from those of courts, they have not yet developed a theory of agency statutory interpretation.

This Article develops a purposivist theory of agency statutory interpretation on the ground that regulatory statutes oblige agencies to implement the statutes they administer in that manner. Regulatory statutes not only grant powers but also impose …

The Bayh–Dole Act & Public Rights In Federally Funded Inventions: Will The Agencies Ever Go Marching In?, Ryan Whalen

Northwestern University Law Review

For over thirty years, the Bayh–Dole Act has granted federal agencies the power to force the recipients of federal research funding to license the resulting inventions to third parties. Despite having this expansive power, no federal agency has ever seen fit to utilize it. This Note explores why Bayh–Dole march-in rights have never been used, and proposes reforms that would help ensure that, in the instances when they are most required, the public is able to access the inventions it bankrolled.

There have been five documented march-in petitions since the Bayh–Dole Act was passed into law. Each petition was dismissed …

Optimal Abuse Of Power, Adrian Vermeule

Northwestern University Law Review

I will argue that in the administrative state, in contrast to classical constitutional theory, the abuse of government power is not something to be strictly minimized, but rather optimized. An administrative regime will tolerate a predictable level of misrule, even abuse of power, as the inevitable byproduct of attaining other ends that are desirable overall.

There are three principal grounds for this claim. First, the architects of the modern administrative state were not only worried about misrule by governmental officials. They were equally worried about “private” misrule—misrule effected through the self-interested or self-serving behavior of economic actors wielding and abusing …

Public Regulation Of Private Enforcement: Empirical Analysis Of Doj Oversight Of Qui Tam Litigation Under The False Claims Act, David Freeman Engstrom

Northwestern University Law Review

In recent years, a growing chorus of commentators has called on Congress to vest agencies with litigation “gatekeeper” authority across a range of regulatory areas, from civil rights and antitrust to financial and securities regulation. Agencies, it is said, can rationalize private enforcement regimes through the power to evaluate lawsuits on a case-bycase basis, blocking bad cases, aiding good ones, and otherwise husbanding private enforcement capacity in ways that conserve scarce public resources for other uses. Yet there exists strikingly little theory or evidence on how agency gatekeeper authority might work in practice. This Article begins to fill that gap …

Agency Adjudication And Judicial Nondelegation: An Article Iii Canon, Mila Sohoni

Northwestern University Law Review

The rules governing judicial review of adjudication by federal agencies are insensitive to a critical separation of powers principle. Article III jurisprudence requires different treatment of agency adjudication depending on whether the agency is adjudicating a “private right” or a “public right.” When agencies adjudicate private rights, review of the agency adjudication must be available to an Article III court on a direct appellate basis. In contrast, Article III jurisprudence does not require review to an Article III court on a direct appellate basis of agency adjudications of purely public rights. That means that federal courts reviewing agency adjudications of …

Regulating Cyber-Security, Nathan Alexander Sales

Northwestern University Law Review

The conventional wisdom is that this country’s privately owned critical infrastructure—banks, telecommunications networks, the power grid, and so on—is vulnerable to catastrophic cyber-attacks. The existing academic literature does not adequately grapple with this problem, however, because it conceives of cyber-security in unduly narrow terms: most scholars understand cyber-attacks as a problem of either the criminal law or the law of armed conflict. Cyber-security scholarship need not run in such established channels. This Article argues that, rather than thinking of private companies merely as potential victims of cyber-crimes or as possible targets in cyber-conflicts, we should think of them in administrative …