Law Commons^™

Regulating By Example, Susan C. Morse, Leigh Osofsky

Articles

Agency regulations are full of examples. Regulated parties and their advisors parse the examples to develop an understanding of the applicable law and to determine how to conduct their affairs. However, the theoretical literature contains no study of regulatory examples or of how they might be interpreted. Courts differ about whether examples serve as an independent source of law. There is uncertainty about the proper role of this frequently used regulatory tool.

In this Article, we argue that regulatory examples make law. Our claim is that, as a default rule, the legal content offered by regulatory examples is coequal with, …

Deliberative Constitutionalism In The National Security Setting, Mary B. Derosa, Milton C. Regan

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Deliberative democracy theory maintains that authentic deliberation about matters of public concern is an essential condition for the legitimacy of political decisions. Such deliberation has two features. The first is deliberative rigor. This is deliberation guided by public-regarding reasons in a process in which persons are genuinely open to the force of the better argument. The second is transparency. This requires that requires that officials publicly explain the reasons for their decisions in terms that citizens can endorse as acceptable grounds for acting in the name of the political community.

Such requirements would seem to be especially important in the …

A Hiatus In Soft-Power Administrative Law: The Case Of Medicaid Eligibility Waivers, David A. Super

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Administrative law is fundamentally a regime of soft power. Congress, the President, administrative agencies, civil servants, and the courts all operate within a broad consensus for rational, good-faith decisionmaking. Congress grants agencies discretion, and courts and civil servants defer to agencies’ political leadership based largely on the expectation that the latter are seeking to honor statutes’ purposes. That expectation of prudential restraint also allays concerns about delegations of legislative power. When the executive systematically disregards that expectation and seeks single-mindedly to maximize achievement of its policy objectives, deference’s justification breaks down.

Across agencies, the Trump administration has disregarded the assumptions …

Growing The Resistance: A Call To Action For Transactional Lawyers In The Era Of Trump, Gowri Krishna

Articles & Chapters

his essay is a call to action for transactional lawyers looking to support vulnerable immigrants through non-litigation means. By providing a snapshot of an especially precarious time in history for immigrants in the U.S.—the period immediately after the 2016 presidential election—the essay illustrates future areas of opportunity for transactional attorneys.

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

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

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

Two Pedagogies In Search Of Synergy, Lisa Schultz, Susan Nevelow Mart

Publications

Anyone who has taught a first-year legal research course understands the dilemma: How do we weave research skills into the writing program without sacrificing the quality or quantity of either discipline? In fact, it is difficult and time consuming to interweave any serious legal research instruction into a first-year writing course. What the students need to know is not just how to do a little case law research or how to find a statute: they need to also know how to formulate a research plan, how to evaluate a database, what kind of search works in different information environments, and …

Leveraging Social Science Expertise In Immigration Policymaking, Ming H. Chen

Publications

The longstanding uncertainty about how policymakers should grapple with social science demonstrating racism persists in the modern administrative state. This Essay examines the uses and misuses of social science and expertise in immigration policymaking. More specifically, it highlights three immigration policies that dismiss social scientific findings and expertise as part of presidential and agency decision-making: border control, crime control, and extreme vetting of refugees to prevent terrorism. The Essay claims that these rejections of expertise undermine both substantive and procedural protections for immigrants and undermine important functions of the administrative state as a curb on irrationality in policymaking. It concludes …

That Was Close! Reward Reporting Of Cybersecurity “Near Misses”, Jonathan Bair, Steven M. Bellovin, Andrew Manley, Blake Reid, Adam Shostak

Publications

Building, deploying, and maintaining systems with sufficient cybersecurity is challenging. Faster improvement would be valuable to society as a whole. Are we doing as much as we can to improve? We examine robust and long-standing systems for learning from near misses in aviation, and propose the creation of a Cyber Safety Reporting System (CSRS).

To support this argument, we examine the liability concerns which inhibit learning, including both civil and regulatory liability. We look to the way in which cybersecurity engineering and science is done today, and propose that a small amount of ‘policy entrepreneurship’ could have substantial positive impact. …

Optimizing Regulation For An Optimizing Economy, Cary Coglianese

All Faculty Scholarship

Much economic activity in the United States today emanates from technological advances that optimize through contextualization. Innovations as varied as Airbnb and Uber, fintech firms, and precision medicine are transforming major sectors in the economy by customizing goods and services as well as refining matches between available resources and interested buyers. The technological advances that make up the optimizing economy create new challenges for government oversight of the economy. Traditionally, government has overseen economic activity through general regulations that aim to treat all individuals equally; however, in the optimizing economy, business is moving in the direction of greater individualization, not …

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

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

Risks Faced By Foreign Lawyers In China, Chenglin Liu

Faculty Articles

This article provides an objective assessment of the potential risks that foreign lawyers face in China as they push the boundaries of the limits on their activities set by Chinese law. When the Shanghai Bar Association (SBA), a government-controlled organization, accused foreign lawyers of violating Chinese law and called for official action, some scholars dismissed the threat, claiming that there was no legal basis for a crackdown on foreign lawyers. These scholars erroneously maintained that the Chinese laws that regulate foreign lawyers are ambiguous and create "gray areas." In fact, the claims of the SBA are justified because the applicable …

Infrastructural Regulation And The New Utilities, K. Sabeel Rahman

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Regulation By Database, Nathan Cortez

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

The federal government currently publishes 195,245 searchable databases online, a number of which include information about private parties that is negative or unflattering in some way. Federal agencies increasingly publish adverse data not just to inform the public or promote transparency, but to pursue regulatory ends ⎯ to change the underlying behavior being reported. Such "regulation by database" has become a preferred method of regulation in recent years, despite scant attention from policymakers, courts, or scholars on its appropriate uses and safeguards.

This Article, then, evaluates the aspirations and burdens of regulation by database. Based on case studies of six …

How Constitutional Norms Break Down, Josh Chafetz, David E. Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

From the moment Donald Trump was elected president, critics have anguished over a breakdown in constitutional norms. History demonstrates, however, that constitutional norms are perpetually in flux. The principal source of instability is not that these unwritten rules can be destroyed by politicians who deny their legitimacy, their validity, or their value. Rather, the principal source of instability is that constitutional norms can be decomposed – dynamically interpreted and applied in ways that are held out as compliant but end up limiting their capacity to constrain the conduct of government officials.

This Article calls attention to that latent instability and, …

Transparency's Ideological Drift, David E. Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

In the formative periods of American "open government" law, the idea of transparency was linked with progressive politics. Advocates of transparency understood themselves to be promoting values such as bureaucratic rationality, social justice, and trust in public institutions. Transparency was meant to make government stronger and more egalitarian. In the twenty-first century, transparency is doing different work. Although a wide range of actors appeal to transparency in a wide range of contexts, the dominant strain in the policy discourse emphasizes its capacity to check administrative abuse, enhance private choice, and reduce other forms of regulation. Transparency is meant to make …

Federalism, Convergence, And Divergence In Constitutional Property, Gerald S. Dickinson

Articles

Federal law exerts a gravitational force on state actors, resulting in widespread conformity to federal law and doctrine at the state level. This has been well recognized in the literature, but scholars have paid little attention to this phenomenon in the context of constitutional property. Traditionally, state takings jurisprudence—in both eminent domain and regulatory takings—has strongly gravitated towards the Supreme Court’s takings doctrine. This long history of federal-state convergence, however, was disrupted by the Court’s controversial public use decision in Kelo v. City of New London. In the wake of Kelo, states resisted the Court’s validation of the …

Regulatory Cooperation In International Trade And Its Transformative Effects On Executive Power, Elizabeth Trujillo

Faculty Scholarship

As international trade receives the brunt of local discontent with globalization trends and recent changes by the Trump administration have put into question the viability of such trade arrangements moving forward, there has been a clear trend in using international trade fora for managing regulatory barriers on economic development. This paper will discuss this recent trend in international trade toward increased regulatory cooperation through the creation of formalized transnational regulatory bodies, such as the U.S.-EU Regulatory Cooperation Body that was being discussed in the TTIP negotiations and comparable ones in the Canadian-EU Trade Agreement as well as U.S.-Mexico and U.S.- …