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Localist Administrative Law, Nestor M. Davidson
Localist Administrative Law, Nestor M. Davidson
Faculty Scholarship
To read the voluminous literature on administrative law is to inhabit a world focused almost exclusively on federal agencies. This myopic view, however, ignores the wide array of administrative bodies that make and implement policy at the local-government level. The administrative law that emerges from the vast subterranean regulatory state operating within cities, suburbs, towns, and counties has gone largely unexamined. Not only are scholars ignoring a key area of governance, but courts have similarly failed to develop an administrative jurisprudence that recognizes what is distinctive about local agencies. The underlying justifications for core administrative law doctrines at the federal …
Bureaucratic Administration: Experimentation And Immigration Law, Joseph Landau
Bureaucratic Administration: Experimentation And Immigration Law, Joseph Landau
Faculty Scholarship
In debates about executive branch authority and policy innovation, scholars have focused on two overarching relationships—horizontal tension between the president and Congress and the vertical interplay of federal and state authority. However, these debates have overlooked the role of frontline bureaucratic officials in advancing the laws they administer. This Article looks to immigration law—in which lower-level federal officers exercise discretion delegated down throughout federal agencies—to identify how bottom-up agency influences can inform categorical, across-the-board executive branch policy. In this Article, I argue that decisions by frontline officers can and should be better harnessed to pair local laboratories of executive experimentation …