Law Commons^™

"I'M Leavin' It (All) Up To You": Gundy And The (Sort-Of) Resurrection Of The Subdelegation Doctrine, Gary S. Lawson

Faculty Scholarship

In 2000, Cass Sunstein quipped that the conventional nondelegation doctrine, which holds that there are judicially enforceable constitutional limits on the extent to which Congress can confer discretion on other actors to determine the content of federal law, “has had one good year, and 211 bad ones (and counting).”1 The “one good year,” he said, was 1935, when the Court twice held unconstitutional certain provisions of the National Industrial Recovery Act that gave the president power to approve or create codes of conduct for essentially all American businesses, subject only to very vague, and often contradictory, statutory exhortations to pursue …