Law Commons^™

Whither Rationality?, Shi-Ling Hsu

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Reviving Rationality: Saving Cost-Benefit Analysis for the Sake of the Environment and Our Health. By Michael A. Livermore and Richard L. Revesz.

Symmetry And (Network) Neutrality, Tejas N. Narechania

Michigan Law Review Online

In this short Essay, I take the opportunity to highlight one further potential asymmetry that may yet emerge from the Supreme Court’s application of Chevron’s many doctrines. Drawing on then-Judge Kavanaugh’s disdissental from the D.C. Circuit’s decision affirming network neutrality rules, I suggest that there is at least one vote on the Supreme Court—and perhaps more—for an asymmetric approach to the major questions doctrine. Moreover, I demonstrate how asymmetry in this context is deeply irrational. As applied to network neutrality, the asymmetry has at least one of two effects. One, it might simply favor one large industry over another, …

Implementing Nepa In The Age Of Climate Change, Jayni Foley Hein, Natalie Jacewicz

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

The national government has a crucial role to play in combating climate change, yet federal projects continue to constitute a major source of United States greenhouse gas emissions. Under the National Environmental Policy Act, agencies must consider the environmental impacts of major federal actions before they can move forward. But agencies frequently downplay or ignore the climate change impacts of their projects in NEPA analyses, citing a slew of technical difficulties and uncertainties. This Article analyzes a suite of the most common analytical failures on the part of agencies with respect to climate change: failure to account for a project’s …

The "Directive" Prong: Adding To The Allied-Signal Framework For Remand Without Vacatur, T. Alex B. Folkerth

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

“Remand without vacatur” is an administrative law remedy that allows courts reviewing agency actions with minor legal defects to leave the action in place while the agency fixes the defect. Courts use a two-prong test from the 1993 D.C. Circuit case Allied-Signal, Inc. v. U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to determine whether or not to vacate the action pending remand. Allied-Signal’s “deficiency” prong directs the court to consider how bad the defect is. The “disruption” prong directs the court to consider how much havoc will be wreaked by the vacation of the action while the agency is fixing the defect. …

Illuminating Regulatory Guidance, Cary Coglianese

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

Administrative agencies issue many guidance documents each year in an effort to provide clarity and direction to the public about important programs, policies, and rules. But these guidance documents are only helpful to the public if they can be readily found by those who they will benefit. Unfortunately, too many agency guidance documents are inaccessible, reaching the point where some observers even worry that guidance has become a form of regulatory “dark matter.” This article identifies a series of measures for agencies to take to bring their guidance documents better into the light. It begins by explaining why, unlike the …

This Is What Democracy Looks Like: Title Ix And The Legitimacy Of The Administrative State, Samuel R. Bagentos

Michigan Law Review

Review of R. Shep Melnick's The Transformation of Title IX: Regulating Gender Equality in Education.

Stop Regulating Government Paperwork With More Government Paperwork, Joseph D. Condon

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

The Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA) is an often-ignored law with a large impact. Federal agencies cannot ask the same questions of more than nine people or entities without submitting a proposed information collection to the White House Office of Management and Budget for review, a process that can take up to a year to complete. In an attempt to regulate the amount of paperwork foisted on the public, the PRA has created an enormous amount of paperwork for federal agencies—without any meaningful reduction in the paperwork burden faced by the public. Yet, likely because the burden of the PRA is …

Symmetry's Mandate: Constraining The Politicization Of American Administrative Law, Daniel E. Walters

Michigan Law Review

Recent years have seen the rise of pointed and influential critiques of deference doctrines in administrative law. What many of these critiques have in common is a view that judges, not agencies, should resolve interpretive disputes over the meaning of statutes—disputes the critics take to be purely legal and almost always resolvable using lawyerly tools of statutory construction. In this Article, I take these critiques, and the relatively formalist assumptions behind them, seriously and show that the critics have not acknowledged or advocated the full reform vision implied by their theoretical premises. Specifically, critics have extended their critique of judicial …

Progressive Textualism In Administrative Law, Kathryn E. Kovacs

Michigan Law Review Online

Nicholas Bagley’s article The Procedure Fetish is destined to be a classic. In it, Bagley systematically dismantles administrative law’s obsession with procedure. He decimates the arguments that procedure is necessary to legit-imize the administrative state and avoid agency capture. He nullifies the con-tention that administrative law is neutral by showing how proceduralism inhibits regulation and “favors a libertarian agenda over a progressive one.” Bagley urges progressives to abandon “gauzy claims about legitimacy and accountability” and approach procedure with skepticism.

The Procedure Fetish addresses the normative question of what adminis-trative law ought to require. Bagley writes about how progressives should solve …

Examining The Administrative Unworkability Of Final Agency Action Doctrine As Applied To The Native American Graves Protection And Repatriation Act, Adam Gerken

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

The application of the Administrative Procedure Act (“APA”) to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (“NAGPRA”) creates unique practical and doctrinal results. When considering the application of the current law concerning judicial review of final agency action under the APA to NAGPRA, it is evident that the law is simultaneously arbitrary and unclear. In the Ninth Circuit’s holding in Navajo Nation v. U.S. Department of the Interior, the Court applied final agency action doctrine in a manner that was legally correct but administratively unworkable. The Court’s opinion contravenes both the reasoning behind the APA final agency action …

The Locked Gates To Tension City: The Commission On Presidential Debates, The Fec, And The Two-Party System, Tommy La Voy

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

Since John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon walked into a Chicago television studio for the first general election presidential debate in 1960, candidate debates have been a fundamental aspect of presidential campaigns and have had broader effects on society at large. The Commission on Presidential Debates (“CPD”) has been in charge of organizing the general election debates since it was created in 1987 by the Democratic and Republican parties. In its tenure, the CPD has restricted its massive platform almost every election to the Republican and Democratic candidates through the use of criteria that seemingly follow the law’s requirement of …

Searching For Humanitarian Discretion In Immigration Enforcement: Reflections On A Year As An Immigration Attorney In The Trump Era, Nina Rabin

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

This Article describes one of the most striking features of the Trump Administration’s immigration policy: the shift in the way discretion operates in the legal immigration system. Unlike other high-profile immigration policies that have been the focus of class action lawsuits and public outcry, the changes to the role of discretion have attracted little attention, in part because they are implemented through low-visibility individualized decisions that are difficult to identify, let alone challenge systemically. After providing historical context regarding the role of discretion in the immigration system before the Trump Administration, I offer four case studies from my immigration practice …

Mdl As Public Administration, David L. Noll

Michigan Law Review

From the Deepwater Horizon disaster to the opioid crisis, multidistrict litigation—or simply MDL—has become the preeminent forum for devising solutions to the most difficult problems in the federal courts. MDL works by refusing to follow a regular procedural playbook. Its solutions are case specific, evolving, and ad hoc. This very flexibility, however, provokes charges that MDL violates basic requirements of the rule of law.

At the heart of these charges is the assumption that MDL is simply a larger version of the litigation that takes place every day in federal district courts. But MDL is not just different in scale …

The Procedure Fetish, Nicholas Bagley

Michigan Law Review

The strict procedural rules that characterize modern administrative law are said to be necessary to sustain the fragile legitimacy of a powerful and constitutionally suspect administrative state. We are likewise told that they are essential to public accountability because they prevent factional interests from capturing agencies. Yet the legitimacy-and-accountability narrative at the heart of administrative law is both overdrawn and harmful. Procedural rules have a role to play in preserving legitimacy and discouraging capture, but they advance those goals more obliquely than is commonly assumed and may exacerbate the very problems they aim to fix. This Article aims to draw …

Agency Pragmatism In Addressing Law’S Failure: The Curious Case Of Federal “Deemed Approvals” Of Tribal-State Gaming Compacts, Kevin K. Washburn

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

In the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988 (IGRA), Congress imposed a decision-forcing mechanism on the Secretary of the Interior related to tribal-state compacts for Indian gaming. Congress authorized the Secretary to review such compacts and approve or disapprove each compact within forty-five days of submission. Under an unusual provision of law, however, if the Secretary fails to act within forty-five days, the compact is “deemed approved” by operation of law but only to the extent that it is lawful. In a curious development, this regime has been used in a different manner than Congress intended. Since the United States …

Accusers As Adjudicators In Agency Enforcement Proceedings, Andrew N. Vollmer

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Largely because of the Supreme Court’s 1975 decision in Withrow v. Larkin, the accepted view for decades has been that a federal administrative agency does not violate the Due Process Clause by combining the functions of investigating, charging, and then resolving allegations that a person violated the law. Many federal agencies have this structure, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Federal Trade Commission.

In 2016, the Supreme Court decided Williams v. Pennsylvania, a judicial disqualification case that, without addressing administrative agencies, nonetheless raises a substantial question about one aspect of the combination of functions at agencies. …

Both Sides Of The Rock: Justice Gorsuch And The Seminole Rock Deference Doctrine, Kevin O. Leske

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

Despite being early in his tenure on the U.S. Supreme Court, Justice Neil Gorsuch has already made his presence known. His October 16, 2017 statement respecting the denial of certiorari in Scenic America, Inc. v. Department of Transportation garnered significant attention within the legal community. Joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, Justice Gorsuch questioned whether the Court’s bedrock 2-part test from Chevron, U.S.A. v. NRDC—whereby courts must defer to an agency’s reasonable interpretation of an ambiguous statutory term—should apply in the case.

Justice Gorsuch’s criticism of the Chevron doctrine was not a surprise. In the …

Making Bureaucracies Think Distributively: Reforming The Administrative State With Action-Forcing Distributional Review, Kenta Tsuda

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

This Article proposes that agencies analyze the distributional impacts of major regulatory actions, subject to notice-and-comment procedures and judicial review. The proposal responds to the legitimacy crisis that the administrative state currently faces in a period of widening economic inequality. Other progressive reform proposals emphasize the need for democratization of agencies. But these reforms fail to address the two fundamental pitfalls of bureaucratic governance: the “knowledge problem”—epistemic limitations on centrally coordinated decision making—and the “incentives problem”—the challenge of aligning the incentives of administrative agents and their political principals.

A successful administrative reform must address both problems. Looking to the environmental …

Chevron In The Circuit Courts, Kent Barnett, Christopher J. Walker

Michigan Law Review

This Article presents findings from the most comprehensive empirical study to date on how the federal courts of appeals have applied Chevrondeference— the doctrine under which courts defer to a federal agency’s reasonable interpretation of an ambiguous statute that it administers. Based on 1,558 agency interpretations the circuit courts reviewed from 2003 through 2013 (where they cited Chevron), we found that the circuit courts overall upheld 71% of interpretations and applied Chevrondeference 77% of the time. But there was nearly a twenty-five-percentage-point difference in agency-win rates when the circuit courts applied Chevrondeference than when they did …

Defining Ambiguity In Broken Statutory Frameworks And Its Limits On Agency Action, Amanda Urban

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

“The Problem” occurs when a statute’s provisions become contradictory or unworkable in the context of new or unforeseen phenomena, yet the statute mandates agency action. The application of an unambiguous statutory provision may become problematic or unclear. Similarly, unambiguous provisions may become inconsistent given a particular application of the statute. During the same term, in Scialabba and UARG, the Supreme Court performed a Chevron review of agency interpretations of statutes facing three variations of the Problem, which this Note characterizes as direct conflict, internal inconsistency, and unworkability. In each case, the Court defined ambiguity in various, nontraditional ways and …

Minimization Criteria For Off-Road Vehicle Use, Louisa S. Eberle

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

President Nixon recognized the controversy surrounding off-road vehicle (ORV) use on public lands when he signed Executive Order 11,644 in 1972. The Executive Order set out minimization criteria that bound federal land management agencies’ ORV area and trail designations. Forty years later, agencies are still struggling to implement the minimization criteria. Recent court opinions have struck down implementation attempts by the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, and Forest Service. This note argues that agencies require additional guidance for ORV management, particularly in light of case law that sets a floor for achieving minimization. After examining how the mandate …

Inside Regulatory Interpretation: A Research Note, Christopher J. Walker

Michigan Law Review First Impressions

We now live in a regulatory world, where the bulk of federal lawmaking takes place at the bureaucratic level. Gone are the days when statutes and common law predominated. Instead, federal agencies—through rulemaking, adjudication, and other regulatory action—have arguably become the primary lawmakers, with Congress delegating to its bureaucratic agents vast swaths of lawmaking power, the President attempting to exercise some control over this massive regulatory apparatus, and courts struggling to constrain agency lawmaking within statutory and constitutional bounds. This story is not new. Over two decades ago, for instance, Professor Lawson lamented the rise of the administrative state and …

Delegating Tax, James R. Hines Jr., Kyle D. Logue

Michigan Law Review

Congress delegates extensive and growing lawmaking authority to federal administrative agencies in areas other than taxation, but tightly limits the scope of Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and Treasury regulatory discretion in the tax area, specifically not permitting these agencies to select or adjust tax rates. This Article questions why tax policy does and should differ from other policy areas in this respect, noting some of the potential policy benefits of delegation. Greater delegation of tax lawmaking authority would allow administrative agencies to apply their expertise to fiscal policy and afford timely adjustment to changing economic circumstances. Furthermore, delegation of the …

The Systematic Risk Of Private Funds After The Dodd-Frank Act, Wulf A. Kaal

Michigan Business & Entrepreneurial Law Review

The Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) was created under the Dodd-Frank Act with the primary mandate of guarding against systemic risk and correcting perceived regulatory weaknesses that may have contributed to the financial crisis of 2008-2009. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) collects data pertaining to private fund advisers in order to facilitate FSOC’s assessment of non-bank financial institutions’ potential systemic risks. Evidence that the SEC’s data collection encounters accuracy and consistency problems might hamper FSOC’s ability to evaluate the systemic risk of private fund advisers. The author shows that while the SEC’s data plays a crucial role in all …

Fun With Administrative Law: A Game For Lawyers And Judges, Adam Babich

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

The practice of law is not a game. Administrative law in particular can implicate important issues that impact people’s health, safety, and welfare and change business’ profitability or even viability. Nonetheless, it can seem like a game. This is because courts rarely explain administrative law rulings in terms of the public purposes and policies at issue in lawsuits. Instead, the courts’ administrative law opinions tend to turn on arcane interpretive doctrines with silly names, such as the “Chevron two-step” or “Chevron step zero.” To advance doctrinal arguments, advocates and courts engage in linguistic debates that resemble a smokescreen—tending to obscure …

Unpacking Eme Homer: Cost, Proportionality, And Emissions Reductions, Daniel A. Farber

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

Interstate air pollution can prevent even the most diligent downwind state from attaining the air quality levels required by federal law. Allocating responsibility for emissions cuts when multiple upwind states contribute to downwind air quality violations presents a particularly difficult problem. Justice Ginsburg’s opinion for the Court in EPA v. EME Homer City Generator, L.P., gives EPA broad discretion to craft regulatory solutions for this problem. Although the specific statutory provision at issue was deceptively simple, the underlying problem was especially complex because of the large number of states involved. Indeed, neither the majority opinion nor the dissent seems to …

Instrument Choice, Carbon Emissions, And Information, Michael Wara

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

This Article examines the consequences of a previously unrecognized difference between pollutant cap-and-trade schemes and pollution taxes. Implementation of cap-and-trade relies on a forecast of future emissions, while implementation of a pollution tax does not. Realistic policy designs using either regulatory instrument almost always involve a phase-in over time to avoid economic disruption. Cap-and-trade accomplishes this phase-in via a limit on emissions that falls gradually below the forecast of future pollutant emissions. Emissions taxation accomplishes the same via a gradually increasing levy on pollution. Because of the administrative complexity of establishing an emissions trading market, cap-and-trade programs typically require between …

Admit Or Deny: A Call For Reform Of The Sec's "Neither-Admit-Nor-Deny" Policy, Priyah Kaul

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

For four decades, the SEC’s often-invoked policy of settling cases without requiring admissions of wrongdoing, referred to as the “neither-admit-nor-deny” policy, went unchallenged by the courts, the legislature, and the public. Then in 2011, a harshly critical opinion from Judge Jed Rakoff in SEC v. Citigroup incited demands for reform of this policy. In response to Judge Rakoff’s opinion, the SEC announced a modified approach to settlements. Under the modified approach, the Commission may require an admission of wrongdoing if a defendant’s misconduct was egregious or if the public markets would benefit from an admission. Many supporters of the neither-admit-nor-deny …

Regulating Electricity-Market Manipulation: A Proposal For A New Regulatory Regime To Proscribe All Forms Of Manipulation, Matthew Evans

Michigan Law Review

Congress broadly authorized the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (“FERC”) to protect consumers of electricity from all forms of manipulation in the electricity markets, but the regulations that FERC passed are not nearly so expansive. As written, FERC’s Anti-Manipulation Rule covers only instances of manipulation involving fraud. This narrow scope is problematic, however, because electricity markets can also be manipulated by nonfraudulent activity. Thus, in order to reach all forms of manipulation, FERC is forced to interpret and apply its Anti-Manipulation Rule in ways that strain the plain language and accepted understanding of the rule and therefore constitute an improper extension …

Can You Diagnose Me Now? A Proposal To Modify The Fda’S Regulation Of Smartphone Mobile Health Applications With A Pre-Market Notification And Application Database Program, Stephen Mcinerney

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Advances in mobile technology continually create new possibilities for the future of medical care. Yet these changes have also created concerns about patient safety. Under the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has the authority to regulate a broad spectrum of products beyond traditional medical devices like stethoscopes or pacemakers. The regulatory question is not if the FDA has the statutory authority to regulate health-related software, but rather how it will exercise its regulatory authority. In September 2013, the FDA published Final Guidance on Mobile Medical Applications; in it, the Agency limited its oversight to …