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Full-Text Articles in Law
How Agencies Choose Whether To Enforce The Law: A Preliminary Investigation, Aaron L. Nielson
How Agencies Choose Whether To Enforce The Law: A Preliminary Investigation, Aaron L. Nielson
Notre Dame Law Review
One of the most controversial aspects of administrative law in recent years concerns agency decisions not to enforce the law. Such nonenforcement is often beneficial or, in any event, inevitable. A particular violation may be so distant from what Congress or the agency had in mind when the general prohibition was put on the books that enforcement makes little sense. Likewise, because agencies have finite resources, they cannot enforce the law in all situations. At the same time, however, nonenforcement can also raise difficult questions about basic notions of fairness and administrative regularity, as well as separation of powers concerns. …
Law Enforcement As Political Question, Zachary S. Price
Law Enforcement As Political Question, Zachary S. Price
Notre Dame Law Review
Across a range of contexts, federal courts have crafted doctrines that limit judicial secondguessing of executive nonenforcement decisions. Key case law, however, carries important ambiguities of scope and rationale. In particular, key decisions have combined rationales rooted in executive prerogative with concerns about nonenforcement’s “unsuitability” for judicial resolution. With one nonenforcement initiative now before the Supreme Court and other related issues percolating in lower courts, this Article makes the case for the latter rationale. Judicial review of nonenforcement, on this account, involves a form of political question, in the sense of the “political question doctrine”: while executive officials hold a …