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A Statute By Any Other Name Might Smell Less Like S.P.A.M., Or, The Congress Of The United States Grows Increasingly D.U.M.B., Chris Sagers

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Why we name our statutes is a rarely asked and non-obvious question, but it turns out to be deeply illuminating. This essay examines one little-noticed trend in particular, which has simply exploded within the U.S. Congress during the past twenty years. What at first might seem a frivolous, innocuous, and maybe even sort of likable kind of statute name appeared perhaps three times in the entire history of the Republic before 1988. In the twenty years since, there have been nearly seventy of them. But much more important than its recent and arresting profusion will be the deeper philosophical insight …

Choosing A Court To Review The Executive, Joseph Mead, Nicholas Fromherz

All Maxine Goodman Levin School of Urban Affairs Publications

For more than one hundred years, Congress has experimented with review of agency action by single-judge district courts, multiple-judge district courts, and direct review by circuit courts. This tinkering has not given way to a stable design. Rather than settling on a uniform scheme—or at least a scheme with a discernible organizing principle—Congress has left litigants with a jurisdictional maze that varies unpredictably across and within statutes and agencies.In this Article, we offer a fresh look at the theoretical and empirical factors that ought to inform the allocation of the judicial power between district and circuit courts in suits challenging …

Choosing A Court To Review The Executive, Joseph Mead, Nicholas Fromherz

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

For more than one hundred years, Congress has experimented with review of agency action by single-judge district courts, multiple-judge district courts, and direct review by circuit courts. This tinkering has not given way to a stable design. Rather than settling on a uniform scheme—or at least a scheme with a discernible organizing principle— Congress has left litigants with a jurisdictional maze that varies unpredictably across and within statutes and agencies.

In this Article, we offer a fresh look at the theoretical and empirical factors that ought to inform the allocation of the judicial power between district and circuit courts in …