Law Commons^™

Re-Reading Chevron, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

Though increasingly disfavored by the Supreme Court, Chevron remains central to administrative law doctrine. This Article suggests a way for the Court to reformulate the Chevron doctrine without overruling the Chevron decision. Through careful attention to the language of Chevron itself, the Court can honor the decision’s underlying value of harnessing comparative institutional advantage in judicial review, while setting aside a highly selective reading that unduly narrows judicial review. This re-reading would put the Chevron doctrine – and with it, an entire branch of administrative law – on firmer footing.

Jurisdiction Stripping Circa 2020: What The Dialogue (Still) Has To Teach Us, Henry P. Monaghan

Faculty Scholarship

Since its publication in 1953, Henry Hart’s famous article, The Power of Congress to Limit the Jurisdiction of Federal Courts: An Exercise in Dialectic, subsequently referred to as simply “The Dialogue,” has served as the leading scholarly treatment of congressional control over the federal courts. Now in its seventh decade, much has changed since Hart first wrote. This Article examines what lessons The Dialogue still holds for its readers circa 2020.

Overreach And Innovation In Equality Regulation, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

At a time of heightened concern about agency overreach, this Article highlights a less appreciated development in agency equality regulation. Moving beyond traditional bureaucratic forms of regulation, civil rights agencies in recent years have experimented with new forms of regulation to advance inclusion. This new "inclusive regulation" can be described as more open ended, less coercive, and more reliant on rewards, collaboration, flexibility, and interactive assessment than traditional modes of civil rights regulation. This Article examines the power and limits of this new inclusive regulation and suggests a framework for increasing the efficacy of these new modes of regulation.

Appointments, Innovation, And The Judicial-Political Divide, Gillian E. Metzger

Faculty Scholarship

The federal appointments process is having its proverbial day in the sun. The appointment and removal of federal officers figured centrally in the Supreme Court's two major recent separation-of-powers decisions, Free Enterprise Fund v. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board and National Labor Relations Board v. Noel Canning. The appointments process has featured even more prominently in the political sphere, figuring in a number of congressional-presidential confrontations. Such simultaneous top billing in the judicial and political spheres is hardly coincidental. After all, it was President Obama's use of the Recess Appointments Clause in response to pro forma sessions that triggered …

Agency Threats, Tim Wu

Faculty Scholarship

There are three main ways in which agencies regulate: rulemaking; adjudication; and informal tools of guidance, also called nonlegislative or interpretative rules. Over the last two decades, agencies have increasingly favored the use of the last of these three, which can include statements of best practices, interpretative guides, private warning letters, and press releases.

Scholars are hardly unaware of this trend. In a series of papers, writers have explored the use of informal regulation as it affects the relationship between agencies and the federal courts, asking when nonlegislative rules can be challenged as unenforceable for want of process. This Essay …

Political Control Of Federal Prosecutions: Looking Back And Looking Forward, Daniel C. Richman

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay explores the mechanisms of control over federal criminal enforcement that the administration and Congress used or failed to use during George W. Bush's presidency. It gives particular attention to Congress, not because legislators played a dominant role, but because they generally chose to play such a subordinate role. My fear is that the media focus on management inadequacies or abuses within the Justice Department during the Bush administration might lead policymakers and observers to overlook the hard questions that remain about how the federal criminal bureaucracy should be structured and guided during a period of rapidly shifting priorities …

Administrative Law As The New Federalism, Gillian E. Metzger

Faculty Scholarship

Despite the recognized impact that the national administrative state has had on the federal system, the relationship between federalism and administrative law remains strangely inchoate and unanalyzed. Recent Supreme Court case law suggests that the Court is increasingly focused on this relationship and is using administrative law to address federalism concerns even as it refuses to curb Congress's regulatory authority on constitutional grounds. This Article explores how administrative law may be becoming the new federalism and assesses how well-adapted administrative law is to performing this role. It argues that administrative law has important federalism-reinforcing features and represents a critical approach …

Golden Rules For Transboundary Pollution, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

Environmental law is becoming ever more centralized. In the United States, state and local pollution laws have been eclipsed by federal regulation. In the European Community, and to a lesser degree under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), national controls have been supplemented by regional regulation. And the growing importance of treaties regulating particular aspects of the global environment has reinforced calls for more general regimes of international environmental regulation.

One inevitably given justification for this centralizing trend is that pollution is a transboundary phenomenon. Air and water pollution, and to a lesser extent groundwater contamination, can cross political …

The Rulemaking Continuum, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

The two papers we have before us tell both descriptive and normative stories about current issues of rulemaking. Each suggests, in its field of attention, pressures that operate to increase proceduralization and agency responses to those pressures, as well as an attitude toward these developments. In rulemaking, as in other activities, discretion and order are in constant tension; one might find in that tension the very engine that makes the processes of public law go. Like the studies that assisted the move away from formal rulemaking, and the perceptions underlying the Supreme Court's Vermont Yankee decision, which quieted the judicial …

Administrative Law Symposium: Question & Answer With Professors Elliott, Strauss, And Sunstein, Dick Pierce, Donald Elliott, Peter L. Strauss, Cass Sunstein

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.