Law Commons^™

Procedural Environmental Justice, Jonathan Skinner-Thompson

Publications

Achieving environmental justice—that is, the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income, with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies—requires providing impacted communities not just the formal right, but the substantive ability, to participate as equal partners at every level of environmental decision-making. While established administrative policy purports to provide all people with so-called “meaningful involvement” in the regulatory process, the public participation process often excludes marginalized community members from exerting meaningful influence on decision-making. Especially in the environmental arena, regulatory decisions are often buried …

Algorithmic Impact Assessments Under The Gdpr: Producing Multi-Layered Explanations, Margot E. Kaminski, Gianclaudio Malgieri

Publications

Policy-makers, scholars, and commentators are increasingly concerned with the risks of using profiling algorithms and automated decision-making. The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has tried to address these concerns through an array of regulatory tools. As one of us has argued, the GDPR combines individual rights with systemic governance, towards algorithmic accountability. The individual tools are largely geared towards individual “legibility”: making the decision-making system understandable to an individual invoking her rights. The systemic governance tools, instead, focus on bringing expertise and oversight into the system as a whole, and rely on the tactics of “collaborative governance,” that is, …

Sanctuary Cities And The Power Of The Purse: An Executive Dole Test, Douglas M. Spencer

Publications

A constitutional clash is brewing. Cities and counties are flexing their muscles to frustrate national immigration policy while the federal Executive is threatening to interfere with local law enforcement decision making and funding. Although the federal government generally has plenary authority over immigration law, the Constitution forbids the commandeering of state and local officials to enforce federal law against their will. One exception to this anti-commandeering principle is the Spending Clause of Article I that permits Congress to condition the receipt of federal funds on compliance with federal law. These conditions, according to more than 30 years of Supreme Court …

Structural Deregulation, Jody Freeman, Sharon Jacobs

Publications

Modern critics of the administrative state portray agencies as omnipotent behemoths, invested with vast delegated powers and largely unaccountable to the political branches of government. This picture, we argue, understates agency vulnerability to an increasingly powerful presidency. One source of presidential control over agencies in particular has been overlooked: the systematic undermining of an agency’s ability to execute its statutory mandate. This strategy, which we call “structural deregulation,” is a dangerous and underappreciated aspect of what then-Professor, now-Justice Elena Kagan termed “presidential administration.”

Structural deregulation attacks the core capacities of the bureaucracy. The phenomenon encompasses such practices as leaving agencies …

Agency Genesis And The Energy Transition, Sharon B. Jacobs

Publications

Commentators and policymakers frequently propose new government agencies in response to novel or intractable problems. New agencies can refocus public attention on the problems they regulate. They can attract new talent and bypass calcified or captured channels. But they are also costly, and there is no guarantee that they will be more successful than their predecessors.

This Article examines agency genesis at the state level. In the process, it expands recent thinking about the administrative separation of powers to the states. At the federal level, setting up agency rivalries within the executive branch can be an effective tool for mitigating …

Environmental Law, Disrupted By Covid-19, Rebecca Bratspies, Vanessa Casado Peréz, Robin Kundis Craig, Lissa Griffin, Sarah Krakoff, Keith Hirokawa, Katrina Kuh, Jessica Owley, Melissa Powers, Shannon Roesler, Jonathan Rosenbloom, J. B. Ruhl, Erin Ryan, David Takacs

Publications

For over a year, the COVID-19 pandemic and concerns about systemic racial injustice have highlighted the conflicts and opportunities currently faced by environmental law. Scientists uniformly predict that environmental degradation, notably climate change, will cause a rise in diseases, disproportionate suffering among communities already facing discrimination, and significant economic losses. In this Article, members of the Environmental Law Collaborative examine the legal system’s responses to these crises, with the goal of framing opportunities to reimagine environmental law. The Article is excerpted from their book Environmental Law, Disrupted, to be published by ELI Press later this year.

Administrative Law's Extraordinary Cases, Jonathan Skinner-Thompson

Publications

The Supreme Court's major questions doctrine is grounded in the Chevron framework. Reconstituting it as a "major rules" exception to Chevron or as a non-delegation principle are misguided and create greater uncertainty.

Against Regulatory Stimulus, Erik F. Gerding

Publications

With political constraints on fiscal responses and monetary policy confronting the zero lower bound, policymakers may be tempted to turn to financial deregulation as a tool to stimulate economic growth in a recession, a strategy I label “regulatory stimulus.” This article creates a framework for answer two questions: first, whether and when regulatory stimulus is effective in promoting macroeconomic growth, particularly in a severe recession or liquidity trap; and second, if regulatory stimulus is effective, whether it is worth the potential trade-offs in terms of longer-term macroeconomic policy objectives.

Ultimately, I find grounds for skepticism that financial deregulation can effectively …

Making Litigating Citizenship More Fair, Ming H. Chen

Publications

No abstract provided.

Citizenship Denied: Implications Of The Naturalization Backlog For Noncitizens In The Military, Ming H. Chen

Publications

The immigration system is in crisis. Long lines of asylum seekers at the border and immigrants in the interior spend years waiting for their day in immigration court. This is true in the agencies that process applications for immigration benefits from legal immigrants as well. Since 2016, delays in naturalization have increased to historic proportions. The problem is even worse for military naturalizations, where delays are accompanied by denials and overall declines in military naturalizations. It is the latest front in the battle on legal migration and citizenship.

These impediments to citizenship demonstrate an extreme form of policies collectively dubbed …

Public Purpose Finance: The Government's Role As Lender, Nadav Orian Peer

Publications

This Article explores the workings of Public Purpose Finance, and its role within the U.S. political economy. “Public Purpose Finance” (PPF) refers to the broad range of institutions through which the government extends credit to private borrowers in sectors like housing, education, agriculture and small business. At a total of $10 trillion, PPF roughly equals the entire U.S. corporate bond market, and is around one half of the U.S. Gross national debt (2018 figures). The Article begins by surveying and quantifying the scope of PPF. It then demonstrates that PPF enjoys a considerable degree of insulation from the federal budgetary …

How Much Procedure Is Needed For Agencies To Change “Novel” Regulatory Policies?, Ming Hsu Chen

Publications

The use of guidance documents in administrative law has long been controversial and considered to be one of the most challenging aspects of administrative law. When an agency uses a guidance document to change or make policy, it need not provide notice to the public or allow comment on the new rule; this makes changes easier and faster and less subject to judicial review. Under the Obama Administration, guidance documents were used to implement policy shifts in many areas of administrative law, including civil rights issues such as transgender inclusion and campus sexual harassment and immigration law issues such as …

Remutualization, Erik F. Gerding

Publications

Policymakers need to rediscover the organizational form of business entity as a tool of financial regulation. Recent and classic scholarship has produced evidence that financial institutions organized as alternative entity forms – including investment bank partnerships and banks and insurance companies organized as mutual or cooperatives – tend to take less risk, exploit customers/consumer less, or commit less misconduct compared to counterparts organized as investor-owned corporations. This article builds off the work of Hill and Painter on investment banks organized as partnerships, Hansmann on the history and economics of banks and insurance companies organized as mutuals and cooperatives, and other …

Regulatory De-Arbitrage In Twenty-First Century Cures Act's Health Information Regulation, Craig Konnoth

Publications

Health data regulation can be thought of at two levels. First, the micro- level of regulation has to do with Electronic Health Records (EHRs). Second, the macro-level concerns the networks on which EHRs are transmitted. The micro- and macro-levels of regulation interact. For example, EHRs need to be configured so that they can be transmitted on mandated networks. As a result, the lines do sometimes blur.

That said, the 21st Century Cures Act (Cures) clearly takes a dual approach to regulation. Cures was passed in December 2016 on a bipartisan basis. Its mandate was to address health data regulation at …

Silence And The Second Wall, Ming H. Chen, Zachary New

Publications

The Trump administration has made its clarion call “build the wall.” From the start of the presidential campaign to the government shutdown to the declaration of a national emergency, he has made the wall the centerpiece of his immigration enforcement strategy. While the public attention has been riveted on these dramatic episodes at the southern border of the U.S., many more subtle challenges to legal migration have been introduced and implemented. Collectively, these constitute a second wall – one that is invisible to all but the few who have noticed it. This essay explores the distinctive challenges being posed to …

Copyright Arbitrage, Kristelia A. García

Publications

Regulatory arbitrage—defined as the manipulation of regulatory treatment for the purpose of reducing regulatory costs or increasing statutory earnings—is often seen in heavily regulated industries. An increase in the regulatory nature of copyright, coupled with rapid technological advances and evolving consumer preferences, have led to an unprecedented proliferation of regulatory arbitrage in the area of copyright law. This Article offers a new scholarly account of the phenomenon herein referred to as “copyright arbitrage.”

In some cases, copyright arbitrage may work to expose and/or correct for an extant gap or inefficiency in the regulatory regime. In other cases, copyright arbitrage may …

The Statutory Separation Of Powers, Sharon B. Jacobs

Publications

Separation of powers forms the backbone of our constitutional democracy. But it also operates as an underappreciated structural principle in subconstitutional domains. This Article argues that Congress constructs statutory schemes of separation, checks, and balances through its delegations to administrative agencies. Like its constitutional counterpart, the “statutory separation of powers” seeks to prevent the dominance of factions and ensure policy stability. But separating and balancing statutory authority is a delicate business: the optimal balance is difficult to calibrate ex ante, the balance is unstable, and there are risks that executive agencies in particular might seek expansion of their authority vis-à-vis …

Binary Governance: Lessons From The Gdpr’S Approach To Algorithmic Accountability, Margot E. Kaminski

Publications

Algorithms are now used to make significant decisions about individuals, from credit determinations to hiring and firing. But they are largely unregulated under U.S. law. A quickly growing literature has split on how to address algorithmic decision-making, with individual rights and accountability to nonexpert stakeholders and to the public at the crux of the debate. In this Article, I make the case for why both individual rights and public- and stakeholder-facing accountability are not just goods in and of themselves but crucial components of effective governance. Only individual rights can fully address dignitary and justificatory concerns behind calls for regulating …

The Uses And Abuses Of The Government's Tools Of Information Control, Helen Norton

Publications

No abstract provided.

Drugs' Other Side Effects, Craig J. Konnoth

Publications

Drugs often induce unintended, adverse physiological reactions in those that take them—what we commonly refer to as “side-effects.” However, drugs can produce other, broader, unintended, even non-physiological harms. For example, some argue that taking Truvada, a drug that prevents HIV transmission, increases promiscuity and decreases condom use. Expensive Hepatitis C treatments threaten to bankrupt state Medicaid programs. BiDil, which purported to treat heart conditions for self-identified African-Americans, has been criticized for reifying racial categories. Although the Food & Drug Administration (“FDA”) has broad discretion under the Food, Drugs, and Cosmetics Act (“FDCA”) to regulate drugs, it generally considers only traditional …

Rethinking Public Land Use Planning, Mark Squillace

Publications

The public land use planning process is broken. The land use plans of the principal multiple-use agencies—the United States Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management (“BLM”)—are unnecessarily complex, take too long to complete, monopolize the time and resources of public land management agency staffs, and fail to engage the general public in any meaningful way. Moreover, the end result is too often a plan that is not sufficiently nimble to respond to changing conditions on the ground, a problem that appears to be accelerating due to climate change.

It might seem easy to chalk up these problems to …

Corporations As Conduits: A Cautionary Note About Regulating Hypotheticals, Douglas M. Spencer

Publications

No abstract provided.

The Gdpr’S Version Of Algorithmic Accountability, Margot Kaminski

Publications

No abstract provided.

That Was Close! Reward Reporting Of Cybersecurity “Near Misses”, Jonathan Bair, Steven M. Bellovin, Andrew Manley, Blake Reid, Adam Shostak

Publications

Building, deploying, and maintaining systems with sufficient cybersecurity is challenging. Faster improvement would be valuable to society as a whole. Are we doing as much as we can to improve? We examine robust and long-standing systems for learning from near misses in aviation, and propose the creation of a Cyber Safety Reporting System (CSRS).

To support this argument, we examine the liability concerns which inhibit learning, including both civil and regulatory liability. We look to the way in which cybersecurity engineering and science is done today, and propose that a small amount of ‘policy entrepreneurship’ could have substantial positive impact. …

Leveraging Social Science Expertise In Immigration Policymaking, Ming H. Chen

Publications

The longstanding uncertainty about how policymakers should grapple with social science demonstrating racism persists in the modern administrative state. This Essay examines the uses and misuses of social science and expertise in immigration policymaking. More specifically, it highlights three immigration policies that dismiss social scientific findings and expertise as part of presidential and agency decision-making: border control, crime control, and extreme vetting of refugees to prevent terrorism. The Essay claims that these rejections of expertise undermine both substantive and procedural protections for immigrants and undermine important functions of the administrative state as a curb on irrationality in policymaking. It concludes …

Sanctuary Networks And Integrative Enforcement, Ming Hsu Chen

Publications

My intended focus is on the widespread response--in cities, churches, campuses, and corporations that together comprise "sanctuary networks"--to the Trump Administration's Executive Order 13768 Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States as an instance of the changing relationship between federal, local, and private organizations in the regulation of immigration. After briefly covering the legal background of the Trump Interior E.O., the focus of the Article shifts to the institutional dynamics arising in communities. These institutional dynamics exemplify the beginnings of a reimagined immigration enforcement policy with a more integrative flavor.

Two Pedagogies In Search Of Synergy, Lisa Schultz, Susan Nevelow Mart

Publications

Anyone who has taught a first-year legal research course understands the dilemma: How do we weave research skills into the writing program without sacrificing the quality or quantity of either discipline? In fact, it is difficult and time consuming to interweave any serious legal research instruction into a first-year writing course. What the students need to know is not just how to do a little case law research or how to find a statute: they need to also know how to formulate a research plan, how to evaluate a database, what kind of search works in different information environments, and …

"At Bears Ears We Can Hear The Voices Of Our Ancestors In Every Canyon And On Every Mesa Top": The Creation Of The First Native National Monument, Charles Wilkinson

Publications

No abstract provided.

Pueblo Indian Water Rights: Charting The Unknown, Richard W. Hughes

Publications

This article examines the so-far-unsuccessful efforts to judicially define and quantify the water rights appurtenant to the core land holdings of the 19 New Mexico Pueblos, many of whose lands straddle the Rio Grande. It explains that the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals has squarely held that Pueblo water rights are governed by federal, not state law, and are prior to those of any non-Indian appropriator, but also that the Tenth Circuit acknowledged that it could not say how those rights should be characterized. Part I of the article examines the course of the cases that have sought to achieve …

Entrepreneurial Administration, Philip J. Weiser

Publications

A core failing of today’s administrative state and modern administrative law scholarship is the lack of imagination as to how agencies should operate. On the conventional telling, public agencies follow specific grants of regulatory authority, use the traditional tools of notice-and-comment rulemaking and adjudication, and are checked by judicial review. In reality, however, effective administration depends on entrepreneurial leadership that spearheads policy experimentation and trial-and-error problem-solving, including the development of regulatory programs that use non-traditional tools.

Entrepreneurial administration takes place both at public agencies and private entities, each of which can address regulatory challenges and earn regulatory authority as a …