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Articles 1 - 19 of 19
Full-Text Articles in Public Law and Legal Theory
Reflections On The Effects Of Federalism On Opioid Policy, Matthew B. Lawrence
Reflections On The Effects Of Federalism On Opioid Policy, Matthew B. Lawrence
Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)
No abstract provided.
The Opioid Litigation: The Fda Is Mia, Catherine M. Sharkey
The Opioid Litigation: The Fda Is Mia, Catherine M. Sharkey
Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)
It is readily agreed that federal preemption of state tort law alters the balance between federal and state power. Federal preemption is a high-profile defense in almost all modern products liability cases. It is thus surprising to see how little attention has been given to federal preemption by courts and commentators in the opioid litigation. Opioid litigation provides a lens through which I explore the role of state and federal courts and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in striking the right balance of power. My purpose here is not to resolve the divide among the few courts that have …
Dimensions Of Delegation, Cary Coglianese
Dimensions Of Delegation, Cary Coglianese
All Faculty Scholarship
How can the nondelegation doctrine still exist when the Supreme Court over decades has approved so many pieces of legislation that contain unintelligible principles? The answer to this puzzle emerges from recognition that the intelligibility of any principle dictating the basis for lawmaking is but one characteristic defining that authority. The Court has acknowledged five other characteristics that, taken together with the principle articulating the basis for executive decision-making, constitute the full dimensionality of any grant of lawmaking authority and hold the key to a more coherent rendering of the Court’s application of the nondelegation doctrine. When understood in dimensional …
Our Administered Constitution: Administrative Constitutionalism From The Founding To The Present, Sophia Z. Lee
Our Administered Constitution: Administrative Constitutionalism From The Founding To The Present, Sophia Z. Lee
All Faculty Scholarship
This article argues that administrative agencies have been primary interpreters and implementers of the federal Constitution throughout the history of the United States, although the scale and scope of this "administrative constitutionalism" has changed significantly over time as the balance of opportunities and constraints has shifted. Courts have nonetheless cast an increasingly long shadow over the administered Constitution. In part, this is because of the well-known expansion of judicial review in the 20th century. But the shift has as much to do with changes in the legal profession, legal theory, and lawyers’ roles in agency administration. The result is that …
Occupational Licensing And The Limits Of Public Choice Theory, Gabriel Scheffler, Ryan Nunn
Occupational Licensing And The Limits Of Public Choice Theory, Gabriel Scheffler, Ryan Nunn
All Faculty Scholarship
Public choice theory has long been the dominant lens through which economists and other scholars have viewed occupational licensing. According to the public choice account, practitioners favor licensing because they want to reduce competition and drive up their own wages. This essay argues that the public choice account has been overstated, and that it ironically has served to distract from some of the most important harms of licensing, as well as from potential solutions. We emphasize three specific drawbacks of this account. First, it is more dismissive of legitimate threats to public health and safety than the research warrants. Second, …
The Self-Delegation False Alarm: Analyzing Auer Deference's Effect On Agency Rules, Daniel E. Walters
The Self-Delegation False Alarm: Analyzing Auer Deference's Effect On Agency Rules, Daniel E. Walters
All Faculty Scholarship
Auer deference holds that reviewing courts should defer to agencies when the latter interpret their own preexisting regulations. This doctrine relieves pressure on agencies to undergo costly notice-and-comment rulemaking each time interpretation of existing regulations is necessary. But according to some leading scholars and jurists, the doctrine actually encourages agencies to promulgate vague rules in the first instance, augmenting agency power and violating core separation of powers norms in the process. The claim that Auer perversely encourages agencies to “self-delegate”—that is, to create vague rules that can later be informally interpreted by agencies with latitude due to judicial deference—has helped …
Preserving Life By Ranking Rights, John William Draper
Preserving Life By Ranking Rights, John William Draper
Librarian Scholarship at Penn Law
Border walls, abortion, and the death penalty are the current battlegrounds of the right to life. We will visit each topic and more in this paper, as we consider ranking groups of constitutional rights.
The enumerated rights of the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments—life, liberty, and property—merit special treatment. They have a deeper and richer history that involves ranking. Ranking life in lexical priority over liberty and property rights protects life first and maximizes safe liberty and property rights in the absence of a significant risk to life. This is not new law; aspects of it …
What Congress's Repeal Efforts Can Teach Us About Regulatory Reform, Cary Coglianese, Gabriel Scheffler
What Congress's Repeal Efforts Can Teach Us About Regulatory Reform, Cary Coglianese, Gabriel Scheffler
All Faculty Scholarship
Major legislative actions during the early part of the 115th Congress have undermined the central argument for regulatory reform measures such as the REINS Act, a bill that would require congressional approval of all new major regulations. Proponents of the REINS Act argue that it would make the federal regulatory system more democratic by shifting responsibility for regulatory decisions away from unelected bureaucrats and toward the people’s representatives in Congress. But separate legislative actions in the opening of the 115th Congress only call this argument into question. Congress’s most significant initiatives during this period — its derailed attempts to repeal …
From Treaties To International Commitments: The Changing Landscape Of Foreign Relations Law, Jean Galbraith
From Treaties To International Commitments: The Changing Landscape Of Foreign Relations Law, Jean Galbraith
All Faculty Scholarship
Sometimes the United States makes international commitments in the manner set forth in the Treaty Clause. But far more often it uses congressional-executive agreements, sole executive agreements, and soft law commitments. Foreign relations law scholars typically approach these other processes from the perspective of constitutional law, seeking to determine the extent to which they are constitutionally permissible. In contrast, this Article situates the myriad ways in which the United States enters into international commitments as the product not only of constitutional law, but also of international law and administrative law. Drawing on all three strands of law provides a rich …
The Bounds Of Executive Discretion In The Regulatory State, Cary Coglianese, Christopher S. Yoo
The Bounds Of Executive Discretion In The Regulatory State, Cary Coglianese, Christopher S. Yoo
All Faculty Scholarship
What are the proper bounds of executive discretion in the regulatory state, especially over administrative decisions not to take enforcement actions? This question, which, just by asking it, would seem to cast into some doubt the seemingly absolute discretion the executive branch has until now been thought to possess, has become the focal point of the latest debate to emerge over the U.S. Constitution’s separation of powers. That ever‐growing, heated debate is what motivated more than two dozen distinguished scholars to gather for a two‐day conference held late last year at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, a conference organized …
The Judicial Role In Constraining Presidential Nonenforcement Discretion: The Virtues Of An Apa Approach, Daniel E. Walters
The Judicial Role In Constraining Presidential Nonenforcement Discretion: The Virtues Of An Apa Approach, Daniel E. Walters
All Faculty Scholarship
Scholars, lawyers, and, indeed, the public at large increasingly worry about what purposive presidential inaction in enforcing statutory programs means for the rule of law and how such discretionary inaction can fit within a constitutional structure that compels Presidents to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." Yet those who have recognized the problem have been hesitant to assign a role for the court in policing the constitutional limits they articulate, mostly because of the strain on judicial capacity that any formulation of Take Care Clause review would cause. In this Article, I argue that courts still can and …
The Ordinary Remand Rule And The Judicial Toolbox For Agency Dialogue, Christopher J. Walker
The Ordinary Remand Rule And The Judicial Toolbox For Agency Dialogue, Christopher J. Walker
Christopher J. Walker
When a court concludes that an agency’s decision is erroneous, the ordinary rule is to remand to the agency to consider the issue anew (as opposed to the court deciding the issue itself). Despite that the Supreme Court first articulated this ordinary remand rule in the 1940s and has rearticulated it repeatedly over the years, little work has been done to understand how the rule works in practice, much less whether it promotes the separation-of-powers values that motivate the rule. This Article is the first to conduct such an investigation—focusing on judicial review of agency immigration adjudications and reviewing the …
Introduction To The Workplace Constitution From The New Deal To The New Right, Sophia Z. Lee
Introduction To The Workplace Constitution From The New Deal To The New Right, Sophia Z. Lee
All Faculty Scholarship
Today, most American workers do not have constitutional rights on the job. As The Workplace Constitution shows, this outcome was far from inevitable. Instead, American workers have a long history of fighting for such rights. Beginning in the 1930s, civil rights advocates sought constitutional protections against racial discrimination by employers and unions. At the same time, a conservative right-to-work movement argued that the Constitution protected workers from having to join or support unions. Those two movements, with their shared aim of extending constitutional protections to American workers, were a potentially powerful combination. But they sought to use those protections to …
Defragmentation Of Public International Law Through Interpretation: A Methodological Proposal, Anne Van Aaken
Defragmentation Of Public International Law Through Interpretation: A Methodological Proposal, Anne Van Aaken
Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies
Fragmentation of public international law (PIL) is perceived as a growing problem and answers to it are proliferating. International courts and tribunals are adjudicating ever more on issues that would be considered-were they not transnational or international in nature-constitutional problems. In national law, countervailing values, or intra-constitutional conflicts, are reconciled through a balancing of those values that is usually embedded in the application of the proportionality principle. A similar mechanism in PIL remains underdeveloped from a methodological point of view. This article aims to develop a methodological proposal for defragmentation through interpretation, drawing on legal theory, to be more precise …
Introducción Al Análisis Económico Del Derecho Administrativo / Introduction To Administrative Law And Economics, Andres Palacios Lleras
Introducción Al Análisis Económico Del Derecho Administrativo / Introduction To Administrative Law And Economics, Andres Palacios Lleras
Andrés Palacios Lleras
El estudio y la enseñanza del derecho administrativo colombiano dejan mucho que desear, especialmente en lo que respecta al estudio del derecho como fenómeno social. Éste tiende a ser presentado como un cuerpo de normas políticamente neutrales, construido a partir de categorías conceptuales muy abstractas, y coherente. Como resultado de ello, asume una posición “normativista” que ignora el contexto social en el que lleva a la producción e interpretación de las normas jurídicas. Este artículo sugiere que un cambio conceptual puede ser muy útil para “curar” al análisis del derecho administrativo de los males que lo aquejan. Sugiere que el …
Ripe Standing Vines And The Jurisprudential Tasting Of Matured Legal Wines – And Law & Bananas: Property And Public Choice In The Permitting Process, Donald J. Kochan
Ripe Standing Vines And The Jurisprudential Tasting Of Matured Legal Wines – And Law & Bananas: Property And Public Choice In The Permitting Process, Donald J. Kochan
Donald J. Kochan
From produce to wine, we only consume things when they are ready. The courts are no different. That concept of “readiness” is how courts address cases and controversies as well. Justiciability doctrines, particularly ripeness, have a particularly important role in takings challenges to permitting decisions. The courts largely hold that a single permit denial does not give them enough information to evaluate whether the denial is in violation of law. As a result of this jurisprudential reality, regulators with discretion have an incentive to use their power to extract rents from those that need their permission. Non-justiciability of permit denials …
The Opacity Of Transparency, Mark Fenster
The Opacity Of Transparency, Mark Fenster
ExpressO
The normative concept of transparency, along with the open government laws that purport to create a transparent public system of governance promise the world—a democratic and accountable state above all, and a peaceful, prosperous, and efficient one as well. But transparency, in its role as the theoretical justification for a set of legal commands, frustrates all parties affected by its ambiguities and abstractions. The public’s engagement with transparency in practice yields denials of reasonable requests for essential government information, as well as government meetings that occur behind closed doors. Meanwhile, state officials bemoan the significantly impaired decision-making processes that result …
The Unitary Executive In The Modern Era, 1945–2004, Christopher S. Yoo, Steven G. Calabresi, Anthony J. Colangelo
The Unitary Executive In The Modern Era, 1945–2004, Christopher S. Yoo, Steven G. Calabresi, Anthony J. Colangelo
All Faculty Scholarship
Since the impeachment of President Clinton, there has been renewed debate over whether Congress can create institutions such as special counsels and independent agencies that restrict the president's control over the administration of the law. Initially, debate centered on whether the Constitution rejected the "executive by committee" used by the Articles of Confederation in favor of a "unitary executive," in which all administrative authority is centralized in the president. More recently, the debate has focused on historical practices. Some scholars suggest that independent agencies and special counsels are such established features of the constitutional landscape that any argument in favor …
Legislative Formality, Administrative Rationality, Harold H. Bruff
Legislative Formality, Administrative Rationality, Harold H. Bruff
Publications
No abstract provided.