Public Law and Legal Theory Commons^™

Bureaucratic Resistance And The National Security State, Rebecca Ingber

Faculty Scholarship

Modern accounts of the national security state tend toward one of two opposing views of bureaucratic tensions within it: At one extreme, the executive branch bureaucracy is a shadowy “deep state,” unaccountable to the public or even to the elected President. On this account, bureaucratic obstacles to the President’s agenda are inherently suspect, even dangerous. At the other end, bureaucratic resistance to the President represents a necessary benevolent constraint on an otherwise imperial executive, the modern incarnation of the separation of powers, as the traditional checks on the President of the courts and Congress have fallen down on the job. …

Disclaiming Property, Michael Pappas

Faculty Scholarship

Can Congress pick and choose when it must follow the Constitution? One would expect not, and yet the Supreme Court has allowed it to do so. In multiple statutory programs, Congress has disclaimed constitutional property protections for valuable interests that otherwise serve as property. The result is billions of dollars’ worth of “disclaimed property” that can be bought, sold, mortgaged, or leased, but that can also be revoked at any moment without due process or just compensation.

Disclaimed property already represents a great source of value, and property disclaimers are at the core of major recent policies ranging from natural …