Rule of Law Commons^™

When Do Chinese National Ministries Make Law?, Wei Cui

All Faculty Publications

This paper documents some basic empirical facts about the issuance of formal regulations (FRs) and informal policy directives (IPDs) by China’s national ministries and agencies from 2000 to 2014. Prior scholarship (e.g. Cui 2011, Howson 2012) depicts specific instances of Chinese national agencies announcing substantive new policies (many ultra vires by statutory standards) through IPDs. I use FR and IPD quantities as measures of the agencies’ propensity to resort to legal as opposed to non-legal, merely bureaucratic mechanisms for announcing policy. I find significant variations across agencies in the quantities of FRs issued, both in absolute terms and relative to …

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 …

The Trump Administration And The Rule Of Law, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

Written for a French audience in 2017, this article sought to frame the explosive issues about the Trump presidency in relation to the American trend to strong views of the unitary executive, that in the author's view ignore the striking contrast between to propositions in Article II Section 2 of the Constitution, its only words defining presidential power. Made "Commander in chief" of the military, he is next given the power only to require the opinion in writing from the heads of the executive bodies Congress was expected to create how they intended to carry out the duties Congress had …

Reason-Giving, Rulemaking, And The Rule Of Law, Donald J. Kochan

Donald J. Kochan