Administrative Law Commons^™

A Tragedy Of Novelty: Is For-Cause Removal Protection For The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's Single Director A Fatal Flaw?, Logan Hovie

Boston College Law Review

On January 31, 2018, the en banc United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit held, in PHH Corp. v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (“CFPB”) was permissibly organized under the Supreme Court’s removal power jurisprudence. In doing so, the court found that the CFPB’s structure, which provided the agency’s single director for-cause removal protection, did not impinge on the President’s powers under Article II of the U.S. Constitution. Nonetheless, the fate of the CFPB remains in doubt. The United States Court of Appeals for the Second ...

When The Same Words Mean Different Things: Varjabedian V. Emulex Corp., And The Requirements Of Section 14(E) Of The Exchange Act, Isaac Lederman

Boston College Law Review

On April 20, 2018, in Varjabedian v. Emulex Corp., the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that Section 14(e) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 requires only a showing of negligence, not scienter, to establish a violation. The Ninth Circuit derived that requirement from the fact that Section 14(e) resembles Section 17(a)(2) of the Securities Act of 1933. In reaching this conclusion, the Ninth Circuit split with all the other courts to consider this question. The Second, Third, Fifth, Sixth, and Eleventh Circuits had previously held that Section 14(e) shares ...

287(G) Agreements In The Trump Era, Huyen Pham

Huyen T. Pham

No abstract provided.

Duty Or No Duty? That Is The Question: The Second Circuit Reasserts That A Violation Of Item 303'S Duty To Disclose Can Establish Liability Under Section 10(B), Rebecca Rabinowitz

Boston College Law Review

On March 29, 2016, in Indiana Public Retirement Systems v. SAIC, Inc., the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reaffirmed its earlier conclusion that a violation of the duty to disclose imposed on publicly traded companies by Item 303 of Regulation S-K can constitute a violation of Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. In so doing, the Second Circuit directly conflicted with a decision from the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, Cohen v. NVIDIA Corp. (In re NVIDIA Corp. Securities Litigation), despite the fact that both courts relied upon ...

Who Will Educate Me? Using The Americans With Disabilities Act To Improve Educational Access For Incarcerated Juveniles With Disabilities, Lauren A. Koster

Boston College Law Review

Youth involved with the juvenile justice system present with a higher rate of disability, including mental illness and learning disabilities, than do non-system-involved youth. These young people are often eligible for special education services as provided by the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (“IDEA”). Eligible youth incarcerated in juvenile detention and correctional facilities, however, often fail to receive these services. Education advocates typically bring suits against school districts and correctional institutions alike under the IDEA’s mandate to provide a free appropriate public education to students with disabilities. Unfortunately, this approach is failing because the IDEA is not able ...

Too Plain To Be Misunderstood: Sovereign Immunity Under The Arkansas Constitution, Robert C. Dalby

Arkansas Law Review

The framers of the constitution certainly knew that instances of hardship would result from the prohibition of suits against the State, but they nevertheless elected to write that immunity into the constitution. The language is too plain to be misunderstood, and it is our duty to give effect to it. Given the fluid nature of the law, time is often the greatest enemy of clarity in court precedent. From law students to experienced judges, anyone who has tried to research the doctrine of sovereign immunity under the Arkansas Constitution has surely struggled with that enemy as they sift through the ...

Medical Marijuana In Arkansas: The Risks Of Rushed Drafting, Carol Goforth, Robyn Goforth

Arkansas Law Review

Arkansas voters passed the Arkansas Medical Marijuana Amendment to the state constitution in late 2016. Almost certainly, the vast majority of voters did so without reading or understanding the intricacies of the initiative, and instead voted simply to affirm their desire to permit the medical use of marijuana in the state. Among many other provisions, the amendment imposed a 120 day time limit (later extended by the Arkansas legislature to 180 days) within which the Arkansas Department of Health and other agencies were to adopt rules implementing the voter mandate. While six months might seem like plenty of time in ...

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Rehabilitating The Nuisance Injunction To Protect The Environment, Doug Rendleman

Washington and Lee Law Review

The Trump Administration has reversed the federal government’s role of protecting the environment. The reversal focuses attention on states’ environmental capacity. This Article advocates more vigorous state environmental tort remedies for nuisance and trespass. An injunction is the superior remedy in most successful environmental litigation because it orders correction and improvement. Two anachronistic barriers to an environmental injunction are the New York Court of Appeals’ decision, Boomer v. Atlantic Cement, and Calabresi and Melamed’s early and iconic law-and-economics article, One View of the Cathedral. This Article examines and criticizes both because, by subordinating the injunction to money damages ...

Antidiscrimination Laws And The Administrative State: A Skeptic's Look At Administrative Constitutionalism, David E. Bernstein

Notre Dame Law Review

This Article discusses why administrative agencies charged with enforcing antidiscrimination legislation while implicitly undertaking administrative constitutionalism tend to be inconsiderate of constitutional limitations on government authority in general, and especially of the limitations imposed by the First Amendment’s protection of freedom of expression.

To establish the existence and contours of the problem, Part I of this Article provides context by recounting several detailed examples of how federal, state, and local civil rights agencies have favored broad antidiscrimination enforcement over countervailing constitutional doctrines that impose limits on regulatory authority. These examples include the U.S. Department of Education’s Office ...

The Impact Of The Durbin Amendment On Banks, Merchants, And Consumers, Vladimir Mukharlyamov, Natasha Sarin

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law

After the Great Recession, new regulatory interventions were introduced to protect consumers and reduce the costs of financial products. Some voiced concern that direct price regulation was unlikely to help consumers, because banks offset losses in one domain by increasing the prices that they charge consumers for other products. This paper studies this issue using the Durbin Amendment, which decreased the interchange fees that banks are allowed to charge merchants for processing debit transactions. Merchant interchange fees, previously averaging 2 percent of transaction value, were capped at $0.22, decreasing bank revenue by $6.5 billion annually. The objective of ...

Making Consumer Finance Work, Natasha Sarin

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law

The financial crisis exposed major faultlines in banking and financial markets more broadly. Policymakers responded with far-reaching regulation that created a new agency—the CFPB—and changed the structure and function of these markets.

Consumer advocates cheered reforms as welfare-enhancing, while the financial sector declared that consumers would be harmed by interventions. With a decade of data now available, this Article presents the first empirical examination of the successes and failures of the consumer finance reform agenda. Specifically, I marshal data from every zip code and bank in the United States to test the efficacy of three of the most ...

A Dirty Waste—How Renewable Energy Policies Have Financed The Unsustainable Waste-To-Energy Industry, Hale Mcanulty

Boston College Law Review

The end of the 20th Century saw a major shift in the United States’ approach to energy policy. After decades focused on fossil fuel production, the country began to realize that renewable sources of energy were the way of the future. Motivated by environmental concerns and a realization that oil is a finite resource, the federal government and local governments began adopting economic policies that rewarded investment in and production of renewable, clean technology. Governments relied on both mandates and tax incentives to encourage the use of energy from sources like solar and wind power. Waste-to-Energy (“WTE”) power is another ...

A “Natural” Stand Off Between The Food And Drug Administration And The Courts: The Rise In Food-Labeling Litigation & The Need For Regulatory Reform, Amy-Lee Goodman

Boston College Law Review

Faced with the health and financial toll from escalating rates of chronic disease, consumers are demanding healthier food products and increased transparency regarding the ingredients in their food. Food labels provide the primary means for businesses to communicate with customers about their food products. In response to consumer demand, food companies are stocking grocery store shelves with products claiming to be wholesome, “natural” and healthy. Yet, many of these products are not as healthy or natural as purported. Although both consumers and food manufacturers place importance on the term “natural,” the Food and Drug Administration has refused to define the ...

Who’S Driving That Car?: An Analysis Of Regulatory And Potential Liability Frameworks For Driverless Cars, Madeline Roe

Boston College Law Review

Driverless, or autonomous, cars are being tested on public roadways across the United States. For example, California implemented a new regulation in 2018 that allows manufacturers to test driverless cars without a person inside the vehicle, so long as the manufacturers adhere to numerous requirements. The emergence of these vehicles raises questions about accident liability and the reach of state regulation regarding driverless cars. To address these questions, it is beneficial to look at the liability framework for another artificial intelligence system, such as surgical robots. This Note will explore possible frameworks of liability before arguing in support of further ...

Narrowing The Digital Divide: A Better Broadband Universal Service Program, Daniel Lyons

Daniel Lyons

Universal service has long been an integral component of American telecommunications policy. As more activities move online, it becomes increasingly important to narrow the digital divide by helping low-income Americans get online and by extending broadband networks into unserved areas.

Unfortunately, the Federal Communications Commission’s reforms are unlikely to help solve this problem. The Commission is repurposing an $8 billion telephone subsidy program to focus instead on broadband networks. But when pressed, the agency admits that it has no proof that the program meaningfully affected telephone adoption rates, and it offers little evidence that it will fare any better ...

The Icarus Syndrome: How Credit Rating Agencies Lost Their Quasi Immunity, Norbert Gaillard, Michael Waibel

SMU Law Review

Subsequent to the 2007–2008 subprime crisis, the SEC and the US Senate discovered that it was common practice for major credit rating agencies (CRAs) to produce inflated and inaccurate structured finance ratings. A host of explanations were posited on how this was able to happen from the “issuer pays” model of CRAs and conflicts of interest to underscoring the CRA’s regulatory license and their ensuing insulation from legal liability. Historically, credit ratings were akin to opinions. However, when courts started to consider structured finance ratings as commercial speech in the 2000s, CRAs became more vulnerable to litigation. This ...

Wildearth Guardians V. United States Bureau Of Land Management, Seth Sivinski

Public Land & Resources Law Review

In WildEarth Guardians v. U.S. BLM, the District Court of Colorado showed that economic and developmental uncertainty is an area where agencies are given broad discretion in deciding whether an impact is reasonably foreseeable and requires a further conformity analysis under the Clean Air Act. This case exemplifies the tactical limitation of using climate change and the science around it to force greater analysis of projects undertaken by federal agencies. However, the court presented a potential roadmap for successful future challenges.

Predictability For Privacy In Data Driven Government, Jordan Blanke, Janine Hiller

Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology

No abstract provided.

Solenex Llc V. Jewell, F. Aaron Rains

Public Land & Resources Law Review

In Solenex LLC v. Jewell, the Secretary of the Interior cancelled a highly contentious oil and gas lease in Montana’s Badger-Two Medicine area, an environmentally sensitive and culturally significant area to the Blackfeet Tribe, nearly thirty years after the lease had been issued. Solenex, a Louisiana based oil and gas company and holder of the lease, brought this action to enjoin the cancellation. The District Court for the District of Columbia agreed with Solenex and found that the Secretary’s decision took an unreasonable amount of time and violated good-faith contractual obligations. On these grounds, the court found the ...