Disclosure's Effects: Wikileaks And Transparency, Mark Fenster
Feb 2012
Disclosure's Effects: Wikileaks And Transparency, Mark Fenster
Mark Fenster
Constitutional, criminal, and administrative laws regulating government transparency, and the theories that support them, rest on the assumption that the disclosure of information has transformative effects: disclosure can inform, enlighten, and energize the public, or it can create great harm or stymie government operations. To resolve disputes over difficult cases, transparency laws and theories typically balance disclosure’s beneficial effects against its harmful ones. WikiLeaks and its vigilante approach to massive document leaks challenge the underlying assumption about disclosure’s effects in two ways. First, WikiLeaks’s ability to receive and distribute leaked information cheaply, quickly, and seemingly unstoppably enables it to bypass …
Regulating Land Use In A Constitutional Shadow: The Institutional Contexts Of Exactions, Mark Fenster
Dec 2006
Regulating Land Use In A Constitutional Shadow: The Institutional Contexts Of Exactions, Mark Fenster
Mark Fenster
In a refreshingly clear and comprehensive decision issued towards the end of its 2004 Term, the Supreme Court explained in Lingle v. Chevron (2005) that the Takings Clause requires compensation only for the effects of a regulation on an individual’s property rights. Under the substantive due process doctrine, by contrast, courts engage in a deferential inquiry into both a regulation’s validity and the means by which the regulation attempts to meet the government’s objective. Lingle’s explanation appeared to cast doubt on the doctrinal foundation and reach of Nollan v. California Coastal Commission (1987) and Dolan v. City of Tigard (1994), …
The Takings Clause, Version 2005: The Legal Process Of Constitutional Property Rights, Mark Fenster
Dec 2006
The Takings Clause, Version 2005: The Legal Process Of Constitutional Property Rights, Mark Fenster
Mark Fenster
The three takings decisions that the Supreme Court issued at the end of its October 2004 Term marked a stunning reversal of the Court’s efforts the past three decades to use the Takings Clause to define a set of constitutional property rights. The regulatory takings doctrine, which once loomed as a significant threat to the modern regulatory state, now appears after Lingle v. Chevron to be a relatively tame, if complicated, check on exceptional instances of regulatory abuse. At the same time, the Public Use Clause, formerly an inconsequential limitation on the state’s eminent domain authority, now appears ripe for …
The Opacity Of Transparency, Mark Fenster
Dec 2004
The Opacity Of Transparency, Mark Fenster
Mark Fenster
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 …
Takings Formalism And Regulatory Formulas: Exactions And The Consequences Of Clarity, Mark Fenster
Dec 2003
Takings Formalism And Regulatory Formulas: Exactions And The Consequences Of Clarity, Mark Fenster
Mark Fenster
A vocal minority of the U.S. Supreme Court recently announced its suspicion that lower courts and state and local administrative agencies are systematically ignoring constitutional rules intended to limit, through heightened judicial review, exactions as a land use regulatory tool. Exactions are the concessions local governments require of property owners as conditions for the issuance of the entitlements that enable the intensified use of real property. In two cases decided over the past two decades, Nollan v. California Coastal Commission (1987) and Dolan v. City of Tigard (1994), the Court has established under the Takings Clause a logic and metrics …
The Birth Of A "Logical System": Thurman Arnold And The Making Of Modern Administrative Law, Mark Fenster
Dec 2003
The Birth Of A "Logical System": Thurman Arnold And The Making Of Modern Administrative Law, Mark Fenster
Mark Fenster
Much of what we recognize as contemporary administrative law emerged during the 1920s and 1930s, a period when a group of legal academics attempted to aid Progressive Era and New Deal regulatory efforts by crafting a legitimating system for the federal administrative state. Their system assigned competent, expert institutions—most notably administrative agencies and the judiciary—well-defined roles: Agencies would utilize their vast, specialized knowledge and abilities to correct market failures, while courts would provide a limited but crucial oversight of agency operations. This Article focuses both on this first generation of administrative law scholarship, which included most prominently Felix Frankfurter and …