Law Commons^™

Chevron Inside The Regulatory State: An Empirical Assessment, Christopher J. Walker

Christopher J. Walker

For three decades, scholars (as well as courts and litigants) have written thousands of articles (and opinions and briefs) concerning the impact of the Chevron deference regime on judicial review of agency statutory interpretation. Little attention, however, has been paid to how Chevron and its progeny have actually shaped statutory interpretation inside the regulatory state. As part of the Fordham Law Review symposium Chevron at 30: Looking Back and Looking Forward, this Essay presents the findings of the first comprehensive empirical investigation into the effect of Chevron and related doctrines on how federal agencies interpret statutes they administer.

The Essay …

Chevron At The Roberts Court: Still Failing After All These Years, Jack M. Beermann

Faculty Scholarship

This article looks at how Chevron deference has fared at the Supreme Court since John G. Roberts became Chief Justice. The article looks at Chevron deference at the Roberts Court from three distinct angles. First, the voting records of individual Justices in cases citing Chevron are examined to shed light on the strength of each Justice’s commitment to deference to agency statutory construction. Second, a select sample of opinions citing Chevron are qualitatively examined to see whether the Roberts Court has been any more successful than its predecessor in constructing a coherent Chevron doctrine. Third, the article looks closely at …

Improving Agencies’ Preemption Expertise With Chevmore Codification, Kent H. Barnett

Scholarly Works

After nearly thirty years, the judicially crafted Chevron and Skidmore judicial-review doctrines have found new life as exotic, yet familiar, legislative tools. When Chevron deference applies, courts employ two steps: they consider whether the statutory provision at issue is ambiguous, and, if so, they defer to an administering agency’s reasonable interpretation. Skidmore deference, in contrast, is a less deferential regime in which courts assume interpretative primacy over statutory ambiguities but defer to agency action based on four factors — the agency’s thoroughness, reasoning, consistency, and overall persuasiveness. In the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, Congress directed courts …

Tentative Interpretations: The Abracadabra Of Administrative Rulemaking And The End Of 'Alaska Hunters', Matthew P. Downer

Vanderbilt Law Review

Agency flexibility is a battlefield. When circumstances change or a new regime takes power, federal agencies often adjust their settled regulations to reflect new realities. There is a persistent struggle, however, between preserving this flexibility and protecting those who relied upon the previous regulations.' When an agency changes course, regulated entities must comply, often with little warning and at great expense. In 1946, Congress passed the Administrative Procedure Act ("APA") to balance these interests by restricting when and how agencies can promulgate and change regulations.

Unsurprisingly, the APA did not achieve a lasting d6tente. Instead, it merely created new fronts …

The Past, Present And Future Of Auer Deference: Mead, Form And Function In Judicial Review Of Agency Interpretations Of Regulations, Michael P. Healy

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The law of judicial review of agency legal interpretations has undergone an important reshaping as a consequence of the Supreme Court decision in United States v. Mead Corp. That decision and the important follow-on decision in National Cable & Telecommunications Ass 'n v. Brand X Internet Services have changed the understanding of the Court's landmark 1984 decision in Chevron, U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. Chevron defined a new era of judicial deference to an agency's interpretation of an ambiguous statute, but the Chevron era has itself been transformed.

These legal developments had seemed to have little consequential …

The Puzzling Presumption Of Reviewability, Nicholas Bagley

Articles

The presumption in favor of judicial review of agency action is a cornerstone of administrative law, accepted by courts and commentators alike as both legally appropriate and obviously desirable. Yet the presumption is puzzling. As with any canon of statutory construction that serves a substantive end, it should find a source in history, positive law, the Constitution, or sound policy considerations. None of these, however, offers a plausible justification for the presumption. As for history, the sort of judicial review that the presumption favors - appellate-style arbitrariness review - was not only unheard of prior to the twentieth century, but …

The Puzzling Presumption Of Reviewability, Nicholas Bagley

Articles

The presumption in favor of judicial review of agency action is a cornerstone of administrative law, accepted by courts and commentators alike as both legally appropriate and obviously desirable. Yet the presumption is puzzling. As with any canon of statutory construction that serves a substantive end, it should find a source in history, positive law, the Constitution, or sound policy considerations. None of these, however, offers a plausible justification for the presumption. As for history, the sort of judicial review that the presumption favors - appellate-style arbitrariness review - was not only unheard of prior to the twentieth century, but …

International Legal Control Of Domestic Administrative Action, Joel P. Trachtman

Joel P Trachtman

International law increasingly is designed to constrain the regulatory activities of countries where these activities have external effects on other countries. While countries retain the right to regulate, it is a qualified right, with a number of restrictions under international trade, investment, finance, human rights, and other areas of international law. The restrictions are often nuanced: while maintaining maximum policy autonomy, countries agree to international legal rules that establish increasingly complex preconditions for national regulatory action. In some cases, preconditions are formulated so as to establish procedural, as distinguished from substantive, predicates for national action. These varying types of preconditions …

The Death Of Tax Court Exceptionalism, Stephanie Hoffer, Christopher J. Walker

Christopher J. Walker

Tax exceptionalism—the view that tax law does not have to play by the administrative law rules that govern the rest of the regulatory state—has come under attack in recent years. In 2011, the Supreme Court rejected such exceptionalism by holding that judicial review of the Treasury Department’s interpretations of the tax code is subject to the same Chevron deference regime that applies throughout the administrative state. The D.C. Circuit followed suit by rejecting the IRS’s position that its notices are not subject to judicial review under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA). This Article calls for the demise of another instance …

A Framework For Judicial Review And Remand In Immigration Law, Collin D. Schueler

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

This Article breaks new ground at the intersection of administrative law and immigration law. One of the more important questions in both fields is whether a reviewing court should resolve a legal issue in the first instance or remand that issue to the agency. This Article advances the novel claim that courts should use the modem framework for judicial review of agency statutory interpretations to inform their resolution of this remand question. Then, using this framework, the Article identifies when remand is and is not appropriate in immigration cases. This critical analysis, which urges a departure from conventional academic wisdom, …

The Underappreciated Role Of The National Environmental Policy Act In Wilderness Designation And Management, Michael Blumm, Lorena Wisehart

Faculty Articles

On its 50th anniversary, the Wilderness Act owes much to the effect of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), both in terms of the number of acres in the national wilderness system and in the management of designated wilderness areas. Courts have closely scrutinized federal land management agency actions that threaten wilderness qualities — and this article maintains that the usual vehicle has been NEPA. Enacted a little over a half-decade after the Wilderness Act, NEPA was instrumental in the doubling of wilderness acres in the 1980s, as Congress added wilderness areas and released other areas to multiple uses in …

Responding To Agency Avoidance Of Oira, Nina A. Mendelson, Jonathan B. Wiener

Articles

This Article proceeds as follows: Part I provides a background of the system of presidential oversight of regulation through OIRA review. Part II analyzes: (1) the incentives for agencies to cooperate with or avoid OIRA, (2) a broad array of agency avoidance tactics, and (3) corresponding response options (especially in a repeat-player relationship). Part III argues that response options to agency avoidance should not be unquestioningly pursued or rejected. Instead, they should be evaluated using many of the same principles OIRA employs in reviewing agency regulation, including a systematic consideration of the benefits and costs of particular response actions and …

In Search Of Skidmore, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

Ever since 1827, the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly observed that when a court is interpreting a statute that falls within the authority of an administrative agency, the court in reaching its own judgment about the statute's meaning should give substantial weight to the agency's view. Repeated again and again over the years in varying formulations, this proposition found its apotheosis in Skidmore v. Swift & Co., a unanimous opinion authored by Justice Jackson in 1944. His opinion took the proposition to be so obvious that no citation was required. Justice Jackson's typically incisive and memorable formulation stuck. It …