Law Commons^™

"Streamlining" The Rule Of Law: How The Department Of Justice Is Undermining Judicial Review Of Agency Action, Shruti Rana

Faculty Scholarship

Judicial review of administrative decision making is an essential institutional check on agency power. Recently, however, the Department of Justice dramatically revised its regulations in an attempt to insulate its decision making from public and federal court scrutiny. These “streamlining” rules, carried out in the name of national security and immigration reform, have led to a breakdown in the rule of law in our judicial system. While much attention has been focused on the Department of Justice’s recent attempts to shield executive power from the reach of Congress, its efforts to undermine judicial review have so far escaped such scrutiny. …

Chevron'S Two Steps, Kenneth A. Bamberger, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

The framework for judicial review of administrative interpretations of regulatory statutes set forth in the landmark Chevron U.S.A. v. Natural Resources Defense Council decision prescribes two analytic inquiries, and for good reason. The familiar two-step analysis is best understood as a framework for allocating interpretive authority in the administrative state; it separates questions of statutory implementation assigned to independent judicial judgment (Step One) from questions regarding which the courts role is limited to oversight of agency decisionmaking (Step Two).

The boundary between a reviewing court's decision and oversight roles rests squarely on the question of statutory ambiguity. For while courts, …

On Capturing The Possible Significance Of Institutional Design And Ethos, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

At a recent conference, a new judge from one of the federal courts of appeal – for the United States, the front line in judicial control of administrative action-made a plea to the lawyers in attendance. Please, he urged, in briefing and arguing cases reviewing agency actions, help us judges to understand their broader contexts. So often, he complained, the briefs and arguments are limited to the particular small issues of the case. We get little sense of the broad context in which it arises – the agency responsibilities in their largest sense, the institutional issues that may be at …

Rulemaking And The American Constitution, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

A Constitution that strongly separates legislative from executive activity makes it difficult to reconcile executive adoption of regulations (that is, departmentally adopted texts resembling statutes and having the force of law, if valid) with the proposition that the President is not ‘to be a lawmaker’. Such activity is, of course, an essential of government in the era of the regulatory state. United States courts readily accept the delegation to responsible agencies of authority to engage in it, what we call ‘rulemaking’, so long as it occurs in a framework that permits them to assess the legality of any particular exercise. …