Law Commons^™

This Land Is Our Land: Addressing Foreign Ownership Of Agricultural Land In The United States, Will Miller

Kentucky Journal of Equine, Agriculture, & Natural Resources Law

In this note, Will Miller examines the rapid increase in foreign ownership of U.S. agricultural land and the national security and food security risks it creates. He explains that the Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act (AFIDA) only requires reporting of foreign ownership but imposes no restrictions, leaving regulation largely to a patchwork of state laws. Miller argues for federal oversight, contending that matters of foreign affairs and national security are best handled at the national level. He proposes a comprehensive federal regulatory scheme which would set nationwide minimum standards such as prohibiting ownership by foreign adversaries and capping total foreign-held …

The Impact Of Veterinary Stewardship Program Implementations On Backyard Chicken Farming In Rural Georgia, Lauren Ashley Herrin

Kentucky Journal of Equine, Agriculture, & Natural Resources Law

In this article, Lauren Ashley Herrin examines the impacts of new FDA veterinary stewardship regulations on backyard chicken farming in rural Georgia. She explains that requiring prescriptions for previously over-the-counter antibiotics disproportionately harms low-income and rural communities by limiting access to affordable veterinary care, worsening risks of disease spread and public health threats. Herrin argues for policy approaches that balance antimicrobial resistance concerns with the realities of rural accessibility. She proposes solutions such as telehealth veterinary consultations, scholarship programs to encourage rural veterinary practice, and expanding prescriptive authority for veterinary technicians to ensure sustainable animal health care in underserved areas

Pesticide Lies! A Call For Epa Action As Recent Judicial Decisions Reveal The Harmful Truth Resulting From Exposure, Stevi Whitman

Kentucky Journal of Equine, Agriculture, & Natural Resources Law

In this note, Stevi Whitman analyzes the dangers of weak pesticide regulation in the United States. Whitman explains that the EPA’s reliance on the vague “unreasonable adverse effects” standard under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA) allows harmful products like Roundup to remain on the market despite strong evidence of health risks. Whitman argues for strengthening U.S. pesticide laws to match the European Union’s stricter safety threshold. She proposes amending FIFRA to require proactive bans on hazardous pesticides and greater accountability from manufacturers to better protect public health and the environment.

Doge's Matrix Structure And Presidential Power, Jason Marisam

Faculty Scholarship

At the start of his second term, President Trump created the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a novel White House entity tasked with reshaping the federal bureaucracy. Far more than a traditional advisory commission, DOGE employed a matrix structure that embedded staff across executive agencies, establishing dual reporting lines to both agency heads and the White House. This essay argues that DOGE’s organizational design represents a structural innovation in presidential control and an evolution of the longstanding “czar” model. Drawing on organizational and principal-agent theories, the essay explores how the matrix structure enhanced the President’s capacity to monitor agency behavior, …

A Constitutional View Of Administrative Agencies, Anthony J. Diego

Honors Undergraduate Theses

This research focuses on a nuanced area of American law and history: the constitutionality of administrative agencies. Determining their constitutionality requires a sound and fundamental understanding of administrative agencies’ history and purpose, as well as applicable constitutional principles. Reliance on core legal and historical documents founding the United States, as well as existing literature analyzing them, is essential to this determination. Administrative agencies have existed within the United States government since the Founding, though not without scrutiny and exception to government operations. Recently, Supreme Court precedent dramatically changed agency operative functions, making it now an opportune time to analyze the …

Transparency, Accountability, And Influence In The International Investment Law System, Jarrod Wong, Jason Yackee

Michigan Journal of International Law

This article offers the first interdisciplinary critique of transparency in international investment law (“IIL”) that draws on transparency-skeptical and accountability scholarship in political science and public administration. Not only has the expansive IIL literature overlooked these disciplines, but much of it fails to define the core concept of transparency. Building on contributions from the fields of administrative law, international relations, and system theory in classic political science, we provide a novel functionalist account of transparency that traces a line from transparency to accountability to influence in the IIL system.

We make three arguments. First, transparency involves access to data that …

Green Dividends: A Case Study In Green Dividends And The Conditions For Private Ordering Solutions, Anne M. Tucker

Seattle University Law Review

This Essay introduces a novel private ordering solution to facilitate corporate investments in pro-social and environmental initiatives: Green dividends. Green dividends are an optional increase in shareholder dividends that are returned to the company to be reinvested in environmental initiatives or kept by a shareholder.

Green dividends pose an alternative to the current gridlocked debate that corporations can’t, won’t, shouldn’t, and shouldn’t even try to act in pro-social or environmental ways. Turning the common refrains on their head converts each narrative into an element for a successful private ordering solution: authority, accountability, shareholder buy-in, and government- backed enforcement. With Green …

Does Climate Disclosure Work To Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions? Emerging Evidence Suggests Cautious Optimism, Cynthia A. Williams

Seattle University Law Review

Significant regulatory resources have been spent developing global, voluntary climate and sustainability disclosure standards, such as the TCFD, TNRD, and ISSB’s Sustainability and Climate Disclosure standards, or domestically required disclosures, such as in the EU and in the U.S. Thus, it is important to evaluate whether this disclosure, particularly voluntary, qualitative disclosure, will have the power to shift the allocation of capital, will have a significant effect on the management of climate risk within firms, and ultimately will reduce climate change risk and biodiversity loss.

In this Article, several interrelated questions will be discussed. First, what does the empirical evidence …

Denied By Dysfunctional Design: How The Dd-293 Application Form Thwarts Pro Se Veteran Applicants’ Discharge Upgrade Requests., Jessica Lynn Wherry

American University Law Review

Although most military service members receive an Honorable discharge at the completion of their service, thousands of former service members are discharged under less-than-honorable conditions, often for misconduct that is likely the result of a mental health condition, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD ), traumatic brain injury, sexual assault, or sexual harassment. Veterans with a less-than-honorable discharge are ineligible for most veterans benefits. The consequences can be dire for these former service members, including homelessness, unemployment, mental health conditions, criminal involvement, and suicide. These veterans can restore their access to benefits by appealing to a military discharge review board, seeking …

The Federal General Counsel, Law, And Our Democracy At A Crossroads, Seth Frotman

Michigan Law Review Online

This speech, given by the general counsel of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) on January 7, 2025, examines how federal government lawyers can help ensure that laws are faithfully administered to address the contemporary challenges facing American citizens. Despite the CFPB’s successes in protecting consumers from predatory financial practices—particularly amid the rapid digital transformation of the economy—undemocratic forces have increasingly rigged the legal system to serve as both sword and shield for the powerful. The speech describes how judge-made doctrines like “major questions” have been weaponized to disempower Congress from writing statutes with enduring relevance. These challenges represent an …

The Case For Contingent Regulatory Sunsets, Jeffrey D. Manns

Indiana Law Journal

Cost-benefit analysis is at the core of regulatory impact analysis for every proposed rule or regulation and is designed to be a structural constraint on the administrative state. The challenge is ex ante cost-benefit analysis necessarily rests on many assumptions, and much more information is available about a regulation’s impact after it has been implemented. But ex post cost-benefit analysis is ad hoc and infrequent in spite of efforts by numerous presidential administrations to promote regulatory lookbacks.

I propose institutionalizing “contingent regulatory sunsets” to ensure that rules and regulations have the positive impact in practice that administrative agencies intended. I …

Public-Private Partnerships After Murthy V. Missouri, Danielle Keats Citron, Jeff Stautberg

Indiana Law Journal

This Essay considers the future of public-private collaboration in the wake of the Murthy v. Missouri litigation, which cast doubt on the constitutionality of information sharing between federal agencies and social media companies. The litigation has been a good and a bad teacher. On one hand, the lower court decisions made legible the risks to free expression, accountability, transparency, and intimate privacy posed by government-industry collaborations. On the other hand, the litigation chilled information sharing between federal agencies, state election officials, and social media companies at the moment that such collaboration could and should help protect against foreign malign influence …

Ftc V. Amazon: A Turning Point For Antitrust Law?, Matthew Cole Conover

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

The United States is experiencing crippling economic inequalities that harken back to the Gilded Age. For the first time, legal scholars have turned to antitrust law to reverse this alarming trend. These scholars, including current Federal Trade Commission Chairwoman Lina Khan, are testing this ambitious theory in the E-commerce industry. E-commerce is a market largely dominated by one company: Amazon. With its dominance, Amazon lures small businesses into its third-party seller marketplace, where it controls those business’s prices and punishes those that resist. Lina Kahn’s FTC has formally launched its litigation campaign against Amazon, claiming that the company has violated …

Administrative Forum Shopping, Amy L. Stein

UF Law Faculty Publications

Allowing private parties in litigation to stack the deck in their favor through forum shopping is standard fare in the United States. But not everyone realizes that public legislators engage in a similar exercise when they stack the deck in one party’s favor through “jurisdiction-stripping” or “jurisdiction-channeling” provisions. Congress can strip federal courts of all or some of its jurisdiction, channel jurisdiction over a particular class of cases into one particular court, and even strip the U.S. Supreme Court of its appellate jurisdiction. Understandably, this last category has received the most attention, as scholars are drawn to the penultimate conflict …

The Rise And [?] Of Anti-Administrativism, Gary Lawson

UF Law Faculty Publications

Scholars have proclaimed the administrative state to be "Under Siege" or subject to a "Never-Ending Assault." Was the election of President Donald Trump on November 5, 2024 the sixth, if not yet the seventh, day around the walls? 

This seems an appropriate time to consider the present and future of opposition to the administrative state – something that has come to be dubbed "anti-administrativism." The first task, as is usually the case when one seeks intellectual clarity, is to figure out what one is talking about. What is this "anti-administrativism"? Without knowing the answer to that seemingly simple question, one …

Executive Order 14330: A Solution In Search Of A Problem, Edward A. Zelinsky

Cardozo Law Review de•novo

President Trump’s Executive Order 14330 proclaims its determination to “democratiz[e] access to alternative investments for 401(k) investors.” Among its other provisions, Executive Order 14330 requires the Department of Labor (DOL) to “clarify the duties that a fiduciary owes to plan participants.” Such clarification shall “relieve the regulatory burdens and litigation risk that” allegedly deny 401(k) participants access to alternative investments. However, the order states, DOL’s administrative guidance on alternative investments must be “consistent with applicable law.”

The Failure Of Fcc Diversity Initiatives: A Postmortem And A Proposal, Christopher Terry, David Pritchard

Indiana Journal of Law and Social Equality

No abstract provided.

"Then What?": A Framework For Life Without Chevron, Gary Lawson

UF Law Faculty Publications

The Supreme Court overruled Chevron in Loper Bright Enterprises, Inc. v. Raimondo and Relentless, Inc. v. Dep’t of Commerce. What happens next? What should happen next?

This essay does not try to answer either of those important questions. Rather, it seeks to provide a framework to promote careful thinking about those questions. Specifically, any predictive or prescriptive account of the law governing judicial review of federal agency legal interpretations needs to think carefully about four issues.

First, what does “deference” actually mean in any given context? “Deference” can mean anything from polite respect to absolute obeisance, and everything in …

Jbs’S Initial Public Offering: Threats To Environmental And Human Rights, Kayla Thompson

Indiana Journal of Law and Social Equality

This paper centers around the decision to be made regarding JBS, the world’s largest meat company, wanting to list shares on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), and the environmental and social impacts that could result from the Security and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) approval. JBS has been at the center of various controversies over the last several years, including sourcing cattle from ranches acquired through illegal deforestation, engaging in greenwashing practices, incorrectly reporting greenhouse gas emissions, and engaging in human rights abuses. Many environmental groups have filed complaints with the SEC concerning JBS’s bid to list on the NYSE. The …

The Lacey Act: Balancing The Scales Of Federal Authority And Individual Liberty, Bradley Kwon

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis examines the balance between federal authority and individual liberties within the framework of American federalism, using the Lacey Act as a case study. Enacted in 1900 to regulate wildlife trafficking, the Lacey Act has undergone significant amendments that expanded federal authority and reshaped the balance of power between state governments and individual rights. By integrating theoretical insights from scholars such as Martha Derthick and Dennis LaGory, this thesis explores the federal government’s transition from a cooperative model to a coercive one, particularly during the Rights Revolution of the 1960s. The analysis highlights the legislative history of the Lacey …

A Republic Not Kept: The Administrative State As A Constitutional Break, Noah Swanson

CMC Senior Theses

Conservatives often talk about the American people being governed by “unaccountable bureaucrats” who go against fundamental values of democracy and the Founding Fathers. While a common narrative, little evidence is given to reinforce these strong claims. This thesis works to investigate the accountability of the administrative state and its relationship to the philosophy of the Founding Fathers. Accountability is defined as administrative actions (regulations, notices, etc.) being in line with the original intent of the Congress that passed the action’s empowering statute. If the administrative state goes beyond the mere execution of these statutes and thereby the intent of the …

Destroy, Rebuild, Repeat: How To Break The Climate Disaster Cycle, Mark P. Nevitt

Faculty Articles

Climate change is fundamentally reshaping how we live, where we live, and whether we invest in or retreat from climate-exposed communities—but climate and disaster law is not changing with the climate. This legal latency is driven by antiquated statutes, doctrines, and policies that have not kept pace with the climate moment. Ex ante adaptation decisions governing where to live are life and death choices that shape ex post disaster response. Laws and policies should facilitate sound climate decisionmaking, but too often they frustrate individual and governmental decisions on whether to stay or retreat. In this Article, I argue that laws …

Chevron Stare Decisis In A Post-Loper Bright World, Jonathan R. Nash

Faculty Articles

In its June 2024 decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the Supreme Court jettisoned the longstanding Chevron doctrine, which had directed courts to defer to agencies’ reasonable interpretations of ambiguous statutes. The Loper Bright Court attempted to minimize the substantial effect this change would have on administrative law and governance by declaring that “[t]he holdings” of cases that relied on the Chevron test to conclude “that specific agency actions are lawful...are still subject to statutory stare decisis despite our change in interpretive methodology.” But there are two problems with Chevron stare decisis. First, Chevron stare decisis is …

Defederalizing Opioid Addiction Care, Matthew B. Lawrence

Faculty Articles

Lack of access to evidence-based care for drug addiction is an urgent problem amid a decades-long overdose crisis that kills tens of thousands of Americans a year. Opioid addiction is the primary driver of overdoses today, and medicines exist to treat such addiction that can dramatically improve quality of life while reducing the risk of deadly overdose by more than half. Yet fewer than one in four of the nine million Americans who need such evidence-based medical care for their addiction receive it. Chief among barriers to access are restrictive and burdensome federal requirements limiting the use of narcotic medications …

Harmonizing Delegation And Deference After Loper Bright, Kristin Hickman, Amy J. Wildermuth

Articles

By overturning Chevron, the Supreme Court's Loper Bright decision clearly changed the way in which courts must approach agency actions interpreting statutes. But Loper Bright stopped well short of declaring that courts should always ignore agency interpretations and only interpret statutes using their independent judgment. In two critical paragraphs, the Court acknowledged that some statutory provisions delegate discretionary authority to agencies counseled a more restrained judicial review for reasoned decisionmaking when agencies exercise such power. But, whereas Chevron focused nearly exclusively on the statutory word or phrase that an agency was endeavoring to interpret and implement, Loper Bright shifts …

Tribute To Sally Katzen, Rachel Rothschild

Articles

I have been excitedly waiting for the opportunity to speak to you all about Sally tonight. I don't think you could find anyone more deserving of this award than she is. You have heard this evening about her extraordinary professional accomplishments and the indelible mark she has made on administrative law over the course of her career. But in addition to her achievements in government service and private practice, Sally will leave a lasting and significant legacy through the students that she taught at NYU. I hope I can do justice to the enormous role she has played in my …

Statutory Liquidation, Daniel Deacon

Articles

When might practice by the political branches settle the meaning of legal text? That question has mostly been taken up in the constitutional setting, with one strand of scholarship taking inspiration from Madison's statement in Federalist No. 37, that "{a}ll new laws ... are considered as more or less obscure and equivocal until their meaning be liquidated and ascertained by a series ef particular discussions and aqjudications." The prospect that post-enactment practice might liquidate the meaning of statutory text has been comparatively underexamined. That's not surprising. Under modern textualism, post-enactment considerations would seem to have little place. And under Chevron …

The Perils Of Pseudo-Textualism, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

How much freedom does the IRS have to interpret the code?

In recent years, the Supreme Court and lower courts have put significant barriers in front of the IRS’s ability to interpret the code as it wishes. The question is to what extent the IRS can live with the barriers of textualism, nondeference, the major questions doctrine, nondelegation, and the Administrative Procedure Act. Of these, textualism seems to be the most problematic because it is the hardest to fix. The major questions doctrine rarely applies to statutory tax cases. Nondeference based on Loper Bright can be restricted by Congress adding …

Beyond Jarkesy: Rethinking The Role Of Administrative Law Judges In Sec Administrative Proceedings, Mark T. Uyeda, Jaime Marinaro

Fordham Journal of Corporate & Financial Law

No abstract provided.

The Federal Reserve’S Fight Against Covid-19: A Study Of The Corporate Bond Intervention, Noah Seilgson

Fordham Journal of Corporate & Financial Law

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Federal Reserve (Fed) embarked on an unprecedented mission to stabilize the U.S. economy as businesses shut down. One emergency Fed facility, the Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facility (SMCCF), was used to purchase corporate bonds and corporate bond exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in the secondary market. This extraordinary measure, which injected liquidity into the corporate bond market, aimed to mitigate economic fallout for large companies. Purchasing corporate bonds marked a departure from previous Federal Reserve interventions, but the statutory authority was the same as had been used in past crises: Section 13(3) of the Federal …