Law Commons^™

Bureaucratic Resistance And The National Security State, Rebecca Ingber

Faculty Scholarship

Modern accounts of the national security state tend toward one of two opposing views of bureaucratic tensions within it: At one extreme, the executive branch bureaucracy is a shadowy “deep state,” unaccountable to the public or even to the elected President. On this account, bureaucratic obstacles to the President’s agenda are inherently suspect, even dangerous. At the other end, bureaucratic resistance to the President represents a necessary benevolent constraint on an otherwise imperial executive, the modern incarnation of the separation of powers, as the traditional checks on the President of the courts and Congress have fallen down on the job. …

In Defense Of A Little Judiciary: A Textual And Constitutional Foundation For Chevron, Terence J. Mccarrick Jr.

San Diego Law Review

This Article hopes to help fill that “important gap in the administrative law literature.” And it proceeds in three parts. Part II offers a brief history of the Chevron doctrine and its discontents. It traces the doctrine’s origin and scope and ends by articulating the textualist and originalist critique of Chevron described above. Part III grapples with that criticism and offers a textualist and originalist defense of Chevron. Section III.A describes the textual footing for Chevron in the APA and argues that Chevron—if not commanded by the APA—does not upset the role it envisions for courts. Section III.B describes the …

The Partiality Norm: Systematic Deference In The Office Of Legal Counsel, Adoree Kim

Cornell Law Review

This study shows that the Office of Legal Counsel does not offer "detached, apolitical legal advice" in practice. Rather, the OLC is deeply and systematically deferential to the President. The implications are grave considering the OLC's de facto lawmaking power, a result of its position as legal adviser for the executive-- "the judgment of [the OLC] . . . becomes the law." Moreover, the OLC "is frequently asked to opine on issues of first impression that are unlikely to be resolved by the courts--a circumstance in which OLC's advice may effectively be the final word on the controlling law." Whether …

Executive Power And National Security Power, Julian Davis Mortenson, Andrew Kent

Book Chapters

The constitutional text governing national security law is full of gaps, oversights, and omissions. In combination with the authorization principle -- which requires all federal actors to identify particularized authority for their actions -- these gaps have often presented an acute dilemma for Presidents charged with defending the nation. Focusing on three periods in American history, this chapter sketches the historical evolution of how the political branches have responded.

First, the early republic. During this period, presidents responded to the authorization dilemma by seeking highly particularized authorization from the two other constitutional branches of government. Throughout the era, presidents’ claims …

Whose Lands? Which Public?: The Shape Of Public-Lands Law And Trump's National Monument Proclamations, Jedediah Britton-Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

President Trump issued a proclamation in December 2017 purporting to remove two million acres in southern Utah from national monument status, radically shrinking the Grand-Staircase Escalante National Monument and splitting the Bears Ears National Monument into two residual protected areas. Whether the President has the power to revise or revoke existing monuments under the Antiquities Act, which creates the national monument system, is a new question of law for a 112-year-old statute that has been used by Presidents from Theodore Roosevelt to Barack Obama to protect roughly fifteen million acres of federal land and hundreds of millions of marine acres. …

Our Regionalism, Jessica Bulman-Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

This article provides an account of Our Regionalism to supplement the many accounts of Our Federalism. After describing the legal forms regions assume in the United States — through interstate cooperation, organization of federal administrative agencies, and hybrid state-federal efforts — it explores how regions have shaped American governance across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

In the years leading up to the New Deal, commentators invoked regions to resist centralization, arguing that state coordination could forestall expansion of the federal government. But regions were soon deployed to a different end, as the federal government relied on regional administration to …

Presidential Control Over International Law, Curtis A. Bradley, Jack L. Goldsmith

Faculty Scholarship

Presidents have come to dominate the making, interpretation, and termination of international law for the United States. Often without specific congressional concurrence, and sometimes even when it is likely that Congress would disagree, the President has developed the authority to:

(a) make a vast array of international obligations for the United States, through both written agreements and the development of customary international law;

(b) make increasingly consequential political commitments for the United States on practically any topic;

(c) interpret these obligations and commitments; and

(d) terminate or withdraw from these obligations and commitments.

While others have examined pieces of this …

Excavating The Forgotten Suspension Clause, Helen Norton

Publications

No abstract provided.