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Full-Text Articles in Law

The Not-So-Standard Model: Reconsidering Agency-Head Review Of Administrative Adjudication Decisions, Rebecca S. Eisenberg, Nina A. Mendelson Jan 2023

The Not-So-Standard Model: Reconsidering Agency-Head Review Of Administrative Adjudication Decisions, Rebecca S. Eisenberg, Nina A. Mendelson

Articles

The Supreme Court has invalidated multiple legislative design choices for independent agency structures in recent years, citing Article II and the need for political accountability through presidential control of agencies. In United States v. Arthrex, Inc., the Court turned to administrative adjudication, finding an Appointments Clause violation in the assignment of certain final patent adjudication decisions to appellate panels of unconfirmed administrative patent judges. As a remedy, a different majority declared unenforceable a statutory provision that had insulated Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) administrative adjudication decisions from political review for almost a century. The Court thereby enabled the politically appointed …


Internal Administrative Law, Gillian E. Metzger, Kevin M. Stack Jun 2017

Internal Administrative Law, Gillian E. Metzger, Kevin M. Stack

Michigan Law Review

For years, administrative law has been identified as the external review of agency action, primarily by courts. Following in the footsteps of pioneering administrative law scholars, a growing body of recent scholarship has begun to attend to the role of internal norms and structures in controlling agency action. This Article offers a conceptual and historical account of these internal forces as internal administrative law. Internal administrative law consists of the internal directives, guidance, and organizational forms through which agencies structure the discretion of their employees and presidents control the workings of the executive branch. It is the critical means for …


Bureaucracy As Violence, Jonathan Weinberg Apr 2017

Bureaucracy As Violence, Jonathan Weinberg

Michigan Law Review

Review of The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy by David Graeber.


Major Questions About The "Major Questions" Doctrine, Kevin O. Leske May 2016

Major Questions About The "Major Questions" Doctrine, Kevin O. Leske

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

After over a decade of hibernation, the United States Supreme Court has awoken the “major questions” doctrine, which has re-emerged in an expanded form. Under the doctrine, a court will not defer to an agency’s interpretation of a statutory provision in circumstances where the case involves an issue of deep economic or political significance or where the interpretive question could effectuate an enormous and transformative expansion of the agency’s regulatory authority. While the doctrine’s re-emergence in recent Supreme Court cases has already raised concerns, a subtle shift in its application has gone unnoticed. Unlike in earlier cases, where the Court …


Enforcement Without Foundation? Insider Trading And China's Administrative Law Crisis, Nicholas C. Howson Jan 2012

Enforcement Without Foundation? Insider Trading And China's Administrative Law Crisis, Nicholas C. Howson

Articles

China's securities regulator enforces insider trading prohibitions pursuant to non-legal and non-regulatory internal "guidance." Reported agency decisions indicate that enforcement against insider trading is often possible only pursuant to this guidance, as the behavior identified is far outside of the scope of insider trading liability provided for in statute or regulation. I argue that the agency guidance is itself unlawful and unenforceable, because: (i) the guidance is not the regulatory norm required by the statutory delegation of power; and (ii) the guidance is ultra vires because (a) it addresses something substantively different from what is authorized under the statutory delegation, …


Irrelevant Oversight: "Presidential Administration" From The Standpoint Of Arbitrary And Capricious Review, Daniel P. Rathbun Feb 2009

Irrelevant Oversight: "Presidential Administration" From The Standpoint Of Arbitrary And Capricious Review, Daniel P. Rathbun

Michigan Law Review

The president is now regularly and heavily involved in the decisionmaking processes of administrative agencies. What began in the mid-twentieth century as macro-level oversight has evolved, since the Reagan Administration, into controlling case-level influence. Scholars have hotly debated the legality of this shift and have compellingly demonstrated the need to ensure that agencies remain accountable and that their decisions remain nonarbitrary in the face of presidential involvement. However, as this Note demonstrates, the existing scholarship has not provided an adequate solution to these twin problems. This Note provides a novel and effective solution to the accountability and arbitrariness problems of …


Temporary Accidents?, M. Elizabeth Magill Apr 2008

Temporary Accidents?, M. Elizabeth Magill

Michigan Law Review

In Part I of this Review, I will summarize Croley's book, focusing on his powerful critique of public choice theory and the alternative account that he develops and defends. Part II assesses the book, arguing that Croley is successful in demonstrating agency autonomy but less successful in showing that either administrator motivations or the administrative process tend to make agencies regulate in welfare-enhancing ways. As is often the case, the critique is more powerful than the construction of the alternative account. Even so, Croley's book should alter debates over the possibility of good government by placing the agency and how …


A Reality Check On An Empirical Study: Comments On "Inside The Administrative State", Sally Katzen May 2007

A Reality Check On An Empirical Study: Comments On "Inside The Administrative State", Sally Katzen

Michigan Law Review

Presidential control is the term used for the process (or some would say, the model) by which agency decision-making (more particularly, rulemaking) is brought under the direction of the president to "render such decision- making accountable and effective." Until now scholars, who have generally endorsed both the theory and the practice of the process, have written from the perspective of those who exercise presidential control - those at the White House or the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs ("OIRA"). In a recent article in the Michigan Law Review, Lisa Schultz Bressman and Michael Vandenbergh ("the authors") decided to …


Legitimacy, Selectivity, And The Disunitary Executive: A Reply To Sally Katzen, Lisa Schultz Bressman, Michael P. Vandenbergh May 2007

Legitimacy, Selectivity, And The Disunitary Executive: A Reply To Sally Katzen, Lisa Schultz Bressman, Michael P. Vandenbergh

Michigan Law Review

This reply addresses the thoughtful comments that former OIRA Administrator Sally Katzen has provided on our Article, Inside the Administrative State: A Critical Look at the Practice of Presidential Control. Our Article is the first to investigate the agency perspective on White House involvement in agency rule-making. We interviewed 30 of the 35 top political officials in the Environmental Protection Agency ("EPA") during the George H.W. Bush ("Bush I") and the William J. Clinton Administrations during 1989-2001. Prior to our study, empirical studies of White House involvement in agency rule-making had focused almost exclusively on the White House side, …


Inside The Administrative State: A Critical Look At The Practice Of Presidential Control, Lisa Schultz Bressman, Michael P. Vandenbergh Oct 2006

Inside The Administrative State: A Critical Look At The Practice Of Presidential Control, Lisa Schultz Bressman, Michael P. Vandenbergh

Michigan Law Review

From the inception of the administrative state, scholars have proposed various models of agency decision-making to render such decision-making accountable and effective, only to see those models falter when confronted by actual practice. Until now, the "presidential control" model has been largely impervious to this pattern. That model, which brings agency decision-making under the direction of the president, has strengthened over time, winning broad scholarly endorsement and bipartisan political support. But it, like prior models, relies on abstractions - for example, that the president represents public preferences and resists parochial pressures that do not hold up as a factual matter. …


The Irrational Auditor And Irrational Liability, Adam C. Pritchard Jan 2006

The Irrational Auditor And Irrational Liability, Adam C. Pritchard

Articles

This Article argues that less liability for auditors in certain areas might encourage more accurate and useful financial statements, or at least equally accurate statements at a lower cost. Audit quality is promoted by three incentives: reputation, regulation, and litigation. When we take reputation and regulation into account, exposing auditors to potentially massive liability may undermine the effectiveness of reputation and regulation, thereby diminishing integrity of audited financial statements. The relation of litigation to the other incentives that promote audit quality has become more important in light of the sea change that occurred in the regulation of the auditing profession …


The Sec At 70: Time For Retirement?, Adam C. Pritchard Jan 2005

The Sec At 70: Time For Retirement?, Adam C. Pritchard

Articles

The Article proceeds as follows. Part I explains the pathologies of the SEC and explores the relation between those pathologies and the SEC's status as an independent agency. Part II then outlines an alternative regulatory structure primarily situated within the executive branch. I also argue that such a relocation of authority would enhance regulatory effectiveness while simultaneously reducing the cost of excessive regulation. The Article concludes with some thoughts about the viability of my proposal.


The Sec At 70: Time For Retirement?, Adam C. Pritchard Jan 2005

The Sec At 70: Time For Retirement?, Adam C. Pritchard

Articles

As one grows older, birthdays gradually shift from being celebratory events to more reflective occasions. One's 40th birthday is commemorated rather differently from one's 2lst, which is, in turn, celebrated quite differently from one's first. After a certain point, the individual birthdays become less important and it is the milestone years to whch we pay particular attention. Sadly for entities like the Securities and Exchange Commission, it is only the milestone years (the ones ending in five or zero, for some reason), that draw any attention at all. No one held a conference to celebrate the SEC's 67th anniversary. Clearly …


Reply: The Institutional Dimension Of Statutory And Constitutional Interpretation, Richard A. Posner Feb 2003

Reply: The Institutional Dimension Of Statutory And Constitutional Interpretation, Richard A. Posner

Michigan Law Review

Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule argue in Interpretation and lnstitutions that judicial interpretation of statutes and constitutions should take account both of the institutional framework within which interpretation takes place and of the consequences of different styles of interpretation; they further argue that this point has been neglected by previous scholars. The first half of the thesis is correct but obvious; the second half, which the authors state in terms emphatic to the point of being immodest, is incorrect. Moreover, the authors offer no feasible suggestions for how the relation between interpretation and the institutional framework might be studied better …


Virtue: Basic Structure Of Children's Services In Michigan, Stephen H. Clink May 1954

Virtue: Basic Structure Of Children's Services In Michigan, Stephen H. Clink

Michigan Law Review

A Review of BASIC STRUCTURE OF CHILDREN'S SERVICES IN MICHIGAN. By Maxine Boord Virtue.


Separation Of Powers Revisited, Reginald Parker May 1951

Separation Of Powers Revisited, Reginald Parker

Michigan Law Review

Since administrative law is law that governs, and is applied by, the executive branch of government, it is necessarily as old as that branch. As long as executive and judiciary were one and the same and the king at the head of both, all of the law was in fact "administrative" though the term was not used. When, however, out of the amorphous mass of the legal order a fixed body of law courts began to emerge with jurisdiction over the most important legal problems, the term "administrative law," had it been used, would have acquired a specific meaning. Property, …