Law Commons^™

Strategic Delegation, Discretion, And Deference: Explaining The Comparative Law Of Administrative Review, Jud Mathews, Nuno M. Garoupa

Journal Articles

This paper offers a theory to explain cross-national variation in administrative law doctrines and practices. Administrative law regimes vary along three primary dimensions: the scope of delegation to agencies, agencies’ exercise of discretion, and judicial practices of deference to agencies. Working with a principal-agent framework, we show how cross-national differences in institutions’ capacities and the environments they face encourage the adoption of divergent strategies that lead to a variety of distinct, stable, equilibrium outcomes. We apply our model to explain patterns of administrative law in the United States, Germany, France, and Commonwealth jurisdictions.

A Reflection On Erisa Claims Administration And The Exhaustion Requirement, James A. Wooten

Journal Articles

This essay, prepared in connection with the Drexel Law Review Symposium, ERISA at 40: What Were They Thinking?, examines ERISA’s regime for administering benefit claims and, in particular, the requirement that participants exhaust their plan’s review procedures before filing suit to recover benefits. Like other key elements of ERISA’s claims regime, the exhaustion requirement is a judicial creation that is not articulated in ERISA’s text. Interestingly, former congressional staffers who attended the Symposium said they assumed participants would be required to exhaust plan review procedures but failed to include such a requirement in the legislation. After reviewing the development of …

The Immigration Prosecutor And The Judge: Examining The Role Of The Judiciary In Prosecutorial Discretion Decisions, Shoba S. Wadhia

Journal Articles

Legal scholars and judges have long examined the role of judicial review in immigration matters, and also criticized the impacts of the “plenary power” doctrine and statutory deletions of judicial review for certain immigration cases. Absent from this scholarship is a serious examination of the judiciary’s role in immigration decisions involving prosecutorial discretion. I attribute this absence to both a silent concession that prosecutorial discretion decisions are automatically barred from judicial review because of the plain language of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA); the judicial review “exceptions” in the Administrative Procedures Act (APA), and the cases that analyze these …

My Great Foia Adventure And Discoveries Of Deferred Action Cases At Ice, Shoba S. Wadhia

Journal Articles

This Article describes my adventures in FOIA litigation and analyzes deferred action data collected informally by 24 ICE field offices between October 1, 2011, and June 30, 2012. This Article also offers recommendations for the agency on data collection, recordkeeping, and transparency in deferred action cases. Deferred action is a form of prosecutorial discretion that can be granted at any stage of the immigration enforcement process and historically has been applied both to people who meet group characteristics and on an individual basis in compelling humanitarian circumstances. The theory behind deferred action and prosecutorial discretion more generally is to enable …

Deference Lotteries, Jud Mathews

Journal Articles

When should courts defer to agency interpretations of statutes, and what measure of deference should agencies receive? Administrative law recognizes two main deference doctrines — the generous Chevron standard and the stingier Skidmore standard — but Supreme Court case law has not offered a bright-line rule for when each standard applies.

Many observers have concluded that courts’ deference practice is an unpredictable muddle. This Article argues that it is really a lottery, in the sense the term is used in expected utility theory. Agencies cannot predict which deference standard a court will apply or with what effect, but they have …

Embracing The Queen Of Hearts: Deference To Retroactive Tax Rules, James M. Puckett

Journal Articles

The Supreme Court’s decision in Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research v. United States underscored the importance of a uniform approach to judicial review of administrative action; accordingly, the Court clarified that tax administration is generally subject to the same review as other kinds of administrative action by other federal agencies. Tax guidance from the IRS and Treasury Department serves an important role in clarifying the tax law so that taxpayers may report their tax liability accurately and plan their affairs. Meanwhile, aggressive attempts by a relatively small number of taxpayers to avoid tax liability by exploiting arguable ambiguities …

Maximum Feasible Participation Of The Poor: New Governance, New Accountability, And A 21st Century War On The Sources Of Poverty, Tara J. Melish

Journal Articles

In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson called for a Nationwide War on the Sources of Poverty to “strike away the barriers to full participation” in our society. Central to that war was an understanding that given poverty’s complex and multi-layered causes, identifying, implementing, and monitoring solutions to it would require the “maximum feasible participation” of affected communities. Equally central, however, was an understanding that such decentralized problem-solving could not be fully effective without national-level orchestration and support. As such, an Office of Economic Opportunity was established – situated in the Executive Office of the President itself – to support, through …

A Discourse On The Public Nature Of Research In Contemporary Life Science: A Law-Policy Proposal To Promote The Public Nature Of Science In An Era Of Academia-Industry Integration, Michael J. Malinowski

Journal Articles

This article addresses the impact of integration of academia, industry, and government on the public nature of research. The article concludes that, while the integration has benefited science immensely, regulatory measures should be taken to restore the public nature of research in an age of integration.

Survey Says: Army Corps No Scalian Despot, Kim Diana Connolly

Journal Articles

Justice Antonin Scalia and others have described the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers ('the Corps') administration of the permitting process as burdensome and inefficient. Empirical data gathered from the Corps, however, do not bear out this assessment. In this Article, Kim Diana Connolly evaluates data collected from Corps Customer Service Surveys as well as the apparent disconnect between applicant experiences and the public's negative perception of the permitting process. She begins the Article with an overview of the Corps' regulatory permitting process, then lays out the history of and context for the Corps' Customer Service Surveys. Next, she summarizes available …

Can Happy Subjects Have An Enlightened Despot? Customer Satisfaction Among Army Corps Permit Applicants, Kim Diana Connolly

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

The History Of The Judicial Review Of Administrative Power And The Future Of Regulatory Governance, John J. Coughlin

Journal Articles

Traditionally, judicial review has afforded an important check on the exercise of administrative power. First, judicial review functions to protect the legislative intent behind the statutory authorization of the exercise of administrative power. Pursuant to the conventional model, an administrative agency exercises restricted legislative and judicial functions under judicial scrutiny to insure compliance with congressional intent. Judicial review insures that "a congressional delegation of power . . . must be accompanied by discernible standards, so that the delegatee's action can be measured for its fidelity to the legislative will." Additionally, the opportunity for judicial review of administrative action corrects and …

A Comparison Of The Administrative Law Of The Catholic Church And The United States, John J. Coughlin

Journal Articles

Some years ago, an international symposium of jurists described administrative law as encompassing "the entire range of action by government with respect to the citizen or by the citizen with respect to the government, except for those matters dealt with by the criminal law, and those left to private civil litigation where the government's only participation is in furnishing an impartial tribunal with the power of enforcement."

The broad parameters of the concept of administrative law attest to its importance in any legal system. Indeed, for at least the past fifty years, comparative legal scholars have focused on diverse national …

Privatizing Regulatory Enforcement: A Preliminary Assessment Of Citizen Suits Under Federal Environmental Laws, Barry Boyer, Errol Meidinger

Journal Articles

This article provides a preliminary assessment of the potential effects of the privatization of regulatory enforcement and speculates on what such a realignment might portend for the regulatory process. Based primarily on an indepth review of the first wave of citizen suits brought under the federal Clean Water and Clean Air Acts, it identifies four key problems that can undermine the citizen suit as a device for regulatory enforcement: (1) Citizen suits must surmount a series of doctrinal barriers that could make it difficult or impossible to mount an effective private enforcement campaign. Courts have generally been able to control …

Funding Public Participation In Agency Proceedings: The Federal Trade Commission Experience, Barry B. Boyer

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Standing To Challenge Administrative Action: An Inadequate Surrogate For Claim For Relief, Lee A. Albert

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Fiduciary Power To Compromise Claims, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

The sorry state of fiduciary administrative powers in American trust law is an old but healing wound. Our English brothers, who began repair on a similar lesion in the nineteenth century, are still well ahead of us. A few state legislatures poured on balm of varying degrees of efficacy years ago, but they were not many. The Commissioners on Uniform State Laws seemed to promise a cure in the early 1930's, then abandoned the effort for a generation. They have lately returned to their patient, and the Uniform Trustees' Powers Act shows promise of increasing adoption. The incorporation-by-reference treatment is …

The Advent Of The Administrative Process And Its Future, Thomas Frank Konop

Journal Articles

Every government exercises three governmental powers E that are necessary for its existence. They are Taxation, Police Power, and the Power of Eminent Domain. Every government, however crude, or whatever we may call it, must have the power first to make the law, which is called the legislative power; second, it must have the power to declare what the law is, which is the judicial power; and third, it must have the power to enforce the law and this is called the executive power.

In the very early governments such as the government of the clan or tribe, these three …