Law Commons^™

Stepification, Mitchell Chervu Johnston

Northwestern University Law Review

Multistep tests pervade the law to the point that they appear to be a fundamental feature of legal reasoning. Famous doctrines such as Chevron or qualified immunity take this form, as do more obscure doctrinal formulas. But surprisingly, these doctrinal formulations as a class are relatively new. The reality is that the intellectual moment that gave rise to Chevron was one in which multiple older doctrines that relied on multifactor balancing were replaced by new tests formulated as multistep inquiries in which each step was a discrete inquiry.

This Article provides the first historical and normative account of this phenomenon—which …

Agency Adjudication And Judicial Nondelegation: An Article Iii Canon, Mila Sohoni

Northwestern University Law Review

The rules governing judicial review of adjudication by federal agencies are insensitive to a critical separation of powers principle. Article III jurisprudence requires different treatment of agency adjudication depending on whether the agency is adjudicating a “private right” or a “public right.” When agencies adjudicate private rights, review of the agency adjudication must be available to an Article III court on a direct appellate basis. In contrast, Article III jurisprudence does not require review to an Article III court on a direct appellate basis of agency adjudications of purely public rights. That means that federal courts reviewing agency adjudications of …