Law Commons^™

Sunstein's New Canons: Choosing The Fictions Of Statutory Interpretation Exchange, Eben Moglen, Richard J. Pierce Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

In Interpreting Statutes in the Regulatory State, Cass Sunstein grapples with two of the most difficult and important questions concerning governance of the modern administrative state. First, what institution should have the dominant role in interpreting ambiguous agency-administered statutes? And second, how should the institution perform that task? Sunstein rejects the Supreme Court's answer to the first question, characterizing its assignment of a dominant interpretive role to agencies in Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v Natural Resources Defense Council as "the fox guarding the hen house." Sunstein prefers to charge judges with the responsibility of resolving most interpretive disputes. In answer to …

Federal Jurisdiction, Ronald J. Mann

Faculty Scholarship

One important task of the federal judiciary is to resolve cases presenting tensions between national and state governments. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit justly is renowned for its work in this area. One major, if not sensational, arena in which these tensions surface is in cases presenting issues of federal jurisdiction, pursuant to which federal courts allocate power between the national and state judicial systems.

During the survey period the Fifth Circuit published almost one hundred opinions dealing with substantive issues of federal jurisdiction. Like others before me, I have not undertaken in this essay …