Law Commons^™

Can He Legally Do That? Does The President Have Directive Authority Over Agency Regulatory Decisions?, Robert V. Percival

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Chevron Without The Courts? The Supreme Court's Recent Chevron Jurisprudence Through An Immigration Lens, Shruti Rana

Faculty Scholarship

The limits of administrative law are undergoing a seismic shift in the immigration arena. Chevron divides interpretive and decision-making authority between the federal courts and agencies in each of two steps. The Supreme Court may now be transforming this division in largely unrecognized ways. These shifts, currently playing out in the immigration context, may threaten to reshape deference jurisprudence by handing more power to the immigration agency just when the agency may be least able to handle that power effectively.

An unprecedented surge in immigration cases—now approximately 90% of the federal administrative docket—has arrived just as the Court is whittling …

The Case For Abolishing Centralized White House Regulatory Review, Rena I. Steinzor

Faculty Scholarship

A series of catastrophic regulatory failures have focused attention on theweakened condition of regulatory agencies assigned to protect public health, worker and consumer safety, and the environment. The destructive convergence of funding shortfalls, political attacks, and outmoded legal authority have set the stage for ineffective enforcement, unsupervised industry self-regulation, and a slew of devastating and preventable catastrophes. From the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico to the worst mining disaster in forty years at the Big Branch mine in West Virginia, the signs of regulatory dysfunction abound. Many stakeholders expected that President Barack Obama would recognize and ameliorate …

The End Game Of Deregulation: Myopic Risk Management And The Next Catastrophe, Thomas O. Mcgarity, Rena I. Steinzor

Faculty Scholarship

On December 22, 2008, the contents of an enormous impoundment containing coal-ash slurry from the Tennessee Valley Authority’s (TVA) Kingston Fossil Fuel Plant poured into the Emory River. The proximate cause of the spill was the bursting of a poorly reinforced dike holding back a pit of sludge that towered 80 feet above the river and 40 feet above an adjacent road. The volume and force of the spill were so large that 1.1 billion gallons of the inky mess flowed across the river, inundating 300 acres of land in a layer four to five feet deep, uprooting trees, destroying …