Law Commons^™

Developments In Administrative Law: The 2008-2009 Term -- Contemplating Legislative (Im)Precision, Laverne Jacobs

Law Publications

This article examines two key administrative law decisions of the 2008-2009 Supreme Court of Canada term. Canada (Citizenship and Immigration) v. Khosa 2009 SCC 12 [Khosa] and Canada (Privacy Commissioner) v. Blood Tribe Department of Health 2008 SCC 44 [Blood Tribe]. Following on the footsteps of Dunsmuir, the landmark decision of 2008 that eliminated the patent unreasonableness standard, members of the Supreme Court of Canada in Khosa debated the proper interpretation of judicial review legislation. Specifically, the central issue in Khosa was whether subsection 18.1 (4)(d) of the Federal Courts Act provides a legislated standard of review that is equivalent …

Islands Of Effective International Adjudication: Constructing An Intellectual Property Rule Of Law In The Andean Community, Laurence R. Helfer, Karen J. Alter, M. Florencia Guerzovich

Faculty Scholarship

The Andean Community - a forty-year-old regional integration pact of small developing countries in South America - is widely viewed as a failure. In this Article, we show that the Andean Community has in fact achieved remarkable success within one part of its legal system. The Andean Tribunal of Justice (ATJ) is the world's third most active international court, with over 1400 rulings issued to date. Over 90% of those rulings concern intellectual property (IP). The ATJ has helped to establish IP as a rule of law island in the Andean Community where national judges, administrative officials, and private parties …

The Andean Tribunal Of Justice And Its Interlocutors: Understanding Preliminary Reference Patterns In The Andean Community, Laurence R. Helfer, Karen J. Alter

Faculty Scholarship

In the European Union, national courts have been key intermediaries in helping to bolster and expand the authority of the European Court of Justice through its preliminary reference mechanism. This article analyzes the role of national judges in the Andean Community, a regional legal system whose judicial institution - the Andean Tribunal of Justice (ATJ) - was modeled directly on its European predecessor. Our analysis is based on an original coding of every publically available national court referral to the ATJ from 1987 to 2007 and interviews with over forty participants in the Andean legal system. We find that the …

Should Fda Drug And Medical Device Regulation Bar State Liability Claims?: Hearing Before The H. Comm. On Oversight And Government Reform, 110th Cong., May 14, 2008 (Statement Of Professor David C. Vladeck, Geo. U. L. Center), David C. Vladeck

Testimony Before Congress

No abstract provided.

No Two-Stepping In The Laboratories: State Deference Standards And Their Implications For Improving Chevron Doctrine, Michael Pappas

Faculty Scholarship

This article examines the deference standards that the various states apply to agency statutory interpretation and analyzes the implications for the federal Chevron doctrine. First, the article surveys state standards for reviewing agencies' statutory interpretation, finding that none of the state standards exactly follows the federal Chevron test but that state standards fall into one of four categories ranging from "strong deference" to "de novo with deference discouraged." The article then examines four particular state standards in depth, discovering that states tend to use the same methods, tools, and processes for statutory interpretation despite the different announced degrees of deference. …

Foreword: Making Sense Of Information For Environmental Protection, James Salzman, Douglas A. Kysar

Faculty Scholarship

Despite the ubiquity of information, no one has proposed calling the present era the Knowledge Age. Knowledge depends not only on access to reliable information, but also on sound judgment regarding which information to access and how to situate that information in relation to the values and purposes that comprise the individual's or the social group's larger projects. This is certainly the case for wise and effective environmental governance. A regulator needs accurate information to understand the nature of a problem and the consequences of potential responses. Likewise, the regulated community needs information to decide how best to comply with …

The Other Delegate: Judicially Administered Statutes And The Nondelegation Doctrine, Margaret H. Lemos

Faculty Scholarship

The nondelegation doctrine is the subject of a vast and everexpanding body of scholarship. But nondelegation literature, like nondelegation law, focuses almost exclusively on delegations of power to administrative agencies. It ignores Congress's other delegate-the federal judiciary.

This Article brings courts into the delegation picture. It demonstrates that, just as agencies exercise a lawmaking function when they fill in the gaps left by broad statutory delegations of power, so too do courts. The nondelegation doctrine purports to limit the amount of lawmaking authority Congress can cede to another institution without violating the separation of powers. Although typically considered only with …

Regulatory Preemption: Are Federal Agencies Usurping Congressional And State Authority?: Hearing Before The S. Comm. On The Judiciary,, 110th Cong., Sept. 12, 2007 (Statement Of Viet D. Dinh, Geo. U. L. Center), Viet D. Dinh

Testimony Before Congress

No abstract provided.

Regulatory Preemption: Hearing Before The S. Comm. On The Judiciary, 110th Cong., Sept. 12, 2007 (Statement Of David C. Vladeck, Geo. U. L. Center), David C. Vladeck

Testimony Before Congress

No abstract provided.

Amending Executive Order 12866: Good Governance Or Regulatory Usurpation? Part I And Part Ii: Hearing Before The H. Comm. On Science And Technology, 110th Cong., Feb. 13, 2007 (Statement Of Professor David C. Vladeck, Geo. U. L. Center), David C. Vladeck

Testimony Before Congress

No abstract provided.

Judicial Deference To Administrative Agencies And Its Limits, Graham G. Martin, David A. Super

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Policy Analysis For Natural Hazards: Some Cautionary Lessons From Environmental Policy Analysis, Matthew D. Adler

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Climate Change And The Clean Air Act, Lisa Heinzerling

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In Massachusetts v. EPA, petitioners - twelve states, three cities, an American territory, and numerous health and environmental groups - have asked the Supreme Court to hold that the Clean Air Act gives EPA the power to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles and that EPA may not decline to exercise this power based on statutorily irrelevant factors. The problem petitioners ultimately seek to address - climate change - is unique in its scope and complexity. But the legal issues before the Court in Massachusetts v. EPA are neither particularly grand nor particularly complex. They are the kinds of …

Sending The Bureaucracy To War, Elena Baylis, David Zaring

Articles

Administrative law has been transformed after 9/11, much to its detriment. Since then, the government has mobilized almost every part of the civil bureaucracy to fight terrorism, including agencies that have no obvious expertise in that task. The vast majority of these bureaucratic initiatives suffer from predictable, persistent, and probably intractable problems - problems that contemporary legal scholars tend to ignore, even though they are central to the work of the writers who created and framed the discipline of administrative law.

We analyze these problems through a survey of four administrative initiatives that exemplify the project of sending bureaucrats to …

Statutory Interpretation In The Era Of Oira, Lisa Heinzerling

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In recent years, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) within the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has asserted a remarkable degree of authority over administrative agencies' rulemaking processes. One of the ways in which OIRA has exercised power over agencies has been to foist upon them its own views about the requirements of the statutes under which they operate. The most notable trend in this area has been OIRA's insistence on converting technology-based environmental laws into cost-benefit laws. In OIRA's hands, for example, the Clean Water Act ("the Act") is being transformed from a technology- based regime …

Justification, Legitimacy, And Administrative Governance, Matthew D. Adler

Faculty Scholarship

Richard Stewart, in his classic article ‘The Reformation of American Administrative Law,’ argues that the demise of the ’transmission belt’ model of administrative governance creates a crisis of agency legitimacy, and he skeptically surveys a range of possible solutions to the legitimacy crisis. I claim that Stewart’s skepticism is misguided. It may be true that no feasible administrative structure is democratically legitimate; but it is also true, given the logic of moral justification, that in every choice situation confronted by agency decisionmakers, or by those who design agencies, there is some morally permissible and justified choice (perhaps a choice that …

Applying Cost-Benefit To Past Decisions: Was Environmental Protection Ever A Good Idea?, Lisa Heinzerling, Frank Ackerman, Rachel Massey

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this Article, however, we do not mount a critique from outside the technique of cost-benefit analysis. Instead, we examine an argument that proponents of cost-benefit analysis have offered as a linchpin of the case for cost-benefit: that this technique is neither anti- nor pro-regulatory, but rather a neutral tool for evaluating public policy. In making this argument, these proponents have often invoked the use of cost-benefit analysis to support previous regulatory decisions (their favorite example involves the phase down of lead in gasoline, which we shall shortly discuss) as a sign that this technique can be used to support …

Fear Assessment: Cost-Benefit Analysis And The Pricing Of Fear And Anxiety, Matthew D. Adler

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

H.R. 2432, Paperwork And Regulatory Improvements Act Of 2003: Testimony Before The H. Comm. On Government Reform, 108th Cong., July 22, 2003 (Statement Of Lisa Heinzerling, Prof. Of Law, Geo. U. L. Center), Lisa Heinzerling

Testimony Before Congress

No abstract provided.

The Positive Political Theory Of Cost-Benefit Analysis: A Comment On Johnston, Matthew D. Adler

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Administrative Adjudication In Kentucky: Ethics And Unauthorized Practice Considerations, Richard H. Underwood

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

This article is an extended version of a presentation I made at a training course for hearing officers sponsored by the Office of the Attorney General, Division of Administrative Hearings. In my original presentation, I was asked to focus on the ethics of the administrative adjudicator. I was asked to answer some specific questions, which I will include here for the reader's benefit. In this more complete treatment, I would also like to discuss the ethics of lawyers and other representatives appearing before administrative agencies.

The Kentucky Courts had begun to "judicialize" the administrative hearing process in the early 1970's, …

The Humbugs Of The Anti-Regulatory Movement, Lisa Heinzerling, Frank Ackerman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

It is so hard to get beyond cynicism these days. Even a symposium devoted to this goal has, as reflected in the articles by Professors Cynthia Farina, Jeffrey Rachlinski, and Mark Seidenfeld, succeeded primarily in suggesting that regulators are not so much selfish as they are obtuse, stubborn, and sometimes downright dumb. Undoubtedly this is true some of the time. But Farina, Rachlinski, and Seidenfeld want to convince us that it is true enough of the time to warrant quite large-scale solutions. In this Comment, we take issue with this pessimistic assessment of regulatory behavior by discrediting the most prominent …

Petition For A Writ Of Certiorari, Minority Media And Telecommunications Council V. Md/Dc/De Broadcasters Ass'n, No. 01-639 (U.S. Oct. 17, 2001), Angela J. Campbell, Amy S. Wolverton

U.S. Supreme Court Briefs

No abstract provided.

Risk, Death And Time: A Comment On Judge Williams’ Defense Of Cost-Benefit Analysis, Matthew D. Adler

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Defending Courts: A Brief Rejoinder To Professors Fried And Rosenberg, David C. Vladeck

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Harvard Professors David Rosenberg and Charles Fried have presented a provocative, sweeping critique of the theoretical foundations of tort liability that leaves virtually no aspect of our current tort system untouched, or perhaps more accurately, unscathed. Their article throws down the gauntlet to defenders of traditional tort law. For instance, Rosenberg and Fried take aim at the jury system, arguing that ex post liability rules created by juries are inefficient and should be replaced, whenever possible, by ex ante liability rules set by legislative bodies. And they attack the idea that compensation plays a legitimate role in structuring our tort …

Reinventing Tax Expenditure Reform: Improving Program Oversight Under The Government Performance And Results Act, Mary L. Heen

Law Faculty Publications

In this Article, Professor Heen examines the new framework for performance-based management and oversight of federallyfunded programs, describes emerging efforts to incorporate tax expenditures into the performance review process, and places these developments into context by evaluating past experiences with tax expenditure reform. Professor Heen concludes that the new framework provides a promising executive branch mechanism for achieving a more coordinated review of functionally related government programs, whether funded or implemented through direct expenditures, tax expenditures, or regulatory programs. However, as past experience illustrates (including, for example, experience with employment subsidies such as the Work Opportunity Tax Credit and the …

Introduction, To Cost-Benefit Analysis, Matthew D. Adler, Eric A. Posner

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Implementing Cost-Benefit Analysis When Preferences Are Distorted, Matthew D. Adler, Eric A. Posner

Faculty Scholarship

Cost-benefit analysis is routinely used by government agencies in order to evaluate projects, but it remains controversial among academics. This paper argues that cost-benefit analysis is best understood as a welfarist decision procedure and that use of cost-benefit analysis is more likely to maximize overall well-being than is use of alternative decision-procedures. The paper focuses on the problem of distorted preference. A person's preferences are distorted when his or her satisfaction does not enhance that person's well-being. Preferences typically thought to be distorted in this sense include disinterested preferences, uninformed preferences, adaptive preferences, and objectively bad preferences; further, preferences may …

Schechter Poultry At The Millennium: A Delegation Doctrine For The Administrative State, Lisa Schultz Bressman

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The new delegation doctrine might seem perplexing to both sides of the current delegation debate. Either it is too intrusive on administrative prerogatives or it is not nearly intrusive enough. The new delegation doctrine is difficult to comprehend only because it evinces a different focus. While the debate concentrates primarily on the legitimacy of lawmaking by administrative agencies, the new doctrine speaks more to the goal of promoting the legitimacy of law made by administrative agencies. It might even be fair to say that, in this regard, the new doctrine moves beyond the academic debate. Moreover, the new doctrine neither …

Rethinking Cost-Benefit Analysis, Matthew D. Adler, Eric A. Posner

Faculty Scholarship

This paper analyzes cost-benefit analysis from legal, economic, and philosophical perspectives. The traditional defense of cost-benefit analysis is that it maximizes a social welfare function that aggregates unweighted and unrestricted preferences. We follow many economists and philosophers who conclude that this defense is not persuasive. Cost-benefit analysis unavoidably depends on controversial distributive judgments; and the view that the government should maximize the satisfaction of unrestricted preferences is not plausible. However, we disagree with critics who argue that cost-benefit analysis produces morally irrelevant evaluations of projects and should be abandoned. On the contrary, cost-benefit analysis, suitably constrained, is consistent with a …