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Brief Of Amici Curiae Administrative And Federal Regulatory Law Professors In Support Of Respondents, Andrew F. Popper

Amicus Briefs

Amici write to address the first question presented: whether Chevron should be overruled. Properly understood, it should not. Chevron has been much discussed but not always understood. On the one hand, courts have sometimes misapplied the doctrine or failed to understand its legal foundations. On the other, courts and commentators alike have criticized Chevron, often as a result of such aggressive applications. This case provides an opportunity for the Court to clarify what Chevron does and does not entail, while reaffirming the essential role that judicial recognition of constitutionally delegated policymaking authority plays in federal statutory programs. Many of …

Brief Of Scholars Of Administrative Law And The Administrative Procedure Act As Amici Curiae In Support Of Respondents, Jeffrey Lubbers

Amicus Briefs

The principle of judicial deference to agency interpretations of law has been a pillar of this Court's administrative law doctrine for more than a century. This Court's decision in Chevron, U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., 467 U.S. 837 (1984), formalized one version of that principle, creating the two-step framework that is now subject to a multifaceted attack. Among other things, Chevron's opponents argue that the doctrine is at odds with the original public meaning of the Administrative Procedure Act. This is wrong, and the text and history of that landmark statute provide no basis for …

Brief Of Administrative Law Scholars As Amici Curiae In Opposition To Petitioners' Request For Reversal, Jeffrey Lubbers

Amicus Briefs

Amici curiae are administrative law scholars from universities around the United States.

They are: • William D. Araiza, Professor of Law and Dean of Brooklyn Law School; • Blake Emerson, Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law; • Jeffrey Lubbers, Professor of Practice in Administrative Law at American University Washington College of Law; • Todd Phillips, Assistant Professor of Business Law at Georgia State University J. Mack Robinson College of Business; and • Beau Baumann, Doctoral candidate at Yale Law School.

Amici have a strong interest in how the Court’s decision will affect the field of administrative law and …

Affirmatively Resisting, Ezra Rosser

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This Article argues that administrative processes, in particular rulemaking’s notice-and-comment requirement, enable local institutions to fight back against federal deregulatory efforts. Federalism all the way down means that state and local officials can dissent from within when challenging federal action. Drawing upon the ways in which localities, states, public housing authorities, and fair housing nonprofits resisted the Trump Administration’s efforts to roll back federal fair housing enforcement, this Article shows how uncooperative federalism works in practice.

Despite the fact that the 1968 Fair Housing Act requires that the federal government affirmatively further fair housing (AFFH), the requirement was largely ignored …

Frostpaw Addresses Global Warming, William Snape

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

INTRODUCTION: Climate change impacts the law on many levels and in many ways. This Article asks a threshold question: what legal structures will most effectively reduce growing levels of anthropogenic greenhouse pollution? The answer is that an existing U.S. statute-the Clean Air Act-not only possesses clear commands to ratchet down greenhouse pollutants domestically, but also provides explicit authority to negotiate concomitant air pollution reduction with countries around the planet in a fair, transparent, and reciprocal fashion. Further, application of the Clean Air Act is consistent with other legal and policy tools to address global warming. This statute-based solution, while facially …

Soft Whistleblowing, Amanda Leiter

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This Article explores the underappreciated role that agency insiders play in directing outside oversight of their employer agencies and, in turn, manipulating agency policy development. Specifically, the Article defines, documents, and evaluates the phenomenon of "soft whistleblowing"-an agency employee's deliberate, unsanctioned, substantive, and instrumental disclosure of nonpublic information about issues of policy. This phenomenon is ubiquitous but has received no systematic attention in the academic literature. As the Article demonstrates, agency employees regularly engage in soft whistleblowing to congressional staff, journalists, and agency watchdog groups, in an effort to bring outside pressure to bear on their employer agencies to shift …

Paul Verkuil's Projects For The Administrative Conference Of The U.S. 1974-1992, Jeffrey Lubbers

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

I am really happy to be part of this tribute to Paul Verkuil. It may surprise those in the audience to learn that I am bringing some needed diversity to today's proceedings - I am the only other Dutch American on the program! But perhaps my twenty years at the "Administrative Conference" also qualifies me to say a few words about how thrilled I am that we have it back - "ACUS 2.0" we can call it, complete with a website this time- and that Paul is at its helm. And I want to thank Paul for bringing me back …

A Survey Of Federal Agency Rulemakers’ Attitudes About E-Rulemaking, Jeffrey Lubbers

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Drawing on a survey of U.S. civil servants engaged in developing regulations across a wide variety of agencies, this chapter analyzes how bureaucrats in key positions view the impact on their work of “electronic rulemaking” – that is, the creation of online opportunities for members of the public to comment on proposed administrative regulations. There is strong evidence that rulemakers appreciate the value of new technologies for public participation purposes and for internal administration and coordination functions, but less evidence that they see the utility of e-rulemaking for improving the quality of administrative rules.

The U.S. Rulemaking Process: Has It Become Too Difficult?, Jeffrey Lubbers

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

The modem process for making administrative policy-the informal, notice-and-comment rulemaking process-was developed in the U.S. when the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) was enacted in 1946. The "notice-and-comment" label derives from the fact that the APA requires: publication of a notice of proposed rulemaking, opportunity for public participation in the rulemaking by submission of written comments, publication of a final rule and accompanying explanation.

This applies to the substantive rulemaking of every agency of the federal government and provides the procedural minimum for most significant rulemakings. More elaborate public procedures such as oral hearings may be used voluntarily by agencies in …

Squaring The Circle? Reconciling Sovereignty And Global Governance Through Global Government Networks (Review Of Anne-Marie Slaughter, A New World Order), Kenneth Anderson

Book Reviews

This book review summarizes and critiques A New World Order, offering both an internal critique of the argument's consistency as well as an outside critique of the argument from the standpoint of the value of democratic sovereignty. The review locates Slaughter's argument within the debate over international relations realism and idealism, and further locates it within a continuum of seven idealized positions in the debate between global governance and sovereignty, with pure sovereignty at one extreme and world government at the other, with the most relevant positions of democratic sovereignty and liberal internationalism located in the middle. The article concludes …

Changing Channels And Bridging Divides: The Failure And Redemption Of American Broadcast Television Regulation, Anthony E. Varona

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

In Changing Channels and Bridging Divides: The Failure and Redemption of American Broadcast Television Regulation Professor Varona analyzes how the Supreme Court, Congress and the FCC have defined the legal duties of commercial broadcasters throughout the maturation of the television industry. First, he shows how the public trustee doctrine has failed, with broadcasters today airing very little 'public interest' programming. Second, he examines how and why the FCC has failed to effectively elucidate and enforce the public trustee doctrine, focusing on the irreconcilable First Amendment and commercial tensions inherent in the public trustee doctrine since its inception and the 'capture' …

Anatomy Of A Regulatory Program: Comment On 'Strategic Regulators And The Choice Of Rulemaking Procedures', Jeffrey Lubbers

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Besides being a very interesting, cogent, and even a tidy study, "Strategic Regulators" sheds some bright light on agency behavior and on the important issue of whether agency rulemaking may be "ossifying."

The study design employed by Hamilton and Schroeder is attractively simple. They started with all of the Environmental Protection Agency's ("EPA's") hazardous waste regulations under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act ("RCRA") appearing in the Code of Federal Regulations ("CFR"), counting each decimal point CFR number as a separate rule. This yielded 697 rules. They then examined all EPA/RCRA guidance documents issued since the inception of the program …