Law Commons^™

Nondelegation Blues, Philip A. Hamburger

Faculty Scholarship

The nondelegation doctrine is in crisis. For approximately a century, it has been the Supreme Court’s answer to questions about transfers of legislative power. But as became evident in Gundy v. United States, those answers are wearing thin. So, it is time for a new approach.

This Foreword goes beyond existing scholarship in showing how underlying principles, framing assumptions, constitutional text, and contemporary analysis are all aligned in barring transfers of power among the branches of government. Rarely in constitutional law does a conclusion about a highly contested question rest on such a powerful combination.

At the same time, …

Fedaccounts: Digital Dollars, John Crawford, Lev Menand, Morgan Ricks

Faculty Scholarship

We are entering a new monetary era. Central banks around the world – spurred by the development of privately controlled digital currencies as well as competition from other central banks – have been studying, building, and, in some cases, issuing central bank digital currency (“CBDC”).

Although digital fiat currency is one of the hottest topics in macroeconomics and central banking today, the discussion has largely overlooked the most straightforward and appealing strategy for implementing a U.S. dollar-based CBDC: expanding access to bank accounts that the Federal Reserve already offers to a small, favored set of clients. These accounts consist of …

The Administrative Conference And The Political Thumb, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

In his valuable contribution to this special issue, Richard Pierce underscores the role the Administrative Conference of the United States (“ACUS”) has played over the years in encouraging on the ground fact-finding by its consultants, who have usually been academics consulted at the beginning of careers that ever after would be marked by this encounter with the realities of the administrative process. As the mentee of Walter Gellhorn, who directed the remarkable empirical studies of federal agency procedures that underlay the eventual Administrative Procedure Act (“APA”) and who was a member of the ACUS Council from its initiation in 1964 …

Administrative Law, Public Administration, And The Administrative Conference Of The United States, Gillian E. Metzger

Faculty Scholarship

From its birth, administrative law has claimed a close connection to governmental practice. Yet as administrative law has grown and matured it has moved further away from how agencies actually function. The causes of administrative law’s disconnect from actual administration are complex and the divide is now longstanding, but it is also a source of concern given the increasing importance of internal administration for ensuring accountable government. This Article analyzes the contemporary manifestations and historical origins of administrative law’s divide from public administration, as well as the growing costs of this disconnect. It also describes the Administrative Conference of the …

The Case For Original Intent, Jamal Greene

Faculty Scholarship

This Article seeks to situate the constitutional culture's heavy reliance on the Convention debates within an academic environment that is generally hostile to original intent arguments. The Article argues that intentionalist-friendly sources like the Convention records and The Federalist remain important not because they supply evidence of original meaning but rather because the practice of advancing historical arguments is best understood as a rhetorical exercise that derives persuasive authority from the heroic character of the Founding generation. This exercise fits within a long tradition of originalist argument and need not be abandoned in the quest for a more perfect originalism.

Embracing Administrative Common Law, Gillian E. Metzger

Faculty Scholarship

This Foreword begins with the descriptive claim that much of administrative law is really administrative common law: doctrines and requirements that are largely judicially created, as opposed to those specified by Congress, the President, or individual agencies. Although governing statutes exert some constraining force on judicial creativity, the primary basis of these judge-fashioned doctrines lies in judicial conceptions of appropriate institutional roles, along with pragmatic and normative concerns, that are frequently constitutionally infused and developed incrementally through precedent. Yet the judicially created character of administrative law is rarely acknowledged and often condemned by courts.

Turning from descriptive to more normative, …

Overseer, Or "The Decider"? The President In Administrative Law, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

All will agree that the Constitution creates a unitary chief executive officer, the President, at the head of the government Congress defines to do the work its statutes detail. Disagreement arises over what his function entails. Once Congress has defined some element of government and specified its responsibilities, we know that the constitutional roles of both Congress and the courts are those of oversight of the agency and its assigned work, not the actual performance of that work. But is it the same for the President? When Congress confers authority on the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate various forms of …

Property And Empire: The Law Of Imperialism In Johnson V. M'Intosh, Jedediah S. Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

Chief Justice Marshall's opinion in Johnson v. M'Intosh, 21 U.S. (8 Wheat.) 543 (1823), has long been a puzzle, both in its doctrinal structure and in long, strange dicta which are both triumphal and elegiac. In this Essay, I show that the opinion becomes newly intelligible when read in the context of the law and theory of colonialism, concerned, like the case itself, with the expropriation of continents and relations between dominant and subject peoples.

I examine several instances where the seeming incoherence of the opinion instead shows its debt to imperial jurisprudence, which rested on a distinction between …

The Accardi Principle, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

This article is organized as follows. Part I reviews the history of the Accardi principle in the Supreme Court. We learn that the Court has intimated three different theories about the source of the Accardi principle, and has left many questions about its dimensions unanswered. Part II surveys the use of the principle by the D.C. Circuit. This provides additional insights into how the Accardi principle works in practice, including the importance of questions about the meaning of agency regulations and whether agency regulations can render otherwise unreviewable agency action subject to judicial review. Part III seeks to restate the …

The 527 Problem ... And The Buckley Problem, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

In the world of campaign finance, 2004 was without a doubt the year of the 527 organization. No other aspect of campaign financing received as much press coverage or public attention as the rise of the 527s. Expenditures by 527s – named after the section of the Internal Revenue Code under which they are organized – active in federal elections amounted to at least $405 million, accounting for more than one-tenth of total federal election spending and perhaps twenty to twenty-five percent of spending in the presidential campaign. Federal Election Commission ("FEC") Chairman Scott E. Thomas recently observed that "[there …

Law And Judicial Duty, Philip A. Hamburger

Faculty Scholarship

Two hundred years ago, in Marbury v. Madison, Chief Justice Marshall delivered an opinion that has come to dominate modern discussions of constitutional law. Faced with a conflict between an act of Congress and the U.S. Constitution, he explained what today is known as "judicial review." Marshall described judicial review in terms of a particular type of "superior law" and a particular type of "judicial duty." Rather than speak generally about the hierarchy within law, he focused on "written constitutions."

He declared that the U.S. Constitution is "a superior, paramount law" and that if "the constitution is superior to any …

A Constitutional Right Of Religious Exemption: An Historical Perspective, Philip A. Hamburger

Faculty Scholarship

Did late eighteenth-century Americans understand the Free Exercise Clause of the United States Constitution to provide individuals a right of exemption from civil laws to which they had religious objections? Claims of exemption based on the Free Exercise Clause have prompted some of the Supreme Court's most prominent free exercise decisions, and therefore this historical inquiry about a right of exemption may have implications for our constitutional jurisprudence. Even if the Court does not adopt late eighteenth-century ideas about the free exercise of religion, we may, nonetheless, find that the history of such ideas can contribute to our contemporary analysis. …

Litigation And Corporate Governance: An Essay On Steering Between Scylla And Charybdis, John C. Coffee Jr.

Faculty Scholarship

Criticism of the ALI's Corporate Governance Project has had two very different strains. Most vocal have been those critics who exhibit what one sympathetic observer has aptly termed "a neurotic fear of articulation." Although their expressed concern – namely, that courts will be encouraged to second guess boards and impose liability for arm's length business decisions that turned sour – would be a legitimate cause for anxiety if this indeed were the intent or likely effect of the Project, the underlying fear of these critics is more basic and instinctive. It is best revealed in the title of one critique …