Law Commons^™

Moving Forward On Public Health And Safety With Just The Stroke Of The Pen? Yes, Obama Can, Rena Steinzor

Rena I. Steinzor

No abstract provided.

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

Robert Percival

No abstract provided.

Does The Communications Act Of 1934 Contain A Hidden Internet Kill Switch?, David W. Opderbeck

David W. Opderbeck

A key area of debate over cybersecurity policy concerns whether the President should have authority to shut down all or part of the Internet in the event of a cyber-emergency or cyber-war. The proposed Cybersecurity Act of 2009, for example, contained what critics derided as an Internet “kill switch.” The current iteration of a comprehensive cybersecurity reform bill, the Cybersecurity Act of 2012, opts for a soft public-private contingency plan model instead of a kill switch. But the kill switch may yet live. Sponsors of the present legislation have argued that Section 606 of the Communications Act of 1934 already …

Who Decides On Liberty?, Thomas P. Crocker

Faculty Publications

Whether approached as a matter of executive discretion, judicial role, or individual rights, questions about security are never far removed from questions about liberty. Tradeoffs between liberty and security often seem unavoidable. Defenders of unbounded executive power argue that security relies on experts to whom citizens and courts alike must defer. But, if the tradeoff between security and liberty is to be a real weighing of the risks, costs, benefits, burdens, and consequences of various policy decisions, then who has the necessary expertise to decide on liberty? After all, to make decisions about the appropriate balance between security and liberty …

Foreign Affairs Federalism And The Limits On Executive Power, Zachary D. Clopton

Michigan Law Review First Impressions

On February 23 of this year, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals invalidated a California statute permitting victims of the Armenian genocide to file insurance claims, finding that the state's use of the label "Genocide" intruded on the federal government's conduct of foreign affairs. This decision, Movsesian v. Versicherung AG, addresses foreign affairs federalism—the division of authority between the states and the federal government. Just one month later, the Supreme Court weighed in on another foreign affairs issue: the separation of foreign relations powers within the federal government. In Zivotofsky v. Clinton, the Supreme Court ordered the lower courts to …

The Separation Of Powers: Hamdan V. Rumsfeld - The Anti-Roberts, Douglas W. Kmiec

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Roberts Court & Executive Power, Jeffrey Rosen

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Protecting The Government's Obligations: The Public Debt Clause And The President's Duty To Disregard The Statutory Debt Limit, Jacob D. Charles

Jacob D. Charles

The statutory debt limit restricts the amount of funds that can be borrowed to meet the government’s obligations. The Fourteenth Amendment’s Public Debt Clause mandates that all the government’s legally authorized obligations be met. This Article argues that the Clause protects these obligations from actions that create “substantial doubt” about their validity, including actions short of default or repudiation. The Article proposes a test to determine substantial doubt that analyzes (1) the political and economic environment at the time of the government’s actions, and (2) the subjective apprehension exhibited by debtholders. Applying this test, the Article argues that Congress’s actions …

The Auditor For The Auditors' Auditor: Accounting For The Unitary Executive In Free Enterprise Fund V. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, Kelsey Elizabeth Stapler

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Reforming Lawyers Into Irrelevance?: Reconciling Crisis And Constraint At The Office Of Legal Counsel, Peter Margulies

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Constitutional Backdrops, Stephen E. Sachs

Stephen E. Sachs

The Constitution is often said to leave important questions unanswered. These include, for example, the existence of a congressional contempt power or an executive removal power, the role of stare decisis, and the scope of state sovereign immunity. Bereft of clear text, many scholars have sought answers to such questions in Founding-era history. But why should the historical answers be valid today, if they were never codified in the Constitution's text? This Article describes a category of legal rules that weren't adopted in the text, expressly or implicitly, but which nonetheless have continuing legal force under the written Constitution. These …

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

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Federalism As A Safeguard Of The Separation Of Powers, Jessica Bulman-Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

States frequently administer federal law, yet scholars have largely overlooked how the practice of cooperative federalism affects the balance of power across the branches of the federal government. This Article explains how states check the federal executive in an era of expansive executive power and how they do so as champions of Congress, both relying on congressionally conferred authority and casting themselves as Congress's faithful agents. By inviting the states to carry out federal law, Congress, whether purposefully or incidentally, counteracts the tendency of statutory ambiguity and broad delegations of authority to enhance federal executive power. When states disagree with …

Executive Power In A War Without End: Goldsmith, The Erosion Of Executive Authority On Detention, And The End Of The War On Terror, Sandra L. Hodgkinson

Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law

No abstract provided.

Congress In Court, Amanda Frost

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Congress rarely participates in litigation about the meaning of federal law. By contrast, the executive branch joins in federal litigation on a regular basis as either a party or amicus curiae. Congress simply assumes that the president’s lawyers adequately represent its interests save in those rare instances when the two branches have a direct conflict. This Article questions that assumption.

The federal judiciary’s approach to statutory and constitutional interpretation diminishes Congress’s influence, often to the benefit of the executive branch. The rise of textualism, the canon of constitutional avoidance, the reliance on Chevron deference, and the courts’ reluctance to second-guess …

Constitutional Backdrops, Stephen E. Sachs

Faculty Scholarship

The Constitution is often said to leave important questions unanswered. These include, for example, the existence of a congressional contempt power or an executive removal power, the role of stare decisis, and the scope of state sovereign immunity. Bereft of clear text, many scholars have sought answers to such questions in Founding-era history. But why should the historical answers be valid today, if they were never codified in the Constitution's text?

This Article describes a category of legal rules that weren't adopted in the text, expressly or implicitly, but which nonetheless have continuing legal force under the written Constitution. These …