Law Commons^™

Inside Regulatory Interpretation: A Research Note, Christopher J. Walker

Michigan Law Review First Impressions

We now live in a regulatory world, where the bulk of federal lawmaking takes place at the bureaucratic level. Gone are the days when statutes and common law predominated. Instead, federal agencies—through rulemaking, adjudication, and other regulatory action—have arguably become the primary lawmakers, with Congress delegating to its bureaucratic agents vast swaths of lawmaking power, the President attempting to exercise some control over this massive regulatory apparatus, and courts struggling to constrain agency lawmaking within statutory and constitutional bounds. This story is not new. Over two decades ago, for instance, Professor Lawson lamented the rise of the administrative state and …

Deferred Action, Supervised Enforcement Discretion, And The Rule Of Law Basis For Executive Action On Immigration, Anil Kalhan

Anil Kalhan

In November 2014, the Obama administration announced the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA) initiative, which built upon a program instituted two years earlier, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) initiative. As mechanisms to channel the government’s scarce resources toward its enforcement priorities more efficiently and effectively, both DACA and DAPA permit certain individuals falling outside those priorities to seek “deferred action,” which provides its recipients with time-limited, nonbinding, and revocable notification that officials have exercised prosecutorial discretion to deprioritize their removal. While deferred action thereby facilitates a highly tenuous form of quasi-legal recognition …

Before There Were Mouseholes: Resurrecting The Non-Delegation Doctrine, Joel Hood

Joel Hood

Most people are unaware that James Madison original drafted 17 amendments for the Bill of Rights. Even fewer know that the 16th was an express non-delegation amendment meant to protect the American people:

The powers delegated by the Constitution to the government of the United States, shall be exercised as therein appropriated, so that the Legislative shall never exercise the powers vested in the Executive or Judicial; not the Executive the powers vested in the Legislative or Judicial; nor the Judicial the powers vested in the Legislative or Executive.

There are now over five-hundred federal agencies and departments. Some are …

The United States Antiboycott Law And Other Export Controls, Cecil Hunt

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Agency Adjudication And Judicial Nondelegation: An Article Iii Canon, Mila Sohoni

Northwestern University Law Review

The rules governing judicial review of adjudication by federal agencies are insensitive to a critical separation of powers principle. Article III jurisprudence requires different treatment of agency adjudication depending on whether the agency is adjudicating a “private right” or a “public right.” When agencies adjudicate private rights, review of the agency adjudication must be available to an Article III court on a direct appellate basis. In contrast, Article III jurisprudence does not require review to an Article III court on a direct appellate basis of agency adjudications of purely public rights. That means that federal courts reviewing agency adjudications of …

Executive Action On Immigration: Constitutional Or Direct Conflict?, Todd Curtin

Florida A & M University Law Review

On November 20, 2014, the White House released a press statement notifying viewers that President Obama would do everything within his executive powers to solve the problems surrounding the immigration system. The White House made it clear that the President would be acting with legal authority in taking these steps. This paper addresses whether or not the Obama Administration did, in fact, act with legal authority by initiating the following steps using his executive authority: “cracking down on illegal immigration at the border; deporting felons, not families; and accountability through criminal background checks and taxes.” President Obama, acting through Secretary …

Delegation, Accommodation, And The Permeability Of Constitutional And Ordinary Law, Gillian E. Metzger

Faculty Scholarship

To some, the very idea of the constitutional law of the administrative state is an oxymoron. On this view, core features of the national administrative state — broad delegations and the combination of legislative, executive, and judicial power within administrative agencies, particularly agencies that are headed by unelected executive officials only removable on narrow grounds — are fundamentally at odds with both constitutional separation of powers principles and due process. To others, no such conflict between contemporary administrative governance and the Constitution exists, and assertions of the administrative state’s unconstitutionality rest on basic misunderstandings of what separation of powers and …

A Taxonomy Of Discretion: Refining The Legality Debate About Obama’S Executive Actions On Immigration, Michael Kagan

Scholarly Works

Broad executive action has been the Obama Administration’s signature contribution to American immigration policy, setting off a furious debate about whether the President has acted outside his constitutional powers. But the legal debate about the scope of the President’s authority to change immigration policy has not fully recognized what is actually innovative about the Obama policies, and thus has not focused on those areas where he has taken executive discretion into uncharted territory. This essay aims to add new focus to the debate about Pres. Obama’s executive actions by defining five different types of presidential discretion: Congressionally-authorized discretion, non-enforcement discretion, …

Federal Court Rulemaking And Litigation Reform: An Institutional Approach, Stephen B. Burbank, Sean Farhang

All Faculty Scholarship

The purpose of this article is to advance understanding of the role that federal court rulemaking has played in litigation reform. For that purpose, we created original data sets that include (1) information about every member of the Advisory Committee on Civil Rules who served from 1960 to 2013, and (2) every proposal for amending the Federal Rules that the Advisory Committee approved for consideration by the Standing Committee during the same period and that had implications for private enforcement. We show that, beginning in 1971, when a succession of Chief Justices appointed by Republican Presidents have chosen committee members, …