Law Commons^™

Creating Effective Broadband Network Regulation, Daniel L. Brenner

Daniel L. Brenner

ABSTRACT: The Internet is central to the business and pastimes of Americans. Calls for increased regulation are ongoing, inevitable, and often justified. But calls for “network neutrality” or “nondiscrimination” assume with little hesitation federal agency competence to give predictable and accurate meaning to these terms and create regulations to implement them. This article’s chief contribution to Internet policy debate is to focus attention on the likelihood of successful FCC Internet regulation -- a key assumption of some advocates. The article analyzes three characteristics that hobble the FCC, the likeliest federal agency to provide prescriptive rules. First, the record for the …

Promoting An Independent Judiciary As A Rule Of Law Principle: A Brief Commentary On The Supreme Court Of Pakistan, Kamaal Zaidi

Kamaal Zaidi

The rule of law is often difficult to establish in developing nations characterized by frequent political changes and unstable events that affect the separation of powers between the three branches of government – the executive, legislature, and judiciary. In particular, the integrity of the judiciary is often damaged by influences from the executive and legislative branches in that core democratic principles are promoted, including civil liberties, the supremacy of law, law and order, and transparency and accountability among government actors. In Pakistan, turbulent political events over the years have irreparably damaged the ability of the Supreme Court of Pakistan to …

Ultra Vires Statutes: Alive, Kicking, And A Means Of Circumventing The Scalia Standing Gauntlet In Environmental Litigation, Adam J. Sulkowski

Adam J. Sulkowski

This article makes a critical contribution to the fields of environmental and corporate law. It explains a problem in the citizen enforcement of environmental statutes: the issue of how to establish and secure standing to sue. The article then recommends a novel solution based in corporate law: the application of ultra vires statutes. The article significantly contributes to the scholarly literature on ultra vires statutes by: (1) examining thoroughly the history of the ultra vires doctrine, especially in early American history, (2) clarifying that scholars and practitioners should now cite ultra vires statutes rather than the doctrine, (3) reviewing recent …

Lock Down On The Third Screen: How Wireless Carriers Evade Regulation Of Their Video Services, Rob M. Frieden

Rob Frieden

Wireless handsets increasingly offer subscribers a third screen for accessing the Internet and video programming. The converging technologies and markets that make this possible present a major regulatory quandary, because national regulatory authorities seek to maintain mutual exclusivity between regulated telecommunications services and largely unregulated information services. Many existing and emerging services do not easily fit into one or the other regulatory classification, nor can the Federal Communications Commission determine the appropriate classification by extrapolating from the regulatory model applied to existing or discontinued services. By failing to specify what model applies to services appearing on cellphone screens, the FCC …

Altered Meanings: The Department Of The Interior’S Rewriting Of The Native American Graves Protection And Repatriation Act To Regulate Culturally Unidentifiable Human Remains, Ryan M. Seidemann

Ryan M Seidemann

Since 1990, there has been much debate - within the governmental, scientific, Native American, and legal arenas - as to the applicability of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) to culturally unidentifiable human remains. This article concludes that there is no statutory authorization to apply NAGPRA to such remains by analyzing the history of NAGPRA, the Department of the Interior's (DOI) recent attempt to promulgate draft regulations on this topic and the years' worth of consideration of this topic by the NAGPRA Review Committee. These draft regulations, which would, if given effect, mandate the repatriation of virtually …

“The Nation’S Broadband Success Story”: The Secrecy Of Fcc Broadband Infrastructure Statistics, Benjamin W. Cramer

Benjamin W. Cramer

The Federal Communications Commission regularly promotes the competitiveness of the American broadband market and the availability of robust services to consumers. Since 2000, the Commission has reported on broadband deployment by zip code, and by late 2006 broadband was supposedly available in 99% of American zip codes, with those zip codes representing 99% of the population. However, the viability of the FCC’s zip code-based measurement methodology has long been a matter of controversy, because broadband is counted as “available” in a zip code even if as few as one household in the area has obtained service. Meanwhile, the FCC continued …

A Troubled House Of Cards: Examining How The “Housing And Economic Recovery Act Of 2008” Fails To Resolve The Foreclosure Crisis, Chad Emerson

Chad Emerson

No abstract provided.

The New York City Campaign Finance System: A Model System That Violates State And Federal Law, Daniel A. Katz

Daniel A. Katz

The New York City campaign finance system was amended in 2007 from a voluntary program into a mandatory regulatory scheme that is applicable to all candidates. Because the requirements of the law can no longer be avoided, the law is in conflict with provisions of state law that govern local elections. A United States Supreme Court decision, Davis v. FEC, handed down in June of 2008 has further undermined the validity of the New York City campaign finance system. The decision held that asymmetrical contribution limits applicable to candidates based on the candidate’s use of their own wealth violate the …

Dumping Emtala: Restoring The Fiduciary Ethic, Improving Community Care, And Increasing Efficiency Through The Membership Model, Joseph A. Gonzalez

Joseph A Gonzalez

The U.S. healthcare system is breaking. Hospital emergency departments ("EDs") disproportionately bear this burden. EMTALA, the federal law that mandates treatment in an emergency, is responsible. By forcing a hospital to provide medical treatment, despite a patient's inability to pay, EMTALA has altered treatment standards for the worse. In this note, I suggest that repealing EMTALA will allow the market to capture the treatment values that motivated EMTALA's passage. Permitting EDs to base treatment on a patient's pre-existing hospital membership encourages better treatment than EMTALA. A market driven ED will succeed where EMTALA has failed.

Fine Feathered Adversaries: The Fcc And Avian Mortality At Communications Towers, Benjamin W. Cramer

Benjamin W. Cramer

Every year, millions of birds are killed at communications towers in the United States, and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) oversees hundreds of thousands of such towers. In 2000, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS), utilizing the legal mandates of the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, issued guidelines urging the FCC to take action on ameliorating the widespread avian mortality at its communications towers. These guidelines included provisions for the siting of towers and environmental assessments of tower construction processes, which are conducted by the FCC’s licensees. Two years later, …

Fine-Feathered Adversaries: The Fcc And Avian Mortality At Communications Towers, Benjamin W. Cramer

Benjamin W. Cramer

Every year, millions of birds are killed at communications towers in the United States, and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) oversees hundreds of thousands of such towers. In 2000, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS), utilizing the legal mandates of the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, issued guidelines urging the FCC to take action on ameliorating the widespread avian mortality at its communications towers. These guidelines included provisions for the siting of towers and environmental assessments of tower construction processes, which are conducted by the FCC’s licensees. Two years later, …

The Institutional Logic Of Preventive Crime, Mariano-Florentino Cuellar

Mariano-Florentino Cuellar

Criminal justice plays a major role in regulating undesirable conduct. As part of that role, the system relies on deterrence, incapacitation, and the shaping of social norms and preferences in an effort to prevent conduct considered harmful. But that preventive role is routinely misunderstood. This paper rethinks preventive enforcement by training attention on the relationship between criminal law and the institutional realities affecting risk regulation in environmental, health, and national security regulation. First, while not denying a host of problems with the expansive reach of criminal enforcement, the article describes how the structure of criminal enforcement does not draw particularly …

"Securing" The Nation: Law, Politics, And Organization At The Federal Security Agency, 1939-1953, Mariano-Florentino Cuellar

Mariano-Florentino Cuellar

American public law is affected by two important dynamics impacting the relationship between citizens and their government: how the executive branch defines national security, and how politicians compete to secure control of the vast public organizations through which governments implement the law. This article analyzes the intersection of these dynamics by investigating the now-forgotten history of the U.S. Federal Security Agency (FSA) and drawing perspectives from separation of powers, organization theory, and the study of American political development. In 1939 the Roosevelt White House overcame strong political opposition to centralize vast legal responsibilities within the FSA. Soon after its creation, …

Whittling Away, J.B. Ruhl, James Salzman

J.B. Ruhl

Mandates that agencies solve massive problems such as sprawl and climate change roll easily out of the halls of legislatures, but as a practical matter what can any one agency do about them? Serious policy challenges such as these have dimensions far beyond the capacity of any single agency to manage effectively. Rather, as the Supreme Court recently observed in Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, “agencies, like legislatures, do not generally resolve massive problems in one fell swoop, but instead whittle away over time, refining their approach as circumstances change and they develop a more nuanced understanding of how best …

Optimal Federalism Across Institutions: Theory And Applications From Environmental Policies And Health Care, Dale B. Thompson

Dale Thompson

This article presents a framework to analyze federalism based on enactment, implementation, and enforcement institutions. The framework provides a mechanism to determine whether a particular public policy should be conducted at a state or federal level, by examining economies and diseconomies of scale inherent in each of these institutions. This article then applies the framework in a comparison of environmental policies for wetlands and endangered species, and in an analysis of a health care policy. These applications can then serve as guides to legislators and judges in analyzing federalism concerns.

Maximizing Social Influence To Minimize Carbon Emissions: Law And Social Norms In Collective Action, Jed S. Ela

Jed S Ela

Legal scholars have long argued that informal social norms can solve collective action problems, as long as these problems occur in close-knit groups. This “group knittedness hypothesis” may suggest that social norms, by themselves, will not be able to solve the world’s largest collective action problem: anthropogenic climate change. Yet recent scholarship has taken the group knittedness hypothesis too far, suggesting that any attempt to manage social influences in large, loose-knit groups is likely to be relatively ineffective.

In fact, social norms can shape individual behavior even in loose-knit groups, and climate policies that ignore norms may miss important opportunities …

Midnight Regulations And Regulatory Review, Jerry Brito

Jerry Brito

The term “midnight regulations” describes the dramatic spike of new regulations promulgated at the end of presidential terms, especially during transitions to an administration of the opposite party. As commentators have pointed out, this phenomenon is problematic because it is the result of a lack of presidential accountability during the midnight period—the time after the November election and before Inauguration Day. Midnight regulations, however, present another problem that receives little attention. It is the prospect that an increase in the number of regulations promulgated in a given time-period could overwhelm the institutional review process that serves to ensure that new …

Procedural Safeguards For Agency Guidance: A Source Of Legitimacy For The Administrative State, Jessica Mantel

Jessica Mantel

Administrative agencies increasingly announce important policies through guidance documents. While agency guidance can have a profound impact on individuals’ behavior, generally agencies promulgate guidance with little public input and few procedural safeguards. Through the use of guidance agencies thus can circumvent the procedural protections applicable to other forms of administrative rulemaking that ensure the legal, economic, and political soundness of agencies’ policies. Although a number of commentators have debated the merits of procedural reform for agency guidance, largely overlooked is the potential for procedural safeguards to enhance the legitimacy of the administrative state.

Procedural requirements oblige agencies to adhere to …

Loco Labels And Marketing Madness: Improving How Consumers Interpret Information In The American Food Economy, Margaret Sova Mccabe

Margaret Sova McCabe

America's current food labeling scheme, as illustrated by the example of salt, is flawed when examined from the consumer and public health perspective. While the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act has sound scientific standards, those standards as currently applied to labels do not efficiently signal health information to consumers. Without better information on labels, consumers will continue to make poor choices at the grocery store. However, there are promising new ways to label. Both the United Kingdom and the domestic supermarket chain Hannaford’s have implemented simple health labeling on food packaging or grocery shelves to improve the amount and location …

Public Agencies And Investor Compensation: The Agency As Judge Or Lawyer?, Verity Winship

Verity Winship

This essay compares experiments in investor compensation by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). The Fair Fund provision of Sarbanes-Oxley allows the SEC to distribute penalty amounts to injured investors, acting as “public class counsel.” In contrast, through its longstanding Reparations Program, the CFTC acts as a judge or arbitrator to resolve disputes between private parties. This essay suggests that the Treasury Department’s recent proposal to consolidate financial regulators – including the SEC and CFTC – provides an opportunity to reexamine these programs and ask whether a consolidated financial regulator should act as …

The Emergent Logic Of Health Law, Maxwell Gregg Bloche

Maxwell Gregg Bloche

The American health care system is on a glide path toward ruin. Health spending has become the fiscal equivalent of global warming, and the number of uninsured Americans is approaching 50 million. Can law help to divert our country from this path? There are reasons for deep skepticism. Law governs the provision and financing of medical care in fragmented and incoherent fashion. Commentators from diverse perspectives bemoan this chaos, casting it as an obstacle to change. I contend in this article that pessimism about health law’s prospects is unjustified, but that a new understanding of health law’s disarray is urgently …

Plain Language Patents, Robin C. Feldman

Robin C Feldman

Law is a process of Bounded Adaptation. The law that exists at any given moment is constantly driven to adapt to changing circumstances within the framework of what has gone before. The boundaries of that framework are policed by the necessity of articulating an interpretation in a way that gains general acceptance. It is the need to effectively articulate a common logic that mitigates the distortion of personal perspective.

This process of Bounded Adaptation cannot proceed effectively without an adequately structured dialogue that will promote the flow of information and analysis. Nowhere is this dialogue more challenging than at the …

The Rest Is Silence: Chevron Deference, Agency Jurisdiction, And Statutory Silences, Jonathan H. Adler, Nathan A. Sales

Jonathan H Adler

Should agencies receive Chevron deference when interpreting the reach of their own jurisdiction? This article argues that, in general, they should not. We begin by identifying and detailing the various different types of “jurisdictional questions” that may arise in statutory interpretation. The article then surveys how courts have analyzed these different aspects of the jurisdiction problem, with a particular attention to statutory silences. The Court’s Chevron jurisprudence strongly suggest that deference to agency determinations of their own jurisdiction should be disfavored, particularly where a statute is silent (and not merely ambiguous) about the existence of agency jurisdiction. In particular, we …

Rulemaking Without Rules: An Empirical Study Of Direct Final Rulemaking, Michael Kolber

Michael Kolber

In an effort to improve efficiency, several administrative agencies have adopted a procedure known as “direct final rulemaking” (DFR). Some academics have debated whether DFR violates the Administrative Procedure Act, but none have studied how DFR has functioned in practice. This paper, which examines the first decade of DFR at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), is the first of this kind. The results are surprising, and suggest DFR deserves more study than it has received. Intended for noncontroversial rules that are expected to receive no significant comments in a notice-and-comment rulemaking, FDA has often used direct final rulemaking for …

Tort Experiments In The Laboratories Of Democracy, Alexandra B. Klass

Alexandra B. Klass

This Article considers the broad range of “tort experiments” states have undertaken in recent years as well as the changing attitudes of Congress and the Supreme Court toward state tort law. Notably, as states have engaged in well-publicized tort reform efforts in the products liability and personal injury areas, they have also increased tort rights and remedies to address new societal problems associated with privacy, publicity, consumer protection, and environmental harm. At the same time, however, just as the Supreme Court was beginning its so-called “federalism revolution” of the 1990s to limit Congressional authority in the name of states’ rights, …

Political Party-Association Restrictions On Officers Of The United States Are Unconstitutional, Rebecca L. Kurowski

Rebecca L Kurowski

Many scholars who have analyzed the text of the Appointments Clause have hastily concluded that Congress has no power whatsoever to impose any statutory restrictions on the President’s choice of nominees for any officer of the United States. This result would render unconstitutional numerous existing statutes. This article takes a different, more nuanced and comprehensive, approach. This article looks not only at the Appointments Clause, but also at the source of congressional power to create offices – the Necessary and Proper Clause – to see if restricting the pool of eligible office-holders falls within the scope of office-creation. The result …

Technological Due Process, Danielle Keats Citron

Danielle Keats Citron

Distinct and complementary procedures for adjudications and rulemaking lie at the heart of twentieth-century administrative law. Due process required agencies to provide individuals notice and an opportunity to be heard. Agencies could foreclose policy issues that individuals might otherwise raise in adjudications through public rulemaking. One system allowed focused advocacy; the other featured broad participation. Each procedural regime compensated for the normative limits of the other. Both depended on clear statements of reason. The dichotomy between these procedural regimes has become outmoded. This century’s automated decision-making systems collapse individual adjudications into rulemaking while adhering to the procedural safeguards of neither. …

Procedural Safeguards For Agency Guidance: A Source Of Legitimacy For The Administrative State, Jessica Mantel

Jessica Mantel

Administrative agencies increasingly announce important policies through guidance documents. While agency guidance can have a profound impact on individuals’ behavior, generally agencies promulgate guidance with little public input and few procedural safeguards. Through the use of guidance agencies thus can circumvent the procedural protections applicable to other forms of administrative rulemaking that ensure the legal, economic, and political soundness of agencies’ policies. Although a number of commentators have debated the merits of procedural reform for agency guidance, largely overlooked is the potential for procedural safeguards to enhance the legitimacy of the administrative state.

Procedural requirements oblige agencies to adhere to …

The Real Id Act: Is It Really Worth It?, Sheena Eastman

Sheena Eastman

No abstract provided.

Rethinking Johnson V. M’Intosh (1823): The Root Of The Continued Forced Displacement Of American Indians Despite Cobell V. Norton (2001), T S. Twibell

Ty Twibell