Law Commons^™

American Wartime Values In Historical Perspective: Full-Employment Mobilization Or Business As Usual, Timothy A. Canova

Faculty Scholarship

This paper explores the range of values implicated by war and compares today's dominant values with those that prevailed during previous American wars, with a particular emphasis on the World War Two and early Cold War period. War is related to values, and as economists like to remind us, what we value becomes apparent in the movement of people and prices. Part I of this Article considers the moral, ethical and monetary values that prevailed throughout the 1940's and early 1950's. The normative threads that kept the World War Two effort on track were those of mobilization and shared sacrifice. …

Florida East Coast Railway And The Structure Of Administrative Law, Michael P. Healy

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

A typical Administrative Law course presents the Supreme Court's decision in United States v. Florida East Coast Railway Co. as establishing the rule that statutory text quite close to the magic words, "on the record after opportunity for an agency hearing," is needed to trigger the Administrative Procedure Act's (APA) formal hearing requirements for a rulemaking. Florida East Coast Railway is a prime example of an underrated case because, even though the case is well known, its renown is a consequence only of its black letter rule about rulemaking procedures. Many scholars and practitioners do not appreciate the case for …

Peeking Behind The Iron Curtain: How Law "Works" Behind Prison Walls, Donald F. Tibbs

ExpressO

The prison disciplinary process plays a major role in maintaining institutional order. It starts from the premise that the safety of the institution trumps the punishment of the inmate. Given the massive incarceration rates in virtually every part of the United States, most prisons are overcrowded and, therefore, forced to place a premium on order and safety. The only way to maintain order and safety is to have prison rules that deter inmate behavior; and the only way to enforce those rules is fairly and humanely.

Peeking Behind the Iron Curtain is a study of the law-in-action. Using a variety …

A Tough Pill To Swallow: Does The First Amendment Prohibit Wv From Regulating Pharmaceutical Companies' Advertising Expenses To Lower The Cost Of Prescription Drugs?, Brienne Taylor Greiner

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Scientific Expertise In Policymaking: The Case For Open Review And Patent Reform, Beth Simone Noveck

ExpressO

The Energy Research Advisory Board, the group of external scientific advisors that provided impartial expert advice to the Secretary of Energy since 1978, was disbanded this May. The Administration, like its predecessors, regularly replaces experts on agency advisory panels with ideologues and political allies. We are at the nadir of a historical progression since World War II away from trust in and use of scientific expertise in policymaking. This shift however, has not been countered with greater public participation. Instead, administrative law and theory have developed a model of the managerial administrative authority. The "expertocratic" agency relies on internal expertise …

Commodity Exchanges And Antitrust, Andrew N. Kleit, James M. Falvey

ExpressO

Historically, commodity exchanges have been viewed as natural monopolies, not subject to competitive forces. But in recent years, both technology and regulatory changes have allowed for competition between rival exchanges in various contracts. With competition comes the regulation of competition. The traditional method of regulating competition is through court adjudication of the Sherman Antitrust Act. But in regulated industries, antitrust authority must be shared in some way with the regulatory authority. Then, it must be implemented by the relevant government entity.

This article will explore the impact of competition on this industry and how the exchanges are dealing with the …

The Independent Board Of Directors And Governance In The United States: Where Is This Heading?, Florence Shu-Acquaye

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Gathering Twilight? Information Privacy On The Internet In The Post-Enlightenment Era, Mark F. Kightlinger

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The steady stream of news reports about violations of privacy on the Internet has spawned a growing body of literature discussing the legal protections available for personally identifiable information—i.e., information about identified or identifiable persons—collected via the Internet. This Article takes the discussion of Internet privacy protection in a new and very different direction by reexamining the U.S. Internet privacy regime from the perspective of a broader cultural/historical analysis and critique. The perspective adopted is that of Alasdair MacIntyre's account of the disarray in Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment discourse about morality and human nature and the accompanying disappearance of rational justifications …

Auditing Executive Discretion, Mariano-Florentino Cuellar

ExpressO

Executive branch officials routinely make thousands of decisions affecting public security and welfare. While it is rare that such discretionary decisions are entirely immune from some kind of judicial review, courts’ role is often so circumscribed or deferential that in some domains the probability of uncovering problems through such review almost certainly falls close to zero. The resulting amount of executive discretion carries considerable risks along with rewards. Some discretionary decisions undoubtedly benefit from the speed and flexibility that results from limiting judicial review. Yet judicial review’s evisceration as a tool to restrain certain forms of discretion also makes it …

When Criminal And Tort Law Incentives Run Into Tight Budgets And Regulatory Discretion, William G. Childs

Faculty Scholarship

Eight-year-old Greyson Yoe was electrocuted while waiting to get on the "Scooters" bumper car ride at the Lake County Fair in northeastern Ohio. The failure to ground the ride structure and damage to a light fixture on the ride caused his death. The day before the electrocution, two inspectors from the Ohio Department of Agriculture (ODA) inspected the ride and passed it as "safe to operate." That inspection was superficial and grossly inadequate, and the completed inspection form had serious misrepresentations. Indeed, the inspectors later admitted that they never reviewed the key electrical items that they checked off on the …

The People's Agent: Executive Branch Secrecy And Accountability In An Age Of Terrorism, Sidney A. Shapiro, Rena I. Steinzor

Faculty Scholarship

The increase in government secrecy is an important and troubling policy trend. Although the trend predates the 2000 presidential election, the movement towards government secrecy has accelerated dramatically in the Bush Administration. The case for open government is usually based on political principles embraced by the Framers of the U.S. Constitution. This article seeks to bolster these arguments by applying “agency theory” to the question of how much secrecy is too much. While agency theory is most often used to analyze private sector economic relationships, commentators have also applied it to the analysis of methods for holding legislators and Executive …

Is Cost-Benefit Analysis Neutral?, David M. Driesen

College of Law - Faculty Scholarship

Cost-benefit analysis (CBA) owes much of its appeal to its image as a neutral principle for deciding upon the appropriate stringency of environmental, health, and safety regulation. This article examines whether CBA is neutral in effect, i.e. whether it sometimes makes regulations more stringent or regularly leads to weaker health, safety and environmental protection. It also addresses the question of whether CBA offers either an objective value-neutral method or procedural neutrality. This Article shows that CBA has almost always proven anti-environmental in practice and that, in many ways, it is anti-environmental in theory. It examines the practice of the Bush …

Interim Report On The Administrative Law, Process And Procedure Project For The 21st Century, Rena I. Steinzor

Congressional Testimony

No abstract provided.

A Digital Age Communications Act Paradigm For Federal-State Relations, Kyle D. Dixon, Philip J. Weiser

Publications

This article captures the effort of the Digital Age Communications Act (DACA) to craft a new framework for the federal-state relationship in implementing a next generation telecommunications regulatory regime. In particular, it sets forth a DACA model that would implement a "rule of law" regulatory paradigm for an era of technological dynamism. This era requires, as the article explains, a coherent federal framework that circumscribes the role of state and local authorities so as to advance sound competition policy goals. The sole exception to this policy is the recognition that a basic local service rate retains both political and practical …

Killing Jim Crow And The Undead Nondelegation Doctrine With Privately Enforceable Federal Regulations, Brian J. Sutherland

Seattle University Law Review

This Comment has two goals. First, it seeks to contextualize, within the reality of institutional racism, the debate over the private enforceability of federal regulations under 42 U.S.C. § 1983. On the one hand, the regulations promulgated pursuant to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 already include many provisions which effectively confront the vestiges of racially discriminatory law and policy. The logical inference is that these perfectly proscriptive federal regulations ought to be enforceable, through private lawsuits if necessary, in order to enjoin and deter such policy and procedure. On the other hand, federal administrative agencies have …

Skepticism And Expertise: The Supreme Court And The Eeoc, Melissa Hart

Publications

The Supreme Court regularly denies deference to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's interpretations of the federal antidiscrimination laws which that agency is charged with enforcing and interpreting. The Court's lack of deference for EEOC interpretation is in part a function of the analytical framework that the Court has created for assessing the deference due to different types of administrative interpretation. But this essay argues that the Court's lack of deference cannot be entirely explained with reference to these neutral analytical criteria. The Court's attitude toward the EEOC may also be explained as a consequence both of judicial reluctance to view …

State Executive Lawmaking In Crisis, Jim Rossi

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Courts and scholars have largely overlooked the constitutional source and scope of a state executive's powers to avert and respond to crises. This Article addresses how actual and perceived legal barriers to executive authority under state constitutions can have major consequences beyond a state's borders during times of crisis. It proposes to empower state executives to address federal and regional goals without any previous authorization from the state legislature-a presumption of state executive lawmaking, subject to state legislative override, which would give a state or local executive expansive lawmaking authority within its system of government to address national and regional …

Chart Accompanying: An Assessment Of Cross-National Regulatory Burden Comparisons, Thomas D. Hopkins

Fordham Urban Law Journal

The Article compares several rankings systems for national regulatory compliance costs. It finds the ranking systems are limited to differentiating between those countries least burdened by regulation from those most burdened by regulation. It concludes the rankings could be an important tool for deciding which countries would be the most promising for regulatory burden reduction initiatives.

Solving The Puzzle Of Mead And Christensen: What Would Justice Stevens Do?, Amy J. Wildermuth

Articles

One area in which I teach and have become increasingly interested over the last few years is administrative law. Although one might expect at a symposium honoring the jurisprudence of Justice Stevens that I might focus solely on his most famous administrative law opinion, Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., and its two-step test that requires a court to defer to a reasonable agency interpretation if the statute is ambiguous, I have instead decided to take on the United States Supreme Court's more recent consideration of what to do with those actions agencies take that, unlike the bubble rule …

Who’S Afraid Of The Apa? What The Patent System Can Learn From Administrative Law, Stuart M. Benjamin, Arti K. Rai

Faculty Scholarship

In recent years, widespread dissatisfaction with the perceived poor quality of issued patents has spurred a diverse range of groups to call for reform of administrative procedures. Strikingly, however, most calls for reform pay little attention to principles of administrative law. Similarly, judges (in particular the judges of the Federal Circuit) have treated patent law as an exception to the Administrative Procedure Act, and to administrative law more generally. In this Article, Professors Benjamin and Rai contend that this treatment is doctrinally incorrect and normatively undesirable. Standard principles of administrative law provide the appropriate approach for judicial review in the …

Monetizing The Benefits Of Risk And Environmental Regulation, W. Kip Viscusi

Fordham Urban Law Journal

The Article responds to the school of thought reflected in the book "Priceless: On Knowing the Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing" that opposes the economists' attempts to monetize the value of environmental amenities and the value of risks to life and health. It applies the value of statistical life ("VSL") concept to regulatory decisions in order to decide whether the adoption of a regulation makes economic sense. VSL measures the value of life, as judged by measuring the amount of risk of injury workers in a particular industry are willing to take on, and the costs associated …

How Much Is That Doggy In The Window? The Inevitably Unsatisfying Duty To Monetize, Adam F. Scales

Fordham Urban Law Journal

The Article is in response to Professor Kip Viscusi's "Monetizing the Benefits of Risk and Environmental Regulation." It emphasizes several issues Viscusi's "value of a statistical life" (VSL) methodology fails to capture: (1) the distinction and difference in value between willingness to pay for a regulation and willingness to accept; (2) the fact that the many risks, for which regulations have been adopted, are so slight that the value to many is actually the value of not seeing someone else suffer harm in the absence of regulation; (3) real life irrational decision-making does not easily fit into an economic value; …

The Unbearable Lightness Of Regulatory Costs, Frank Ackerman

Fordham Urban Law Journal

The Article counters the presumption that increased environmental regulation necessarily decreases economic prosperity. It analyzes the European chemical regulatory structure and deduces that any costs imposed on the consumer are minimal, and more cost effective than watered-down American regulations covering the same subject matter with approximately the same cost imposed on the consumer-taxpayer. It argues the Office of Management and Budget and regulated industries have consistently overestimated the costs of environmental regulation and promoted the theory that environmental regulation causes factories and jobs to move offshore. It concludes that deregulation may not spur growth.

Statutory Interpretation In The Era Of Oira, Lisa Heinzerling

Fordham Urban Law Journal

The Article is a case study regarding a rule governing cooling water towers for power plants promulgated pursuant to the Clean Water Act ("CWA"). It analyzes the history of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs ("OIRA") within the Office of Management and Budget ("OMB"), and its influence in compelling the Environmental Protection Agency ("EPA") to conduct cost-benefit analysis of all regulations. It argues that the EPA should not receive Chevron deference since it has acted illegally by interpreting the CWA not as a technology-based environmental law, but instead as a cost-benefit law.

The Regulatory Flexibility Act At 25: Is The Law Achieving Its Goal?, Keith W. Holman

Fordham Urban Law Journal

The Article traces the issue of lack of representation given small business during rule-making, and the inability of the original Regulatory Flexibility Act (RFA) to adequately address this issue. It argues that the amendment of the RFA by the Small Business Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act of 1996 (SBREFA) has significantly increased small business awareness of and involvement in the regulatory process. It concludes there are several remaining weaknesses to the RFA, and recommends Congress take action to compel all agencies to follow specific procedures for assessing the economic impacts of their regulatory actions on small business.

An Assessment Of Cross-National Regulatory Burden Comparisons, Thomas D. Hopkins

Fordham Urban Law Journal

The Article compares several rankings systems for national regulatory compliance costs. It finds the ranking systems are limited to differentiating between those countries least burdened by regulation from those most burdened by regulation. It concludes the rankings could be an important tool for deciding which countries would be the most promising for regulatory burden reduction initiatives.

Resisting Regulation With Blue Ribbon Panels, Thomas O. Mcgarity

Fordham Urban Law Journal

The Article analyzes the use of blue ribbon panels to resolve complicated scientific issues that frequently arise during regulatory proceedings. In particular, it looks at the case of beryllium in order to illustrate how blue ribbon panels appointed and paid for by industry often lend scientific legitimacy to policy advocacy. It concludes that agencies should partially discount scientific evidence provided by industry appointed blue ribbon panels due to expected bias. However, it finds the agency will confront some difficulty convincing the public of the adequacy of regulations that are in conflict with a well-financed campaign by a regulated entity armed …

Cost-Benefit Analysis: Where Should We Go From Here?, Sally Katzen

Fordham Urban Law Journal

The Article addresses the criticism of cost benefit analysis (CBA). Although it accepts the monetization of costs will generally oppose regulation, it finds CBA is at least close to an objective standard. It argues the results of CBA are informative, but are not dispositive, and often the procedures used in CBA are imperfect. It concludes financial resources should be devoted to retrospective analyses and/or organization studies in order to achieve rational regulatory decision making.

The Role Of The Office Of Information And Regulatory Affairs In Federal Rulemaking, Curtis W. Copeland

Fordham Urban Law Journal

The Article describes the role of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), an office within the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), in reviewing agencies' draft rules. It emphasizes the dramatic effect each Presidential administration has had on the OIRA's review process, and indirectly on all agency action. It finds OIRA has become a "gatekeeper" with regard to agency action, but mentions that scholarly debate continues as to whether OIRA represents the President's interests exclusively or both the often conflicting interests of Congress and the President.

Willful Blindness: Federal Agencies' Failure To Comply With The Regulatory Flexibility Act's Periodic Review Requirement-And Current Proposals To Invigorate The Act, Michael R. See

Fordham Urban Law Journal

The Article first explains the basic requirements of the Regulatory Flexibility Act, and in particular focuses on the periodic review requirement contained in Section 610. It traces the history of Presidential efforts through the promulgation of executive orders to delay the implementation of regulations and require agencies to consult with regulated industries. Reviewing agency action from 1997-2005 following Section 610 review, it found agencies are confused as to when review is necessary, and, though Section 610 is meant to decrease the regulatory burden on small business, agencies often increase the regulatory burden on small business. It concludes the key problem …