Law Commons^™

Local Health Agencies, The Bloomberg Soda Rule, And The Ghost Of Woodrow Wilson, Paul A. Diller

Paul Diller

Local health agencies are often leaders in public health regulation. Despite the significance of this phenomenon, scant scholarship has assessed the interesting doctrinal and normative questions that local agency rulemaking raises. This paper uses local health agency rulemaking, and the New York City portion-cap rule for sugar-sweetened beverages ("the Bloomberg soda rule"), in particular, as a prism through which to analyze local agency rulemaking. The article first explains why it is important -- both doctrinally and practically -- to determine whence local agency power flows. If agencies are created directly by state law, then their powers should be circumscribed by …